How to distribute your own music

It has never been easier to release music. Whether you want to profit off of your work, or just release music as a weekend project, music making and distribution is becoming more simple and more cheap every day. Below are a few of the most immediate way to begin getting your work out there:

Soundcloud

If you’re a new musician and have never distributed your own music, Soundcloud is going to be the fastest way to upload a song to the internet. All you need to do is create an account and upload your song file. You have the opportunity to add as much metadata to your song as you’d like (album art, credits, genre, tags, etc.) but if you just want a link to share that contains your song, Soundcloud can get you up and running in a few minutes. The popular streaming platform even has a genre of music named after it, or soundcloud rap.

YouTube

Do you make music videos or lyric videos for your music? YouTube is a simple way to upload the visuals for your music that has a built in music community of listeners and artists. The majority of the world’s music listening occurs on YouTube, with people opting to watch ad supported videos over paying for subscriptions. “Google has announced that it has 50 million users subscribed to or trying YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, which is a marked increase from the 30 million subscribers it reported in December 2020. This seems to mark a continued trend in people looking to make the jump from the free versions of YouTube and YouTube Music, even as more services are competing in the space,” reports the Verge.

TuneCore, etc.

Before the internet, and even well into the commercialization of it, in order to release music on streaming platforms or make it available on Internet Radio platforms like Pandora, you would need to sign to a record label with distribution infrastructure. If you didn’t want to sign to a label, you could always start your own label, but that was more costly and time intensive than releasing music yourself today. It costs $15/year to be able to release your music on all internet music streaming platforms, a relatively new opportunity for artists. This takes the gatekeepers out of the way, letting artists release music themselves, whenever they want, without giving up a percentage of profits to a label.

Social Media

If you’re just starting out, want to build anticipation for yet to be released on streaming music, or would like to experiment without a formal release, you can release snippets of music or full tracks on social media. With social media livestreaming you can work on music while getting feedback from your audience, then release the final product at a later time. Social media is a great way to feel less pressure when working on music, because it can be considered to be more of a living piece of work, instead of a final track uploaded for distribution.

However you want to release your music, today is the best time in history so far to be a musician. It has never been easier to release music, it has never been more possible to collaborate with others, and this possibility has never existed for more people. The barriers to entry are very low, and you can even make music on your phone. Now that you can release as much music as you want, what is your next song going to be?