How to Upload Your Music to Spotify, iTunes, and More with DistroKid

Video Transcript

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How to Upload an Album on DistroKid

Hey, how’s it going? My name’s Emily. This is get offset. And this video is sponsored by DistroKid. Uh, for as little as 20 bucks a year with DistroKid, you can upload your music. It can distribute it. Thus the name to, uh, digital sources around the world, including popular places in the United States like tunes, Spotify, Tidal, um, stuff like that.

[00:00:28] And this video, I’m going to show you how to upload your music through distro. Okay. Or at least I’m going to try, I’m doing this in zoom because I use pinnacle ultimate and it crashes every time I try to do this. So I apologize in advance that this is not like the highest quality. All right. So first things first, I’m going to open up and share.

[00:00:56] My screen, this is my district kid dashboard. And before I go any farther, I would like to ask that if you. Watch this video, and you want to try DistroKid. You want to get the $20 membership for the year. Use the link in this video description, we do get a kickback and it doesn’t cost you anything. In fact, it saves you about 7% and, um, it would probably encourage DistroKid to keep supporting this channel and the podcast, which helps me make videos like this.

[00:01:31] So this is the dashboard. You have a lot of things up here. I’m going to click on my music, which is just a, just this one song. Yep. So that takes you to the dashboard. This is a single that I added just to try it out the first time. Um, so I’ve already submitted this to stores. So I’m going to start from the top and I’m going to release an album that is actually just a collection of demos.

[00:02:04] I worked on I’ve released on band camp. A couple people have bought it. Um, it might be nice to have it in other places. So let’s see how many songs are on my little E P. I’m going to pull that up really quickly. It is on my secondary hard drive. So I don’t lose it. It’s called self objectification with no remorse, which is a reference to something that I was accused of doing and, uh, and a gear group.

[00:02:39] Once I said I was objectifying myself with no remorse. It’s eight songs has yes. Been previously released the original release date. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna say leaf day, because I released my first EAP on, on LinkedIn as a joke. Emily Harris. That’s my name. So, um, if you’re already on Spotify, even if you’ve released elsewhere through DistroKid or someone else, a tune core or CD baby, there would be a list of people with your artist’s name.

[00:03:14] There, you click on them, look at the profile and it’s you. You confirm it to you yourself, and then you get verified by Spotify, which is really cool. Same with Apple music. Um, so this is not a preorder. It’s my fake record label driven. I ate that I chose and I’m going to drag my cover file. There it is.

[00:03:39] Look at that. That was from the same photo session. I got my passport picture taken. Big upset Piper Hansen. So I’m gonna tip, tip the type when a type, the title

[00:04:01] album price nine 99. You can set this to anything you want language you select primary genre. Let’s go with, um, Oh, gosh, don’t you love pigeon holding yourself in a weird way. This is always the hardest part. Um, I’m not a singer song. Writer is all instrumentals. I’m going to pick, um, alternative as my primary genre.

[00:04:36] The secondary genre is probably like. I don’t want to call it new age. Um, let’s just go with Rog. You could just call it vocal. There’s no vocals on it. So then I have to do this for each song. So the first song is midnight moonless night, no featured artists. So this tells you like how to Tyler your song.

[00:05:05] Um, and I’m going to. Pick an audio file. I’m going to, you don’t see anything that’s on my stuff there. So this is going to take a couple of minutes. I will probably cut this if pinnacle, um, allows me to, I am super mad at them right now. I don’t. Really recommend it. Uh, so I wrote this song. Songwriter’s real name.

[00:05:40] It’s just music. So

[00:05:46] no lyrics, no explicit lyrics sound Smith has always been so instrumental. Um, let streaming services decide. So this is something you’ll select for every single track on this. Zygosity boy is the next one. I wish I could just put the same artists through everything. I think that’s probably a common enough to make sense.

[00:06:20] Real names, not stage names. Why are they real names?

[00:06:29] Good thing to say. They actually tell you that, which is cool, but, um, I like services that actually give the credits. Three part of another, that’s a reference to a Willa catheter quote. She wrote beautiful pate pros. Um, but I kind of think that a lot of her stuff is, does it, does she say age well? And also opine airs is one of the worst things I’ve ever had to read for school.

[00:06:57] Like the pros was great, but Oh my gosh, I hated reading that. Like. When I was 14 years old, that was terrible. pink sea shells. This is, this is not, this is not so bad. I wish I still, you know, having my name. Every once in a while, not, not really a big deal, track five very traffic this way. I was riding my bike with my husband one day and we got lost and I saw a sign directing ferry, traffic, and, uh, I couldn’t think of anything else to name a song at that time.

