How to distribute your music

The digital revolution presents many challenges for musicians – but fortunately, distribution is not really one of them: it's now easier than ever to make your music available to a big audience (whether they buy it or not is another matter, of course). In this blog post I’m going to look at some ways that you can distribute your music quickly and effectively – and give you some tips on how to maximise revenue from each method of distribution. 

1. Use your own website

The simplest way to distribute your own music is by setting up a store page on your website and selling your music – in whatever format you like – direct to site visitors. The big advantage of this is that you keep nearly all of the cash generated through sales; the downside is the time involved in fulfilment of physical products (that, in layman’s terms, means the shoving of CDs into jiffy bags and walking them to the post office). If you think you are going to sell thousands of CDs, and don't like going to the post office, then you need to bear this time commitment in mind.

Selling digital downloads from your site is obviously more straightforward and doesn't involve the dreaded jiffy bag – but don’t forget the bandwidth issue: if you find yourself in a lucky position where thousands of people are rocking up to buy a download direct from your site, remember that they may also knock it over unless you’ve set everything up correctly from a hosting / bandwidth perspective.

As for processing payments, an obvious way to get started on this is via Paypal, but a tool like Shopify might be a better bet, as it allows you to upload and sell digital goods easily, track and fulfil orders, run sales reports and so on - Paypal can be a fiddly business as far as this goes, and not everybody loves buying with it. You can also use Shopify to sell other merchandise and, in fact, build a whole music website on it.

A good thing to do when selling direct from your site is to ‘add value’ to the stuff you are flogging. By this I mean making the products on offer more appealing on your website than on other digital stores – for example, you can let potential customers know that you will sign every CD bought direct from your site; that you will include an exclusive PDF of lyrics with every download of the album and so on.

However, if you think you are going to sell records in quantities that might result in a chart position, then it is better to focus on a distribution solution that lets the good folk who run the charts know whenever somebody buys a copy of your album. Which takes me onto…

2. Use a digital distribution company

There are a host of companies out there that offer global digital distribution on all the major digital stores and streaming services. You just pay a fee, upload your music to their system and they make it available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify etc.

As every online store you sell your music on will be taking a percentage of each sale, you won’t make as much money as you might from selling direct, but there are some big advantages in using an online distribution company, namely: 

• you will be selling music on sites and stores that have large, existing customer bases
• people may be more comfortable with buying music from their preferred digital store than from your site
• this method of music distribution makes you eligible for the charts (and we all love being in the charts).

The question is whether you plump for a company that takes a cut of every sale (such as Zimbalam), or use one like Tunecore where you pay a flat fee every year and keep all the dosh generated via sales (after iTunes / Amazon / 7Digital have taken their percentage, of course). You’ll need to base this decision on the number of downloads you reckon you’ll sell.

There is work involved in all this – you’ll need to be prepared to spend a couple of hours gathering and uploading your music, album art, meta data etc. to your digital distributor’s website (and in quite specific formats). It’s time consuming and occasionally technically challenging but once it’s all set up, you will have global distribution and, theoretically at least, a chance of getting into the charts.

Remember that some online music stores provide ‘affiliate links’ that let you get a little bit more cash from each sale of your download. If you are pointing people in the direction of these stores, you should use these affiliate links to do so – this will help you get a few more pence any time somebody buys your music (follow these links for more info on iTunes and Amazon affiliate programmes: iTunes | Amazon).

3. Get a distribution deal

Another approach to getting your music out there is to try to secure a traditional distribution deal, where a distributor takes charge of getting your music into the shops and onto online stores.

The nature of each deal will vary, but generally speaking, this is possibly the most expensive way of distributing your music, so it’s best to do a distribution deal only if: 

• you know you have a fairly large number of fans, who are very likely to purchase your CDs from record shops or
• the distributor is offering to provide you with some support promoting the album (for example, by hiring a music PR firm, printing up posters etc.) or
• you are completely and utterly too busy / technically illiterate to upload your own music to digital stores.

