Music distribution is what enables the bond between your creations and your potential audience. Even if the term seems self-explanatory, it involves various nuances that are crucial to anyone who’s getting into the music biz—even more so today. But, to begin with, let’s start on common ground with an initial definition. In brief, music distribution consists of getting your product somewhere you can sell it. In this day and age, it can be done either physically or digitally.
The Artists in Search for Their Label: Some Context
When the world wasn’t as technological as it is today, artists looked for record labels to launch their albums. It seems like forever ago when a musician had to go to a specific place (probably multiple places at diverse times so that s/he could sell the creation). Then the album would be produced, the label would transport it to shops, and finally, with the right marketing strategy, people would buy the CD. As this brief bit of history suggests, music distribution is how the music industry manages to get recorded music to available consumers.
Pure Business: How Music Distribution Works
The ultimate goal of any emerging artist is for people to listen to them, right? And, while listening, obtaining an economic retribution is not optional. Music distribution makes the purchase of your material possible. The dynamics of this are essentially what our previous example shows: getting your music somewhere where it can sell, either in the traditional manner or digitally. To put in more technical terms, the process of making your tunes available to the public consists of creating a series of contracts and payments. You mustn’t forget this part of the whole deal because it’s what will get you the paycheck.
Conclusions
Either physically or digitally, every artist should create a distribution plan for their materials. In previous entries we have recommended a combination of both the material and the virtual, so as to take advantage of all the means possible. For the time being, just know that once you’ve finished the hardest job, which is recording your tune, you must focus your effort on how to distribute your music.