[00:07:37] It’s hard to name instrumental stuff. Green Lake loops. That is another bike riding thing as obviously riding my bike a lot and running. When I, when I wrote this, I’m going to bastard Joanie’s spoon, Getty, Western, or is that from my mom on her birthday? She really liked it. I think.

[00:08:16] And last but not least call, which is a song that makes me sad when I hear it.

[00:08:28] If you’re gonna be really upset and sad if, uh, none of this works. So here are these, um, additional extras, optional, but welcome. Some of them are upcharges. Um, and some of them are not. This one’s upcharge. So there’s something that you can do for any song. Any music that you do, a is $20 a year, and you do have to keep paying that year after year.

[00:08:52] If you plan on continuously releasing music, it’s a pretty good deal. Um, or this is why I wish it had happened when I signed up for tune core. Leave a legacy one time fee non-recurring they will never delete it until you tell them to you keep your money. No one ever has to do anything else about it.

[00:09:10] Again, I imagine you can add that later. I really hope you can add that later. So mandatory check boxes.

[00:09:23] Um, I slept a YouTube music as a store. So I won’t email this, your kid later asking you why Jeff Luma music to YouTube. Okay. That’s fair. I recorded this. I’m authorized to sell it in distributed and stuff. I’m not using any other artist’s name and my song without their approval. And I agree with their terms of service.

[00:09:41] So I just got done and I just get to watch it upload, watch. Me jumpstart. Oh, I wish my internet was faster. Oh man. I just realized I started an upload and YouTube and then I had to restart my computer so much restart that upload. Darn no big deal. No biggie. It happens. I have a max of a five up speed, which is glacial.

[00:10:11] It’s bad. It’s slow. I’m like, I’m getting, I’m making it better. Don’t worry. Um, Yeah, I actually literally have no idea what this is going to show. As far as the screen goes. It could just be my voice over the screen, which I think is probably not super duper fun.

[00:10:31] I’m sorry. I’ve only ever done EPS. Maybe my next solo thing will be a full length. I think I’m going to call it easy virtue to go along with the, uh, self, self objectification. Theme. So these last one, track eight, come on. Let’s do a track eight. Let’s do it. Yes, that’s finishing. Cool. So give stores a week to publish your album live.

[00:11:02] You can also schedule stuff for the future, which I highly recommend scheduling. Um, Sometimes things take different lengths of time. Uh, they also, once you’re, once you submit your music, it goes through their quality control and a big part of that quality control is to make sure that you’re like not uploading someone else’s music.

[00:11:25] Like it’s kinda suspicious if you start releasing a bunch of Prince songs from these, those old bootlegs that you have sent around somewhere, and then you’re trying to profit off of that. So that’s what their QA does, but when they’re done. You can piece these kinds of links, like this link here into your, um, your bio on Instagram and it creates this nice little fun page,

[00:11:54] which is really neat. And then I click a message I’m talking to myself. So that’s part of that. Um, so next you follow the processes to add lyrics. If you want to. Um, you can aboard that. It looks like some of these have already processed and some of them are not, uh, the credits are there, there are these things called Visy and Marcel to kind of like make your own sort of easy content, which is super cool.

[00:12:23] You can create a team so that like, This is really, I think I’ve been able to counsel, I might not have all the features. Like I am, I have features that don’t come with a basic account, but if you do get a label account, um, you can upload a bunch of bands for the same price, um, which is it’s more than 20 bucks a month, but it is the same price for all the bands.

[00:12:43] You can add people as different team members. I don’t really know. Um, I don’t really know what that enables them to do. Oh, revenue share. I guess that’s what that is primarily for. Um, which is, which is actually really neat. That’s less accounting. There’s a lot more you can do on this. Um, you can add lyrics.

[00:13:12] So if we go to my music, old growth actually does have lyrics. I can edit the release, any of the details. I can choose a new image. I can remove the release from all stores. Um, I can add plain lyrics, which I did, but you have to follow their, their rules. And then you can do something called sync lyrics. So what that’s going to do is it’ll play the song and then you’ll hit the space bar each time.

[00:13:42] Um, a lyric line is finished and this kind of, this is for things like Spotify or creating a lyric video to make sure that the words on the screen are actually sinked with. Uh, your song and it gives you an I S R C code, um, which is really neat. And I’m going to remember to edit this, so I probably don’t have any stats, but this is kind of what their stat dashboard looks like.