Make sure you are aware of all the potential charges from a distributor before doing a deal - delivery costs, CD storage costs, 'sale or return' costs and so on.

4. Forget selling your music

Of course the other way to distribute your music is to forget selling it, and just give it away for free. People are generally more likely to part with an email address / Facebook like in exchange for a download than they are to spend hard cash on a CD, and you may feel it's better to have tight people listening to your music than none at all. Oddly enough this can still generate revenue for you though, because, done right, free downloads can generate a (larger) fanbase that attends gigs, buys merchandise and so on.

And finally…

Possibly the best way to distribute your music is by using a mixture of the above four approaches – for example, give away a free EP in exchange for an email address; sell limited edition, signed CD albums direct from your site; use Tunecore or similar services to get your music into online stores; and see if you can convince a distributor to put your music into the nation's few remaining record shops.

That way, you can guarantee that you’ll end up with your mum’s email address, and that she’ll buy your record in three different formats.

About The Prescription

'The Prescription' is written by independent musician and Head of Digital Communications and Irish PR at Prescription PR, Chris Singleton.  

Find out how Prescription PR can get your band noticed - contact us today. We offer music PR, digital marketing and music web design services.

Don't miss great free music promotion advice from Prescription PR

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- Find out more about Prescription PR, a leading UK music PR and band promotion agency - visit our website.

How to market your music to a smartphone audience

In this Prescription PR article, we look at some of the challenges that smartphones bring to music marketing and offer some tips on how to promote your music to a smartphone audience...

I’d like to take issue with the term ‘smartphone’. If anything, smartphones make people dumb. Try having a conversation with somebody whilst they staring at an iPhone; all you’ll get out of them is an ‘um, yeah, huh…um, huh, yeah, sorry, what was that again?’. Dinner-time conversation in posh restaurants is a particular victim of this, as your squeeze will be too busy instagramming their food to talk to you. And don’t get me started about SUV drivers on the M25 who feel compelled to, yes, check their email whilst driving. That is potentially lethal, not smart – even if it means they’re enjoying a Prescription article at 70mph (sorry, 95mph).

Regardless of the dumbing-down effects of smartphones, these devices are increasingly a fact of online life. We see proof of this every time we send a Prescription article out via email – our stats indicate that at least 30% of the people reading it are doing so on a mobile phone (mainly iPhones – that’s the music industry for you!). Similarly, a significant proportion of visitors to our website – around 20% - are peering at it on their phones. Although we’d like to think that we’re the kind of hip agency that almost demands being experienced through the prism of a glossy smartphone screen, these stats are actually going to be quite similar with regard to any online bumph.  (And musicians, as we know, excel at inflicting online bumph on the world.)

So, as a DIY musician plugging your wares, how do you take this new smartphone audience into account and actively cater for it? Here are a few tips:

1. Write copy that works for both desktop and mobile users

Any time you send a band e-newsletter, remember that a large proportion of your victims (sorry, recipients) will be reading it on a phone, with all the reduction in attention span that this entails. Consequently, you probably want to avoid writing an essay to your fans. Put your key ‘call to action’ (come to my gig / buy my record / be my groupie) near the top of the message, and keep waffle to a minimum. Same goes for your website really (particularly if you are not planning on having both a desktop and a mobile version of your site).

2. Avoid flashing

iOS devices don’t do Flash, and increasingly, neither do Android ones. (Try visiting a Flash website on a phone and you’ll just get a helpful blank space where the content should be.) However, for many years now bands and musicians have been big into ahem, flashing: even in the dial-up era, the web was packed full of whizzy sites packed full of flash animations. These sites cost an arm and a leg to build and took an age to load, but bands put up with this because they thought that having a flash site made them look cool. Plus ҫa change. However, these days, unless you deliberately want to confuse or irritate your smartphone audience, there is little point in having a Flash-based music site. Best to concentrate on putting together a simple music website that looks nice, loads quickly, contains great content and (crucially) captures data. If you must use Flash, get a website-building boffin to ensure your site does some OS / browser detection – this works out what kind of device or browser a visitor is using, and serves up the right sort of content accordingly (i.e., desktop users get flash; iPhone users get text etc.)

