Ep. 17: The Music Release Maze: Essential Steps To A Pro Release

[00:00:00] Stephen: Welcome to Secrets from the Scene. My name is Stephen Helvig, and I'm your host. If this is your first time checking out this podcast, first of all, I just want to say thank you for giving me your time and attention. And if you're a returning listener, thanks for coming back. This podcast is all about trying to help local musicians to navigate the recording process, to build their fan base, find their community, basically just make their way through the music scene here in the Twin Cities. I'm currently sitting [00:01:00] in my control room, located out in the Excelsior neighborhood. I've got a recording studio out here. If you've watched previous episodes with guests, we're sitting down in the live room of my recording studio. Today, though, I'm just gonna do a solo episode, and I'm sitting up here in my control room. This episode is going to be about releasing music. Now, releasing music can mean a lot of things, depending on which thread you want to start pulling on. It can be everything from, you know, just getting things uploaded, to the streaming platforms, to royalty collection conversations. to figuring out your branding and messaging to creating a social media strategy and a lot more. There's tons and tons of details that you have to think through when it comes to releasing your music, particularly if it's your first release, just because there's that many more things that have to be set up that many more accounts that need to be claimed. If you've done it a few times before, then it's more a matter of, coming up with your plan for promoting that new release. It's a little bit easier, but. There are so many things to think through and a lot of [00:02:00] times people skip certain steps for this episode I want it to be tactical I want to go over a lot of those details But in an effort to not get too bogged down with everything and have this be three hours long I think I'm going to talk about just Getting your music uploaded and getting your music registered correctly. Because those are the steps that I often see get messed up more times than not. or, if they're not incorrect, sometimes they just get skipped. Particularly when it comes to registering your stuff for royalties. That gets skipped quite a lot. So I want to break down how to do this properly. And a lot of this episode is actually going to be based on a guide, a free guide that I give to my clients when I'm recording a band or solo artist or whatever out here at my studio. I give them this guide as a way to make their release process easier. Essentially, it's just a very detailed step by step process of. where to go to upload your music, what that looks like. There's a walkthrough tutorial for the distributor. [00:03:00] There's explanations on how to register your music correctly for royalties, how to set up your artist accounts, tips and tricks for all of that. And that's kind of what we're going to talk through today. And I'm going to go over. A lot of the common questions that I get time and time again, I'm going to go over a lot of the roadblocks that people run into. So if you're a new artist, this episode is going to be great for you because it'll probably save you a lot of time searching YouTube or searching Google for those answers. The problem with doing that sometimes is that, well, A, it takes a lot of time. So this guy can just kind of cut that out for you. But B, sometimes you get answers that are half answers and maybe they lead to more questions or maybe they don't quite fit your scenario. Now, it's impossible to talk to every single person's unique scenario at once. So we're going to go over the most common problems and the most common roadblocks that people run into when it comes to Getting their music uploaded to a distributor, getting it onto streaming platforms, and making sure that it's registered everywhere. I think also in this episode, we should at least talk about some of the [00:04:00] absolute, in my opinion, bare necessities to having a professional release. releases can be huge, right? You could have campaign, you can have a huge social media launch, you know, paid ads, you could do a lot, right? A lot of artists getting started off aren't looking to do that. That's just too much. They don't have the time, the resources, the money, the effort, all of that to do it. And they're just excited to get their music out there. They just want it to be live and to be streamable. So, we're going to focus more on that crowd. More at the beginning stage. So if you've already done this before, perhaps you're going to know a lot of these things. But I bet there could be a tip or two in here. That maybe you've skipped that you're not doing that might just speed up the process for you or something that you can include in your next release. In the future, I hope to also do episodes that will go deep on the other pieces of the release, important things that go into the release, like crafting your brand, thinking about your messaging and your imaging when you release, creating a social media plan that you can actually [00:05:00] stick with so that when it comes to release day, Or better yet, when it comes to two weeks past release day, you know what you're going to be doing. you have something to continue posting to continue building your fan base. Those conversations are all so long. We might touch in on some of that, but I'm going to stick to kind of that first stage of just getting things uploaded. And then we'll maybe do different episodes on the other pieces of the release. So let's dive in to Getting things uploaded and registered correctly. the first and most important thing is give yourself enough time. Particularly if this is a new release for you or a first time release for you or maybe it's the first time releasing something that you feel is worthy and professional enough and you're really excited about it, people tend to rush through the release process. They just want it to come out as soon as possible. I'm very empathetic about that because it's exciting. You want to get it out there. You want to share it with people, but if you want your release to go as smooth as possible, giving yourself [00:06:00] plenty of time and to get through these steps is crucial. There's a lot to do and there's a lot of planning and some things take a little longer than you expect them to. So make sure you give yourself enough time. I recommend a couple months would be