You don’t need to sign to a label

It costs $15 a year to release music on all of the digital streaming platforms that the majority of people use to listen to music. For fifteen dollars a year, you as an artist can release as much music as you want to on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, or wherever people generally get their music from. Musicians no longer need a label to release music, and with modern day music publishing services, you can monetize your own music, cutting out a label’s take.

Labels perform a multitude of functions, like touring and merchandise operations, but more and more, these tasks can be performed or automated by a musician with little effort. A band website can be made with Squarespace, and a basic merchandise store can be made in about an hour, that prints and ships band merch automatically, with services like Printify. Tours can be booked over email after some research, or booked at publicly available spaces. Entire label marketing departments would not be able to reach audiences as well as digital marketing tools like Meta, TikTok and Google advertising.

Thinking about music as a business, without a label, means incorporating as a business on a service like LegalZoom. Opening a business checking and savings account is another necessary step. Changing your social media profiles for your music from personal accounts to business accounts is needed to be able to create ads on social platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. You can even press your own vinyl.

Not needing a label doesn’t mean that you need to become focused on business and lose sight of the joy of art. Not needing a label means utilizing modern tools, and creating your own business infrastructure to create your music at your own pace, without someone taking a percent of your earnings.

Once you’ve put in the work to be able to schedule a release on digital streaming platforms like Apple Music, you can then create your own social media promotions that link to that music. The ads are the same whoever is buying them, whether it be you or the label. You can target your exact audience with a link to stream your music, or target an ad for show tickets and merch to your fans. Anything that a label would do for you, you can now do for yourself, with the added benefit of learning how to build your own music business along the way.

Not needing a label isn’t failing or not getting success as a commercial musician. Not needing a label is betting on yourself as a musician, and choosing to sign yourself the day you decide to self release your own music. Having control over your artistic output means that you get to start from the beginning and work towards what you want to achieve, yourself. Along the way you learn how to get better, and have a direct connection to your how the music business works. You don’t have to split your earnings, and no label executive can tell you what to do with your creative output. Why not sign yourself today?