3. Ensure that your free tracks are accessible on a smartphone

A lot of bands offer free EP downloads – or even free albums – to their fans in exchange for email addresses. A lot of the time these are presented in ZIP format, with all the songs being contained within one ZIP file. This is a neat way of doing thing for desktop or laptop users…but seriously, try opening a ZIP file on an iPhone. It is doable, but it’s a royal pain in the bum. So make sure that when you give away a free track in exchange for an email address, or an interesting encounter in the green room, that the fan will actually be able to listen to the song afterwards (particularly if you’re going down the encounter-in-the-green-room route; why disappoint them twice?). One way to do this is to offer a non-zipped, down-to-earth, old-fashioned MP3 as well as a ZIP file. The former should play fine on a smartphone; and the latter will allow the user to save the content into a music folder on a PC. Another option is to also provide links to smartphone-friendly streams of your EP / album.

4. Check all your ‘online assets’ on a phone as well as a 27” monitor

If you’re a musician, the chances are you’re looking at all your online assets – websites, HTML e-newsletters, videos etc. – on a big shiny 27” iMac screen (all broke musicians have iMacs - it's an odd fact of musical life). But it's vital to check all this content on a phone too before unleashing it on the world (well ideally, on a few phones, and the odd tablet as well). A website that looks superb on the big screen may look rubbish on a phone; an e-newsletter which looks lovely in the desktop version of Gmail may be completely unreadable in the mobile version. With the increasingly large variety of devices in circulation, it’s getting difficult to create online content that works perfectly on everything; however, you should aim to ensure that your content looks good on as broad a range of devices as possible, especially iOS and Android ones.

5. Consider building a mobile site

One way to ensure that your site looks good on mobile devices is to, yes, build a mobile site. There are a truckload of services kicking around the web that make it easy to do this - one of the best-known is Dudamobile, which automatically converts your existing site into a mobile website (which you can then edit further if you so wish). You can find out more about Dudamobile here. Alternatively, annoy a web designer friend who likes your take on death-folk and wants to build your band a mobile site.

6. Be creative with smartphone technology

Don’t overlook the creative possibilities that smartphones offer musicians. Can you create a game that is somehow tied into your music? Can you develop an app that offers your fans an interesting experience which takes your music to another level (man)? Can you use smartphones to capture data at gigs? Can you use text messages to market your music? Can you release your album as an app rather than a download or CD? It’s quite easy to go overboard with this sort of thing – and spend way too much money on developers  – but it is still worth thinking about, because some ideas can actually yield great results (and double up as good PR angles).

Now, put that phone down, stop reading this article and concentrate on the M25. Or flying that plane.

About The Prescription

'The Prescription' is written by independent musician and Head of Digital Communications and Irish PR at Prescription PR, Chris Singleton.  

Find out how Prescription PR can get your band noticed - contact us today. We offer music PR, digital marketing and music web design services.

Don't miss great free music promotion advice from Prescription PR

- Get our music industry advice articles in your inbox
- Subscribe to updates by RSS
- Follow Prescription PR on Facebook
- Follow Prescription PR on Twitter
- Find out more about Prescription PR, a leading UK music PR and band promotion agency - visit our website.

Typefaces: why they are important and tips on choosing the right one for your band

Recently I bought a new pair of glasses. A pair that are a little bit more ‘out there’ than some of my previous spectacles. When I say that, I mean they are big and goofy and more in line with something that Clark Kent would sport than my more restrained, sensible eyewear purchases of yore. And to be honest, they are my sole nod to fashion. The rest of me looks as scruffy, non-descript and as ignorant of the latest trends in clothing as ever, but – oh! – you should see my eye-area. It now looks totally at home in any Dalston bar full of hip-spectacle-wearers that you care to mention. The top of my face has become fashionable; it looks like somebody has done a professional job on styling it.