nice, you know, two maybe you don't need that much But if you are intending to do things with branding and social media as well Then you definitely need that much time just to be making a plan and creating content getting all your assets together So that the release can go off and you're not scrambling to find things To post the second thing is before you start the upload and registration process, get all of the required assets together. And what I mean by assets is your master way file from your producer, your engineer, or if you're doing it yourself from your laptop, have that. Set aside and done. No more tweaking of the mix. No more going back like it's done. Don't start the upload process Don't even bother with that until you're done with the creative process And then you also need your album artwork ready to [00:07:00] go and you probably need some updated artist photos Potentially some graphics for banners and things on your accounts, your official artist accounts, your social media accounts. Start getting that together. If you're going to do the graphics yourself, great, but you know, you're going to need some time to figure out what you want. And if you're going to hire somebody again, you'll need time for that process to take shape for revisions to happen. And so on. You want to have all of these things together because What happens a lot is maybe you have your music ready, maybe you have your album artwork together. And so you go, okay, I'm going to get my upload done. And then you set that to release in two weeks or something. And then you realize, oh man, I would really like to have a new artist shot and an image banner for my Spotify page. And then you're scrambling to get those done in time before the release comes out. That's why giving yourself A long period of time to make sure you have all of these details is great. And that's also why I recommend this guide and the guides going to be linked in the show notes in the description of the YouTube video, a lot of stuff. It's free. [00:08:00] Go check it out. Because what the guide does is it gives you sort of a comprehensive picture. of the whole release process. And I break it down into like, here are the things that are absolutely necessary. You should do these things to have a professional release. And then it goes into the extra stuff, things that you probably should be doing, like thinking about your brand and social media strategy, but aren't necessary. You can skip those and still get out music and still have it look professional. And then more advanced stuff after that, like. PR campaigns and pitching to playlists and, you know, doing paid advertising. It gives you the overall view. So you can kind of pick out what is most important to you and then figure out how much time you think you need for those things. But you can kind of think through all the steps and see a little bit of the order of things, because that's one of the other confusing parts of releasing music is that Sometimes you have to wait for step one to be finished before you can go on to step two. And sometimes after step five you need to circle [00:09:00] back to something else on step one to update. It's complicated. It's a bit of a maze. So the guide helps you just kind of get a big sense of it, make a plan, and then get started. Okay, so. You've got your music, you've got your album art, and then you've got some other artist photos and graphics. Great. That's the bare minimum that you need. By the way, if you are doing your own graphic design on your own, if you have that skill set, or you want to develop that skill set, The tool that I absolutely recommend is Canva. Maybe you've already heard of it, maybe you're already using it. It is totally worth paying for Canva. They do have a free version, but the pro version is awesome. I use it for all kinds of things. They have great templates. The tools are so easy. So it's basically, if you don't know how to use Photoshop, you can get Canva and be able to do most things that you could do in Photoshop. Now, you probably can't customize to the degree that you can with Photoshop. But if you're not a graphic designer, then you're probably not looking to go into that much detail anyway, but [00:10:00] Canva has new features added all the time. And I'm always impressed by how much we can do with having pretty much no graphic design skill here. I love it. I can't recommend it enough. Check it out. You can use it for everything. You can use it to make banners. You can use it to make. social media posts. You can use it to make thumbnails. You can use it to make show posters on and on. And of course your album artwork. if you don't have a good graphic designer in your network or you just simply like having that control, check out Canva. They've got great tutorials. It's awesome. Otherwise hire your local graphic designer. If you've got a friend that's into it. That's awesome. Use them. but just make sure that they have enough time and they know your deadlines so that you get all that stuff together for artists photos. You can try to do those yourself or book a local photographer as well. There's a lot in our scene, super talented photographers and you can't have too many photos to use. I mean, there's so much content that you need to be posting all the time doing a photo shoot. Somewhat [00:11:00] regularly will really help you out. So try to find a photographer that you really love that's affordable for you so that you can keep working with that person over time. All right, let's get into the meat of today's episode, which is uploading your music to a distributor and getting your music registered for royalties. All right. What is a distributor? If you're not familiar with that term, a distributor is basically a middleman between you and the streaming companies. If you don't know already, you can't just go to Spotify, to Apple music and upload your music directly. It's not how it works. You have to use a distributor. Now there are a lot of distributors to pick from. The three most popular, I believe, are CD Baby, TuneCore, and DistroKid. For my part, the choice is usually between CD Baby and DistroKid. Those are the things that I see the most often. I do see some people use TuneCore from time to time. They all essentially do the same thing, which is get your music on streaming platforms, but they just have different pricing models and they have some differences in features. So let's walk through that so you can kind of make a choice. But I'm going to start