[00:14:09] Um, daily stats from Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon. If not as much as I’ve seen with other, um, tune core, I think has better, it seems to have better reporting or just different reporting. Ultimately, I won’t really know much about the reporting until like my music’s up there. It’s been listened to stream purchased, yada, yada, I don’t really understand, I guess maybe it’s just daily stats for these three services.

[00:14:41] Maybe there will be more advanced uploading, uh, and other places. There’s lots of other, other things. Um, I don’t lock like all under more. There really is so much more. Um, so there’s uploading your lyrics. You can do a meme video generator, you can set up a personal profile, which I’ve done. Uh, you can spin the wheel to get on our Spotify playlist.

[00:15:12] Huh? Which is interesting. Everybody’s a winner. I haven’t done this yet. Oh, it’s not live in Spotify. That’s why I got the error message. So that’s interesting. Um, there’s just so much to dig around in. Um, and after you submit. You’re selling to places like Spotify. If you have an artist account in Spotify, which I recommend doing, there’s more that you can do there.

[00:15:43] So I’ll do another video showing everything that I’m doing there. Um, once all of this stuff gets uploaded probably once the single is uploaded and that’s yeah, that’s about it. We can look at still processing, still doing something, kicking around, figuring it out. Look at that, look at that mug. Oh my gosh.

[00:16:07] Do you like these glasses better? I think I do. Um, yeah, let me stop my share. So DistroKid super duper easy, really intuitive. Um, I don’t think it’s going to be alive, digging around, trying to find the things that you want. They have a lot of stores you can and are constantly adding stores, especially in other markets.

[00:16:28] They’re not, they don’t, it’s my understanding. They don’t serve the Asian markets as well as CD baby or tune core, but they’re always adding stores. So if that’s important to you, that’s something to consider. You can also keep nudging them to. I’m at the source that you want, you can pay an additional fee for every release, I think eight bucks or something to just in perpetuity, be added to any of them, new stores automatically.

[00:16:54] And I know that with tune core, those new stores are, they could, they could be things like flash in the pan sort of things like Ello. Um, they could be things like tick tock. They could be things like, um, Oh, those, those smart digital jukeboxes. Although with those, there’s no guarantee that you’re ever going to get your, um, you’re never going to get your S there’s no guarantee that your songs are gonna get added to those digital jukeboxes, because those are actually curated lists.

[00:17:23] That’s why, when you open up that, like whatever that app is called, like. There, I think there are probably a couple of different ones. That’s why there aren’t a million options. And why, like some of your favorite performers maybe only have one, two, three, three songs on there. Uh, so that’s just some things to keep in mind.

[00:17:42] I, after using tune core for a number of years and paying 50 bucks a year, 40, 50 bucks a year for tune core, that came out of my earnings. I only made like 50 bucks a year from tune core. Um, So I was obviously like coming up completely empty and that’s not a lot of money the EPA have on there. So they have recorded.

[00:18:05] And in college it has, I think, seven songs, one, three of which your studio tracks and the other three are considered like demos. Um, and I’m really proud of it. And it’s really cool to be able to go into the reporting and be like, wow, like that month 1400 people listen to my song in Norway. Or something like that.

[00:18:24] It’s so it’s really kind of interesting and fun to take a look at. Um, it’s always fun to see those analytics. So even if I wasn’t making a lot of money, it’s not something I was pushing. It’s not something I was trying to make money off of. And neither is this, um, these projects. Aren’t my main, my main musical projects that are my fun.

[00:18:41] Keep, keep me growing projects. And if I can get them out there and get some incremental revenue. Um, I mean, 50 bucks a year, that’s it that’s take a gas. That’s nothing until like shake a stick at, um, you know, do that for a couple of getting us a bunch of a bunch of guitar strings. That’s like, you know, it’s not bad, it’s really not bad.

[00:19:03] And, uh, you know, Now I’ll probably be able to keep $30 at that. When I migrate all my, all my music over from tune core to DistroKid who again, sponsored this video full disclosure, I think I mentioned that at the top. Um, and they’re going to sponsor more educational, mainly content like this from the channel.

[00:19:25] So thank you to tune core for hooking us up with that. Um, the tune core account and the for supporting, supporting this channel. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate everyone who’s watching. So especially me in this kind of vaguely, vaguely dirty room with my Christmas stuff, my trash in the back kind of lean over.

[00:19:47] Yeah, no good spot for that. But if everyone’s watching, please, like comment, subscribe below once again. Um, my name is Emily and I’ll see you soon