I’m tempted to just leave this article at that, leaving you in awe of my spectacle-purchasing decisions and imagining what my improved eye-area looks like, but I suppose the purpose of these posts is actually to provide music promo advice, so I’d better try to find a way to turn this anecdote about glasses into something of relevance to the rock-success-craving muso. So read on and I'll explain why the transformative power of my specs is going to help your music career.

You see, a good pair of glasses is like a good typeface. Useful. Possibly sexy. Quite often cheap. Image-changing. And before you put your promo CD in the hands of any A&R guy, or point any unsuspecting music listener in the direction of your website, you need to ensure that you’re using the right fonts on both. That may sound like a ridiculously cautious approach – or overly-reverential of fonts – but there are some very good reasons for ensuring you’ve got your typeface selection right before you unleash your music on an industry contact or a member of the great unwashed.

Firstly, the typeface you use on your promotional material is one of the biggest clues about the kind of music you make. Say, for example, you are in a band called The Folk Poppers and you make polite folk pop. The drummer in the band says he knows a thing or two about graphic design, and he duly whips up a logo using a typeface called Squealer, which is rather reminiscent of the font-du-choix of AC/DC. Not knowing any better, you plaster this all over your album sleeve, your posters, your website and your e-newsletters.  In doing so, you become a hard rock band before anybody’s even heard your CD full of tasteful folk-pop ditties. This of course means that you now run the risk of having to deal with some seriously confused hard rock fans who are absolutely disgusted by your CD; and worse, you might never reach the eardrums of those who are into polite folk pop, because they took a look at your album cover and assumed you were a hard rock band.

Secondly, a font can instantly tell an industry contact or potential listener how professional you are as an outfit (and thus how seriously to take you). For example, if you design promotional material that makes extensive use of Comic Sans, you immediately come across as amateurish. Your tracks may sound great – recorded with vintage analogue synthesisers run through valve pre-amps that only accept inputs from cables that end with quarter-inch jacks made of gold – but if the song titles are presented in Comic Sans, well, seriously, you’re screwed. That’s the kind of font that mums and dads get the pleasure of seeing when they receive a newsletter from a playgroup. It screams ‘small time’. Childish. Local. Unambitious. Not very rock and roll. And ultimately unworthy of further exploration. (Note to any kindergarten-users or proprietors amongst you: it's fine, however, for playgroups to use it; probably quite appropriate).

It all comes down to this: in showbiz, preconceptions are everything. And typefaces are actually one of the earliest generators of these preconceptions. Like band photos, they technically don’t have anything to do with the kind of noise your band makes – but they sure as hell make people think they know what you sound like, without you ever playing a note.

So, given all the above, how do you actually get your band typeface right? Here are some tips:

• Before you start thinking about fonts, think about your music. What kind of noise do you REALLY make? Try to nail down the genre as best you can as this will eventually inform your typeface choice. (This can be surprisingly difficult in these post-post-post-modern days of ours, but try your best.)
• Do some research. Look at the typefaces used by bands that operate in the same genre as you and compile a list of potential fonts that get your act into the right ‘font ballpark’.
• Use tools like Myfonts.com to see what your band’s name looks like in a particular typeface (just whack your act’s name into the ‘sample text’ box above font search results). If you see another band using a particular font, and are minded to nick it, you can also use Myfonts.com’s “What the Font” tool to find out what the name of that typeface is (by uploading a screengrab of it).
• Once you’ve decided on a particular typeface, gauge opinion on it – ask some music industry professionals, your Facebook fans, etc. what they make of it, and if they think it 1) suits the sort of music you play and 2) looks professional.
• Remember that if you want to use a particular font for general body copy on a website, there must be a ‘web font’ version of it available. However, if you are particularly keen on a using a typeface for your band name, but there isn’t a web font version available, you can just convert the band name text to a graphic – for use in headers and so on –  and use a similar / complimentary webfont for general text on the site. (A good source of free web fonts is Google Fonts).
• If you feel in any way out of your depth with typefaces, do consider getting a graphic designer on board – and preferably one that regularly works with bands (rather than one who does corporate stuff – you don’t want to end up with your band’s name looking like the Barclay’s logo or similar).