by saying if you haven't picked a distributor [00:12:00] yet, I fully recommend CD Baby for pretty much all new and emerging artists. It just is the safest bet. They have great tools and resources and the price is right. There is no subscription. You pay one time fee and your music stays up forever. But let's break down some of the pros and cons to each distributor, mostly looking at CD Baby and DistroKid, and you can make the choice for yourself. All right. One of the cool things about DistroKid is they offer automatic payment splits. So if you've got a couple of different collaborators on a track and you want the royalties that come in just to get auto paid out to each person, DistroKid offers that, which is really cool. But every person, every one of those collaborators needs to have an account with DistroKid forever again. So it's great for that first year, second year, but then if somebody drops off, you're going to be back in the same dilemma of needing to manually pay that person out. CD Baby, you know, it's all going to come into the, account that uploaded the song. And then you, you know, you got to bust out a calculator and you got to figure it out once in a while. not that big of a deal and probably a good thing to [00:13:00] review, but that is one cool thing about DistroKid. a big selling feature for DistroKid and other distributors like DistroKid that do subscription models is that. they basically say, Hey, we're going to charge you a subscription fee every year. but in exchange for that, then we're not going to take any commission. We're not going to take any royalties, a cut of your royalties. Whereas CD Baby doesn't do a subscription, one low 10 fee to get signed up, but then they take 9 percent of your earnings. That sounds bad, but the reality of it is that in order for CD Baby's 9 percent cut, to get to be larger than your renewal with a subscription with DistroKid. for rough math, like 100, 000 streams every year. So, unless you're getting more than that, it's still cheaper to let CD Baby take a cut of those royalties. So consider, if these are your early releases, they may not get that many streams, and then in five years they might get even less, and in ten years even less. You at that point would be looking at paying DistroKid [00:14:00] more money than what you're actually making from the streams. And that's why I don't recommend starting with DistroKid because for a lot of new and emerging artists, they aren't turning those kinds of numbers. So you end up. Letting it get taken down or even if you don't want to let it take down and you want to keep paying for it if you forget if you just let that subscription lapse, maybe your card expired, something like that, like it gets taken down. And I just I don't like that. I don't like having to worry about that. I like that. I have old projects that are just up and they're good to go. but those are some of the benefits of using DistroKid. Now DistroKid does allow you to pay an additional fee that they call leave a legacy, which then, makes that release independent of the subscription fee. So you can, you can pay more basically with this, leave a legacy fee, and then it's not dependent on the subscription. that cost is more than what it would cost to just do it through CD baby. But perhaps if you know, you're going to be getting over a hundred thousand streams every year, and I'm just using a hundred thousand as a rough number. It would depend based on what subscription level and what add ons you have with DistroKid, which we'll get to [00:15:00] in a second. if you know that you're going to be over that 100, 000 streams every single year forever, then you could pay the leave a legacy. You could pay that more upfront and keep all your royalties. And there's not that 9 percent difference. so maybe, maybe that's the right thing, but just do the math. Just do the math. what's cool about CD Baby is that a lot of the little extra things that DistroKid charges for are all included in this really low one time 10 upload fee from CD Baby. Things like, you have to pay an extra dollar every year to have your music in the Shazam and iPhone Siri database. So if your song is playing at a party or in some public space and somebody wants to figure out what song is playing and they pull up Shazam or ask their phone then You want your song to be able to show up. You want to be in those databases, right? That's included for free CD baby. You got to pay a dollar every year dollar every year is not expensive But you just got to remember to keep doing it another thing that district kid charges for that CD baby doesn't they call store maximizer essentially if a [00:16:00] new streaming platform or some new database where your music is going to be Distributed 2 shows up after you've released it, you have to pay DistroKid Extra to have your tracks with them get submitted to these new platforms. So think like when Tidal showed up or when TikTok showed up, if you had an old release, you've got to pay extra to get into these stores and you probably want to be on these platforms. CD Baby does this automatically for all your releases. No extra charge. Another thing that you just don't have to worry about. It's not a hassle. Plus CD Baby just has other resources and tools that make it really good. CD Baby's been around the longest. They're a very large company. They're likely to outlast most companies. so all for all those reasons, that's why I recommend them. But if you're already using a distributor that you really like, or maybe you're using a newer distributor that I've never heard of, or I don't know anything about, I haven't brought them up here. By all means use whoever you want. I mean, essentially they all do the same thing. maybe one has a feature that really matters to you. Great. Just do the [00:17:00] math. Just be a little cautious of the subscription model. If you're brand new at this, because. getting enough streams to really warrant the price of paying that forever is going to be tough. I hope you're in that place, but if you're not, then you CD baby, they're awesome. And there is one more reason you might want to consider CD baby, which is simply that this guide that I made for you that makes the upload process super easy. I did through CD baby. So the walkthrough video, all the tips, a lot of the links. It's all talking about CD Baby. So if you know you want to use my guide just to make this effortless essentially to get your music out, then sign up with CD Baby. Okay, now