Music Industry Discussion

Tunecore has been popping up like crazy lately in ads on every website. Can someone give some insight on whether or not it's a tangible or logical decision to partner with them for any serious committed musicianship where The Money isn't the main goal but it accounts for a reason(bills, and that's really it). The main goal being promotion with increased income as a result, not investing for free promotion that leads to sub-par living afterwards.

My musical goal is to change individuals lives for the better, the way music has done all our lives, just to give back and to give (as much OR more) to new generations and older folks alike(an open mind is all ya need to grasp it). Can someone lend insight into getting started releasing a first album on iTunes, ReverbNation, and sites of those sorts? I'm most excited to copy and press actual CDs for people I know, so if a website says I get $0.03 per song purchase, that wouldn't fly comparing the $10 14song album in person.

Just looking for some input, Thanks for reading, and I hope you're curious about what I'm working on. It will be here SOoOoOooN.

Tunecore offers a bit more service than CDBaby, but also charges more - an annual fee for each album, for example. They also offer 'publishing', where they take 10% of your collected royalty pennies.
If you just want your music on iTunes, CDBaby will be the cheaper investment, they also offer amazon, etc.
If you want to sell CDs cheap, Kunaki.com is the least expensive duplicated-copies place around, and have a store front you can point people to.
Createspace is almost free to set up, you just pay for discs you get, and as an Amazon spin-off, you get your CD on amazon automatically, hard copy and downloads, and you can set the hard copy pricing - note that they suck a big chunk of money of the sale, though.

I've never tried selling anything through reverbnation's download services (not sure how much they charge), but as it tends to be a place ONLY for musicians, I wouldn't give than as an option, instead you can link 'buy' places to your songs or excerpts there. I'm guessing that bandcamp is similar - not a huge amount of sales through it, but I haven't used it.

Do it ourselves, or others will profit and we will not.
That is my official stance.

I think it is totally worth it! (and they are a competitor to my company in some aspects!). I have been working with musicians for a while now, and we all use tune core. First off, they have great customer service. If we ever have a problem, they always solve it right away. Second, its so easy to use. Third, it helps you capture an additional revenue stream. One client I am working with has over 400k streams. Not much money, but it helps artists trying to make it.

As a side note, I make merchandise for musicians and that's how we compete. But I totally advocate their digital distribution services.

TuneCore? Yay



It allows me to distribute music worldwide in about 10 minutes.