Start Spreading the Tunes: New Online Distribution Tools
It’s kind of cute now how just a few short years ago we were all sufficiently impressed by how Apple Garageband gave broke college kids the ability to cut albums on a laptop with a basic, free DAW program. In the meantime, the studio has continued to shrink while the abilities to furnish your music to the global populace have flourished.
It’s to the point now that you could record and edit a new song or music video and post it online for preview and/or sale within minutes, all with a mobile device whose coolest feature used to be keeping your old phone number when you moved to a new city.
I’m not saying you should stop booking studio time and pressing CDs just yet, but if you wanted to try a new approach to music distro, here’s one way to do it.
From VeriCorder…
Vericorder's VC Audio Pro editing screen.
If you don’t immediately see the need to make spontaneous live recordings of your music with an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’re not weird. Production value concerns are natural and warranted. However, give your rabid fans as many ways to support you as possible. Even if only a small percentage of your fans are the rabid ones, they will love to have access to as much of your creative output as possible.
VeriCorder makes mobile audio/video recording tools for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s VC Audio Pro appeals especially to musicians as it provides multi-track recording, editing and Internet delivery of audio files all in one $5.99 app that works on the iOS up to version 4. Audio is recorded at the maximum fidelity for the devices (CD quality), and Vericorder offers mics for $20 or an XLR adapter for $60.
Once recorded, you can layer up to three tracks of audio and then edit them, highlighting sections with a swipe of a finger. You can cut/copy/paste bits of audio, as well as combine clips and create volume fades. Send your finished compositions as WAV or compressed M4A files as email attachments. Or, as of this summer, you can also upload audio files directly to SoundCloud, one of the slickest and most popular audio hosting platforms online.
…To SoundCloud…
By now, SoundCloud is well-known, with more than one million users, so I’ll keep this brief. SoundCloud lets anyone upload audio to a page where anyone else can hear it. You can embed SoundCloud players on any other website as easily as embedding a YouTube video, and set your individual pieces of audio to be public or private, downloadable or streaming only, with links to buy online — like this:
School of Seven Bells – Wind-storm by VagrantRecords
A basic SoundCloud account is free and provides some stats on who listened to which tracks and when. Higher-tier, paid artist and business accounts give you more audio time, a greater amount of downloads and streams available, and more detailed stats. Posting music to SoundCloud is a great way to allow labels, producers, DJs, music supervisors, blogs and other media outlets access your music conveniently.
The latest SoundCloud news for September includes integration with the digital music distributor TuneCore. You can now connect your SoundCloud account to your TuneCore account for easily supplying music to the distro service.
…To TuneCore…
Another upstart of a few years ago, TuneCore is now a household name in the musicmaking world for distributing music and videos to the top-rated music download stores for a flat fee; the company takes no royalties from your sales, and you keep all the rights to your original music. For $9.99 per song or $49.99 per album, TuneCore will supply your music to iTunes, Amazon, Emusic, Myspace Mu-sic, Spotify and others; starting an account is free.
…To Facebook…
Root Music's BandPage Facebook plug-in.
Creating a decent presence on Facebook for your music no longer needs to frustrate the life out of you. Now that you have a SoundCloud account, you can add a SoundCloud player to an aesthetically acceptable BandPage from RootMusic.com.
BandPage is a FaceBook app that adds a “BandPage” tab to your Facebook fan page where you can add a SoundCloud player, a Bio Pane, and a nice calendar of events.
The BandPage tab be-comes the default tab visitors arrive at, but you still get your Wall, Info and other tabs, and visi-tors do not need to have BandPage installed to see BandPage sites. SoundCloud music plays un-interrupted while the fan explores photos, Wall posts or anything else on your page. The basic BandPage tab is free, but if you want a more pimped-out page, BandPage Plus costs $1.99 a month and gives you customized font and color settings, background images and a customizable banner image.
…To Gettin’ Yours.
Root Music's BandPage with the new YouTube Tracks feature.
Root Music’s latest addition to BandPage will please your fans while possibly getting you paid. The new YouTube Tracks feature lets you add YouTube videos to your Facebook BandPage with ability to collect royalties based on accumulated video plays. BandPage users also get a short listn.to URL for their Facebook site, for example listn.to/KanyeWest.
Now that you have the knowledge, the question is what do you do with it? It’s the classic technological precaution: Just because you can shoot a video on a mobile of your band playing an impromptu acoustic version at the SouthWest gate in LaGuardia and upload it to the Internet for potential profit within minutes, doesn’t mean you should.
But those people in the SouthWest line are on edge big time, so yeah, you probably should. — Markkus Rovito
Markkus Rovito plays drums, DJs and hacks away on the QWERTY in San Francisco. He has written for Gearwire, DJ Tech Tools, Remix, EM, and Mac Life, among others.
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