that you've picked a distributor, you've got your master wave file ready, your album art ready, and other graphics and artist photos and all that stuff ready, let's move on. I think the next most important thing to do, I would call it necessary, although I know a lot of people skip this step, is to get your paperwork in order. What I mean by paperwork is, if this is a collaboration of any sort, [00:18:00] whether it's you and Bandmates, or if it's you and another artist doing a collab, you need to have the splits worked out. Don't wait for the song to become a hit and then start talking about who owns what. That's just a recipe for disaster get your splits worked out before you even upload the song. It's a good excuse say hey I'm uploading I've got to have this information Let's have this conversation the conversation should happen right away even in the recording session ultimately or as soon as it's done being created But if it hasn't happened yet Get something in writing. There's cool websites now that make this really, really easy. There's cosign. com I'll put the link in the show notes that gives you a split sheet. I think that's free it also has stuff like collab agreements and work for hires that sort of thing You can use that you can probably find free stuff online I mean you could even use chat GPT to write a rough outline of a split sheet for you It doesn't need to be Like an amazing contract that you worked up. The most important thing is that you just [00:19:00] somewhere write down an agreement with the people that helped you make this music of who owns what you're going to need this information when you upload the music, because they'll usually ask for who the songwriters are and who they're publishing companies are. So get that stuff worked out. The next thing is you need to set a date in advance. I've been talking about this two month process of giving yourself time, but that includes. Some of the time, maybe even before you get to the upload process. So once you're to the upload process, I recommend about six weeks in advance from the day you get it submitted to the day it actually comes out. During those six weeks, you can be doing content creation. You can be making a plan. You can be pitching to playlists and a lot more. Now, it doesn't have to be six weeks. If you needed to come out sooner, you could do three weeks. You could do two weeks, but give yourself as much time as possible. The more time you have between. The upload and the actual release date, the more likely you can get a lot more stuff done. That's going to make your release successful when it comes to then going through the actual upload process, depending on which [00:20:00] distributor you picked, that's going to look different for everybody. If you use CD baby, I highly recommend checking out this guide that I've got linked in the show notes and. Inside that guide, there's a walkthrough tutorial video for CD Baby, which we'll go through every single step of that upload, answering all the questions that you might have and. To be fair, there might be a few. It's sometimes a little confusing what they mean, but I will go over a few of the most common questions, and these will probably relate to any distributor that you pick. One of the first questions is, what's the difference between a single, an EP, and an album? Every platform has their own rules for this, but roughly how it breaks down is one to three songs is going to be a single. 4 to 6 songs is going to be an EP, and 7 or more songs is going to be classified as an album on that platform. to make things a little bit more confusing, CD Baby has you choose between a single or an album when you start your upload process what you're picking on CD Baby isn't how it's going to show up basically a single for them is one song an album [00:21:00] is More than one song and it's just how they have it structured in terms of pricing that might change in the future because they've Recently changed their pricing structure to where whether you do a single or an album. It's 10. But that's part of the confusion. So if you've got more than one song, you just select album. And then if it's four songs that you upload, it's going to show up as an EP on Spotify. Kind of silly how they do it, but that's how it works. Another really common question that I get is how do I correctly add credits to my song. Now, there are only a few credits that can show up and they don't show up everywhere. Anyway, on Spotify, if you right click on a track, you can show song credits and that will show songwriters if you've got them listed and it will also show producer credits. So at the minimum, you should try to get those credits added. Obviously the songwriters want to be credited, but additionally, if you're working with a producer, it matters to them. However, this often doesn't happen. I don't think it's necessarily neglect. It's kind of a confusing process. [00:22:00] Again, it's too hard to show it for anybody that's just listening. It would be impossible to really describe how it works. So check out the video and I can show you how it's done and it will be different on other distributors, but The important thing is to just double check your work and make sure that you're actually crediting everybody that's involved in the project. The next question that I get most frequently is, do I need to sign up with blank, right? And this comes up, with CD Baby and TuneCore because both of those companies offer publishing administrative services. And so while you're uploading your music, you have to make this decision that relates to royalty registration, which is, do you want to use their publishing administrative services? Ultimately, you probably should use a publishing administrative service. CD Baby offers one, TuneCore offers one, DistroKid does not, but there are also independent services that you can hire. One being SongTrust. My recommendation is to not use CD Baby's publishing admin service. It's currently called Boost. So when you get to [00:23:00] that stage in the upload process, I recommend that you decline Boost. Boost costs 40 per release. If you're uploading an album And you think it might be the only album you upload. Maybe this is just like a hobby or something you're not looking to go too deep down this whole royalty world. Then using CD Baby Boost is the right thing to do because it's simple. It's going to get done all in one easy click and they just take care of most of the things that need to be taken care of for you. However, if you're, A more typical indie artist here, you're uploading singles one song at a time. That would mean paying 40 every single time you're releasing one song. 40 makes more sense when it's spread across the whole album, but for every single single, yeah, it's not great. because there's just a better route to do it. You can go to SongTrust, which is a publishing admin company, and pay a 100 one time sign up fee, and then they'll be your publishing admin service. Forever. You can just skip the boost.