Releasing Music For The First Time - The Complete Guide
Releasing music is exciting but it can also be overwhelming. We’ve created a simple guide for you to help take you through the entire process.
Our goal is to handle the business side of your music career so you can focus on the music. Visit Offstage to learn more or setup a call with one of our team.
1. Prep your music
Have your music professionally mixed and mastered
Mixing and mastering are two stages of the music production process. Mixing involves combining multiple tracks, such as vocals and instruments, into a single, cohesive song. Mastering involves further refining and polishing the mix to make it sound its best. Together, these steps help to create
We recommend finding someone on EngineEars. However, another idea is to call a local studio in your city
It will cost around $250 per song for a mix, $50-100 for master
The output will be a professional-sounding, high-quality final audio (it should be a WAV or AIFF file format)
Prepare your album artwork
You’ll need to create a square image for your album art. Don’t know where to begin? Find a freelance designer on Fiverr (for as low as $5) or use an image-generator tool like DALLE-2 (free)
The image needs to be 1,000 x 1,000 px
2. License your recordings
Sign up for a distributor
Licensing is incredibly complicated, and uploading music to streaming platforms directly isn’t possible if you’re not signed to a big label. Instead, you’ll need a distributor who will license music on your behalf with streaming platforms
There’s three big players in this space which you can use: Distrokid, CDBaby, Tunecore.
Any of these will be fine but our recommendation is Distrokid - they let you keep 100% of your royalties. Additionally, they won’t take down your music from the streaming platforms if you cancel your subscription
Set your release
In whichever distributor tool you use you’ll upload your music, artwork, set your release date, and set your profile information (such as your artist name)
3. Copyright your songwriting (Songwriters Only)
You’re entitled to royalties every time someone listens to your song (the audio file); but you’re entitled to additional royalties simply for the writing of a song. This means if someone covers your song you can also collect royalties for the writing. Publishing royalties are extremely complicated but we’ll make this simple for you.
Sign up for a US PRO
The first royalty you’ll collect is performing royalties. A PRO, or Performing Rights Organization, is a non-profit organization will handle the licensing and collection of this royalty for you.
Register your works with your PRO
Once signed up, login and register your works (the songs you’ve written)
When you register your works you’ll be asked for an ISRC - this is the ID that represents the recording you uploaded to your distributor. You can find this with your distributor.
Register your works with The MLC (Mechanical Rights)
Separately you’ll need to register with The MLC to collect an additional royalty called a mechanical copyright. More money!
Even better, it’s a government organization so there’s no fees. Simply sign up!
4. Prep your release
Once you’ve done all the basic admin of scheduling and licensing you’ll release, you’ll want to start the marketing aspect of your release.
Set up your streaming profiles
Sign up artists.spotify.com (you need a Spotify account)
You’ll need to get your Spotify URI (your unique identifier) from your distributor to get access
Once signed up you’ll be able to manage your artist page and see analytics when people listen to your music
Pitch to playlists
There are two types of playlists you’ll want to pitch to:
Curatorial playlists: These playlists are managed by the streaming platforms themselves
You should pitch your music to Spotify at least 2 weeks in advance. You can do this within artists.spotify.com
Independent playlists are simply playlists created by people around the world that have a lot of followers. You can pitch to these people using Submithub.com, PlaylistPush, and Groover are also good platforms to pushing your music to playlists
You can also just find a playlist you like and reach out to the playlist owner directly on social media
Set up a TikTok
TikTok is quickly becoming the biggest social network in the world and it is critical for musicians to be on it. Download TikTok for free from the App Store
TikTok has extensive tools to create videos and is straightforward to use - we recommend posting at least once a week
Create a YouTube
If you have music videos you can can either upload directly on YouTube or distribute your videos through your distributor and then you’ll appear on Vevo’s page - you don’t control it but it might look legitimate
Set up Spotify canvas
Canvas is an additional visual element for your music
Create a 3-8 second video
9:16 ratio and at least 720px tall
Upload in Spotify for Artists
5. Release your music
Go live
On release day your music will go live and you should celebrate! In a future article we’ll dive into how to best do this.
Set up Apple Music profile
Finally, once your music is released you can claim your Apple Music profile at artists.apple.com - but only once your music is live
NEXT TIME: Marketing your music and organizing a Release Party