[00:24:00] once you've uploaded three songs using boost, you're already paying more than the one time fee for song trust. If you use song trust, you skip boost and song trust is going to do the rest. And beyond that song trust makes registration a little bit easier, a little bit simpler, and they offer YouTube monetization. The reporting is nicer. there are other admin publishing services if you want to look into those, but song trust is one of the biggest and I use them. You're definitely going to have more questions than just those three that I went over. So check out the walkthrough video for all the other little things that are going to come up along the way. but once you get done and everything's uploaded and submitted, now you've got a few weeks to wait and start promoting your stuff before it comes out. In the meantime, the next things I think you should move on to the next things that I would deem must do's or completely necessary are just claiming important profiles. claiming your official artist channels, right? if this is your first release, you're going to get an official artist page on Spotify and Apple [00:25:00] music and an official YouTube channel and a page now on Amazon. CD Baby offers links and tutorials on how to get all of that claimed. fairly easily. Most of it's pretty easy. The absolute simplest way to get all of them claimed is the day the music releases, you go claim all these profiles, but if you want to claim them before the music drops, which you probably do, it does take a few extra steps. It gets a little more complicated. Again, doesn't make sense to try to explain it over a podcast format. So check out the guide for that. But besides your official artist accounts, you also want to set up all of your social profiles. Again, maybe you already have these, but if you don't, now's the time to go claim stuff. You don't have to have an official artist channel on every single social media platform. However, it might be a good idea to at least claim your handle just so no one else does. I think it's a good idea to try to keep your handle consistent across every platform, if possible. That's something that you might even [00:26:00] want to look into if you're trying to pick out a band name or an artist name still is like what's available. What can I have across every platform? Plenty of times that it doesn't work out that way. And. It'll be okay. You just have to work around It's totally fine to only be active on one of them. I'm just saying maybe claim the other ones just so no one else can take them. Once you've got these channels claimed, then you can actually start setting them up. If you already got all your channels claimed and set up, then while you're waiting for the song to come out, you're either adding all the information that needs to be added, or you're updating stuff so that It looks fresh for this next release. And what I mean by updating is like updating your profile picture, updating a banner. If a banner exists, updating your bio, updating the links that exist inside of these profiles. If links exist, make sure that stuff's up to date. A lot of times that it's easy to let that kind of get more and more dated. because it's all, it's all work, you know, it takes a lot of work to get these things, but the people that want to see this stuff are fans. They're looking for more information. So do your [00:27:00] best to try to keep all this stuff up to date on your social profiles, adding new pictures and that kind of stuff helps bring more attention to your release and helps grow your brand. When it comes to updating bios, I've seen. A lot of variety. There is the people that just don't do them. There are people that write way too long of bios and then there's everything in between. It's hard to argue whether or not one method is better than the other to be quite honest. You know, I've gone to some pretty big and see that they just write a joke, something witty, something clever in the bio and leave it. And they basically say nothing. I've seen people that have taken it very, very seriously and it becomes very long and winded. It just depends maybe on. Who you are, what your brand is, what you think your fans are looking for. But you know, if writing a joke instead of writing a bio or leaving it blank, if you think that fits your brand, then by all means do it. you can find plenty of examples where this is exactly how it's being approached. But the way I look at it is a lot of times if you go to like a favorite artist and it's like, well [00:28:00] look, Their bio just has this funny little joke and they don't take it seriously. And they're not writing about themselves. Well, that might be because their music popped off and now they get to play by different rules. But if you're like the rest of us and you're grinding, you're trying to build an audience, you're trying to attract more people to your music, having more of your story out there really helps. So if somebody goes to your bio because they like your stuff and they want to learn more, they want to connect deeper and there's nothing there. You're kind of robbing. them of that opportunity, robbing yourself of the opportunity to gain maybe a deeper connection with a fan. I think that you should put in a bio what you would want to have in a bio for your favorite artist, like give them something. But again, Everybody's sort of brand and vibe is different. So if the joke thing or leaving it empty or being mysterious or any of those things fits, then, you know, you can do that. You can try it. Otherwise, put some time into your bio to give fans what they're looking for. Next on my list of things that I think you absolutely should do for a professional release is [00:29:00] add a canvas video to your Spotify page. A canvas is that short, like eight second looped video that plays on your phone. If you have the Spotify app up, it looks cool. It makes it look just slightly more professional. It doesn't need to be high production value. You can kind of create anything you want here. Just put some thought behind it. and add it. It doesn't hurt. You have to have your Spotify artist profile claimed in order for this to happen. And so this is your very first release. Go to my guide and follow the links for getting your profile claimed before the release happens. If you've already got it released, this is easy. Just log into your account and upload your video to their specifications. While you're in your Spotify account, the next most important thing is to pitch your song for playlist consideration with Spotify. Most everyone knows by now that if you get a song playlisted on Spotify's editorial playlists, it can make a huge difference in your career. You can go from having a couple hundred streams to a couple million streams pretty quickly if you get on a nice playlist. you don't have to [00:30:00] pitch to get on a playlist. Sometimes lightning strikes. Sometimes you win the lottery and you can just get automatically plucked out and put on a playlist, but it helps to do the pitch. And that's also part of the reason why I suggest having a longer delay between the upload and the release. If you give yourself six weeks of time between the upload and the release, that's six weeks that that song can potentially sit in a queue for Spotify editors to pick it out and put it on a playlist. So, go ahead and get your song pitched for playlist consideration. Alright, there's two more things I think you should absolutely do, or at least consider doing. The first one is, get a smart URL. Something like a link tree, a link page, whatever you call it. Get that created. you can use HereNow, which is a company that, CD Baby is linked up with to create a link page. You can also use Linktree. just using their free versions is fine, but it basically allows you to put all your important streaming links and social media links, website, anything that's important for people to [00:31:00] have a link to on one landing page. And then that can be your link in bio on Instagram or wherever. So you just make it easier for people to find your music. The last thing that people tend to do with a basic release is run a Spotify pre save campaign. I'm a little bit 50 50 on whether or not this is absolutely necessary, but I'm going to throw it in the list anyways, because it doesn't hurt. campaign is basically where you create a link that people can click that says, Hey, I want Spotify to add this song to my playlist the day it comes out. there's a couple benefits of this. hopefully, you have a bunch of fans that say, Yeah, I want to pre save this. And then it shows up and you're just getting a little bit more traction right from day one. The pre saves can also signal to Spotify that There's a lot of interest in your song and maybe that influences whether or not you get on a playlist. I think those numbers would have to be quite high, honestly, to really move that needle. So I don't know if I would do it for that, but [00:32:00] the biggest thing about a pre save campaign in my opinion is it just gives you an excuse to talk about the release. it's hard to self promote. We've all struggled with. Tuning our own horn and just constantly saying, Hey, check out my music that's coming out having one more excuse, having one more reason to do it. Like, Hey, I've got this pre save. Go check it out is really, really helpful. And you never know. Some of your fans might really appreciate having that because perhaps. They're just going to lose track of it and miss the release unless they pre save. I don't know too many people that really rely on pre save from a consumer standpoint. That's why I'm kind of 50 50 on this. It feels a little bit like just checking a box that no one really cares about. But like I said, it gives you an excuse to post about your song. And it might ultimately help your odds with just getting on release radar, getting on algorithmic playlists, or just simply getting a few more streams right on day one. So, go ahead and do it. If this is your 10th release and you're sick of doing pre save campaigns, I [00:33:00] understand that too. I don't think it's a make or break, but I also don't think it hurts anything. Okay. So there is one more thing that you have to do to make this release work, which is post about it. You have to post about it and a lot. That's where the next two things that we're going to talk about in other episodes come into place, which is thinking about your brand. crafting a brand ultimately, you know, thinking how you want to show up online and what ultimately what your messaging is, who you're trying to connect with this, all of that goes into your brand. And then thinking about a social media strategy that you can implement and follow something that you'll actually stick with for promotion. If you're not ready to do all of that stuff yet, I don't blame you. And if you're just getting started, you know what? You probably don't have to get music out. Make it through as much as what we ran through here and then try to take on a little bit more of the process the next time. That's totally fine. You've got the wheels turning, you've got some momentum, now go make some more music. However, if you've already put stuff out, then it is time to start [00:34:00] really, really promoting yourself. And the fact of the matter is, if you just say, hey, my song is out now, here's a link. It's hard to get anybody's attention outside of your friends and family. Videos are really, really important. If you think about when you're on social media, scrolling through things, if somebody just posts a link to something like you're probably skipping past that, be honest with yourself. Video really helps get people to stop scrolling, particularly really creative video. If you're making a music video or you're making some sort of short promotional video. or video of you talking directly to the camera. That way that people that do know you probably stop and at least hear the first three to five seconds of what you have to say. So getting comfortable talking to a camera, getting comfortable with some of that self promotion is really, really critical to being an artist today, whether you like it or not. It's just how it is. But I will tell you that practice makes perfect and you will get more comfortable as you go. So start practicing, look at it as practice. think of some of these early posts as stuff that You know, it's not going to be your best work probably, but that's okay. You got to start [00:35:00] somewhere. And the good news is, is if it's not that good, no one's going to watch it anyways, and it'll just disappear. So, get started do more than just say my song is out now. Okay. that's very doable for everyone. And there's so many cool tools. And apps available to make content creation easier. So do some homework and you'll find that there are a lot of things that help make the process easier. But the biggest thing is just getting experience, some trial and error in that department and starting to get comfortable putting yourself out there. There is one more thing I want to add, and I've said one more now like three times, I think. Once your music is released, I think it's really nice for your fans to upload your lyrics. Again, if somebody finds your music and really connects with it, don't hold back giving them the stuff that they want. A lot of times, that's the lyrics. Having them sync right up inside these apps is cool. The company that does that for you is called music's match. I walked through tutorial wouldn't make any sense on a podcast. So I'm simply going to put that link in the show notes as well. So if you haven't done that before, definitely check that out.[00:36:00] And you can do that on old releases. You can do that on your next release, whatever it takes some time. It's a little bit of effort, but it's worth doing. It looks pro and. Again, you're giving your true fans what they're looking for. It's totally worth doing. All right, we've gone through all the necessary pieces of the upload process. We've talked about picking a distributor. We've talked about some of the roadblocks that you run in the upload process. We've talked about claiming your artist profiles, setting up your social media profiles, getting your links ready to go. Uploading a Canva, pitching your song to Spotify, running a pre save campaign, and getting your lyrics uploaded. Okay, on to one of the more complex parts of this conversation, which is the royalty registrations. We touched on a little bit of it already, and essentially, by uploading to a distributor, you've already taken care of the biggest piece of the pie, which is the recording royalties. The recording royalties are the bulk of the royalties that are generated when your music is streamed, and that goes right from those streaming platforms [00:37:00] back to your distributor and into your account. the majority that's generated is already taken care of. That's number one. But in order to collect all of your royalties, you'll need to create accounts and register your music in three more places. First, you need to be affiliated with a performing rights organization or PRO for short. For you local independent artists out there, that's going to be a choice between BMI or ASCAP. Just pick one. If you've already signed up for one, do not sign up for the other. Just find your information and get logged back in. But if you have not ever signed up with either BMI or ASCAP, pick one. I recommend BMI. And create a writer's account. It should be free. You can sign up, it's the normal create an account kind of thing, save your login information, and then move on to step number two, which is to create an account with SongTrust. Now, SongTrust is a publishing admin. They do a service that's very similar to what CD Baby offered to you earlier, or what TuneCore offers, which is to act as a publisher for you. SongTrust charges 100, a [00:38:00] one time sign up fee, and then they take a 15 percent commission for their admin work. If instead you wanted to use CD Baby's publishing admin service, like we mentioned before, that's 40. So, if you do that three times, SongTrust is cheaper. And CD Baby's still going to take a 15 percent commission on what they collect through their publishing admin services. They both will get your songs registered with the Mechanical Licensing Collective. they both can offer YouTube monetization, but SongTrust's features look better, just like how the dashboard's laid out. And I think there's more options in their YouTube monetization stuff. And then just the reporting on SongTrust is better as well, which is why I recommend using them instead of. The admin features that are built into CD Baby. You're going to save money and you get more features. So step number two, create an account with SongTrust. SongTrust is going to take some of this registration work off your plate because all you have to do with BMI then is create an account. You don't even have to start registering your music there at all yet. Just create the account. Then go create an account with SongTrust. It's a 100 sign up fee. And then once that account is [00:39:00] created, you're going to take your IPI number, which is just an identifying number for you as a writer, that you'll find in your PRO account, and connect your PRO account with SongTrust, so that that's all linked up. Once that's linked up, you can start registering your songs. I recommend you wait until it's released. It's just easier to do the registrations after they're released. Once it's released, you can log back into your song trust account. If all of that synced up and ready to go, you add your song and song trust will register it for you on your behalf with your PRO. And they're also going to register it on your behalf with the MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective. The MLC collects mechanical royalties in the United States for songwriters and publishers. There are some mechanical royalties that are generated from streaming. Again, like I said earlier, most of the revenue that's generated from streaming gets paid to whoever owns the sound recording. But there is a small fraction, it's like 10 percent or something, that's, that is a mechanical royalty, and that's going to go out to the MLC. So you need to sign up with the MLC to [00:40:00] get that. You can go directly sign up with the MLC, but what I recommend is Sign up with SongTrust instead and let them register you. Why? a couple reasons. first, it's just easier. SongTrust just makes it easier. You're doing one registration and they're gonna take care of your PRO and the MLC for you. But beyond that, the MLC only collects mechanicals in the United States. And so if mechanical royalties get generated internationally, you would have to go sign up with every organization internationally to collect those royalties. That's what SongTrust is going to do on your behalf. So for that 100 one time fee, they take care of collecting all of that publishing for you. Now they do take a 15 percent commission, but in my opinion, it's just worth it because it's easier and you're going to cover a lot more bases with SongTrust. The fourth and final step that you need to do to make sure your music Is registered everywhere is sign up with sound exchange direct sound exchange is responsible for collecting digital performance royalties, which include internet radio. So Pandora and I heart radio and [00:41:00] satellite radio, serious XM. If you're getting streams on any of those platforms, those royalties are going to be. put into sound exchange in order to claim them. You need to have an account set up there. Now, sound exchange pays out 50 percent of their royalties to whoever owns the recording 45 percent to the featured artist and 5 percent to session musicians. I don't want to go too deep on this yet because I just think it's a little bit outside the scope of this episode. So what you need to know is that you need to create an account with sound exchange and then follow their steps for getting things linked again. This is easier once your song is already out because you'll be able to search it and just link things up and basically claim it. I do have walkthrough step by step tutorials and that sort of thing in the guide. So if you need help with exactly how to set up that account and get things connected, you can check out the guide. I've got links to help you there. But the biggest thing to remember with sound exchange is if you're an indie artist and you wrote the song and you're self published essentially, then you need to just make sure that you're claiming. the sound recording [00:42:00] side and the artist side. You've got to claim both inside sound exchange. So to recap, there's four places where your streaming royalties are going to come in. The first and most important is your distributor. And thankfully that kind of happens by default because you've got to go through your distributor to even get your music out on streaming platforms. So that's great. Number two is a little bit of your streaming income will come into a PRO. So you need to affiliate with either ASCAP or BMI. Sign up as a writer. You can only sign up with one of them. Do not sign up with more than one. It'll cause a problem. And if you've maybe signed up before, just find that info. Do not sign up twice. Number three I recommend working with a publishing administrator like SongTrust. If you sign up with SongTrust, they will take care of your song registrations right in your SongTrust dashboard. They also offer things like YouTube monetization, which is really nice. There's other features. There's other things that you can take advantage of. It's worth the fee. It's worth the commission, in my opinion. So sign up with SongTrust and then register your songs in SongTrust. They will put your music into the PRO [00:43:00] and they will put your music into the MLC. And then the fourth step is to create an account with SoundExchange and make sure you claim your songs as the sound recording owner and as the primary artist. Before I wrap this up, I did think of one other thing that I wanted to bring up, which is there are some downsides to song trust. One is that they're slow when you register your song, it's not going to show up in the PRO for like six to 12 months, which is insanely slow. Hopefully that gets faster in the future. But the fact of the matter is That's probably okay. If something were to come in in the meantime PROs pay out like six to nine months behind anyways So those royalties will still make it to you eventually. It's just not gonna show up I can go deeper into sort of the complexities of how royalty registration works and pros and cons, but I don't know. I just think it's going to get pretty boring for this episode, but that is one thing to consider. If you need something to be registered immediately, because maybe you have a sync waiting, you could always register it with your [00:44:00] PRO and then just kind of link it with song trust. It might cause a little bit of confusion, but you could do it. For the most part though, I say, just register it with song trust and be patient. It'll be fine. Odds are, you're going to still collect. any royalties that come in because if they come in and your registration isn't there quite yet, it goes into like an unallocated funds thing and you usually have about three years to collect those royalties. It's different depending on the different royalty agency, but within that first year I don't think you're going to miss out on anything. So you just have to be patient and wait for them to come through. The other thing is, is if you are Potentially going to place any of these songs with a publisher, whether it's for sync, or if you think you might get signed, a publishing deal of some sort. SongTrust does have a one year commitment when you sign up with them, so they're going to be acting as your publisher for that year. if you think that you might need to sign your music to a different publisher, then hold off. Don't use SongTrust. You could always sign up to the MLC directly, and just worry about international stuff later. Alright, that was probably a lot, I acknowledge. [00:45:00] That's a lot of tactical information, and this episode is probably best digested with the guide, but hopefully you got a few things, helpful tips, things to think about with your upcoming release, your next release, that'll help you. Check out the free guide that I have, it'll break down all of these things in more detail, and there's walkthrough videos, and I go deeper into some of these subjects. So click the link in the show notes or the video description and go get that for free. It's worth it. If you've got questions or feedback about this episode, feel free to hit me up. You can send me a DM on our socials. Secrets from the scene. You can send me an email podcast at secrets from the scene.com and just hit me up, ask me what questions you have. If I left something important out that you think I should know, or maybe there's something new I don't know about, maybe I can do another episode on that. Thank you so much for listening. I definitely appreciate your time. If you liked this, please like, subscribe, share with other people, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you want to hear about for other episodes, other topics, other guests, all of your ideas are very much [00:46:00] appreciated. All your feedback is very much appreciated until next time. Thanks.