And finally, remember this above all else: there is nothing funny about Comic Sans. Even if you are in a comedy band that sings extremely jovial songs, it is still worth avoiding like the plague.

About The Prescription

'The Prescription' is written by independent musician and Head of Digital Communications and Irish PR at Prescription PR, Chris Singleton.  

Find out how Prescription PR can get your band noticed - contact us today. We offer music PR, digital marketing and music web design services.

Don't miss great free music promotion advice from Prescription PR

- Get our music industry advice articles in your inbox
- Subscribe to updates by RSS
- Follow Prescription PR on Facebook
- Follow Prescription PR on Twitter
- Find out more about Prescription PR, a leading UK music PR and band promotion agency - visit our website.

How to pitch your tracks to the music industry

Here’s a bit of bad news: musicians need to view themselves not just as tortured souls who put heart on sleeve and plectrum to guitar, but sales people. Yep, sadly (and you probably already knew this deep down anyway), as a muso, you are as much in the business of doing a cold sell as you are making that beautiful brand of neo-shoegaze-goth-dubstep-grimey-indie-post-rock.

Once you face the inevitable and embrace your role as a sales rep, invariably you will find yourself approaching managers, publishers, producers, record labels, journalists, bloggers, film directors and tea boys trying to convince them of the merits of your music; you may even end up trying to convince selective radio pluggers and PR companies, who you actually want to pay, that it is worth taking money off you. And, as any sales rep (or hapless Apprentice contestant) will tell you, how successful you are at selling will all boil down to the quality of the pitch.

Fortunately, there is some good news: we at Prescription PR are here to give you some key tips on how to sell your music to the music industry.

1. Know your audience

Research who you are approaching in depth. It doesn’t matter if you are talking to an MD of a record company, a journalist at The Guardian or a teenager who’s doing work experience at a local studio, you need to

• be sure that they actually deal with the kind of music you make and 
• be able to demonstrate to that person that you are familiar with the kind of things they do, or artists they work with. 

That way, you can avoid wasting people’s time (including your own) and personalise your approach. An industry contact is far more likely to deal with you if it is obvious that you know about, and more importantly, are interested in, the kinds of things they do. So mention that A&R’s roster / latest project / new haircut and how much you admire it when you are talking to them. We all have egos that need to be stroked.

2. Make it easy for people you are approaching to hear your music

As we now live in a digitised global village, yada yada, most initial pitches these days will take place over email. And people get tons of emails. And when they open an email, they don't really read it in any depth whatsoever. As such, it’s vital that you make it really quick and easy for the people you are hassling to actually hear your music. So, ensure prominent links to both a stream AND a download are present in all emails (so that people can listen to something immediately and also whack it on their iPod and jog to your dulcet tones later). Soundcloud and Dropbox respectively – two excellent free services – are good for letting you do this. (It’s even worth offering to send people a CD upon if they want one, as some people have an odd attachment to and reliance upon this antiquated format.)

3. Don’t crash anybody's Outlook

Don’t attach a 40MB surround sound version of your song to an email to anyone.  (You may think the above advice is so obvious that it is not worth imparting, but you’d be surprised at the number of alarmingly huge files that get sent to Prescription PR, and how they bugger up our email. And yes, we're talking music here, not saucy pics.)  Even in this day and age of uber-fast broadband, big files crash email programs and there are very few things in life more irritating than the spinning wheel / blue screen of death that invariably pops up when a musician thinks it appropriate to send ridiculously big files to a genial and sexy but unsuspecting, tired and overworked music publicist. Even if you eschew the well-known 'attachment method' of annoying industry contacts, providing links to very big WAV files that take ages to download will also probably ensure that your music never gets played by the people you’re sending it to. A link to a stream and a download of a well-produced but relatively petite MP3 file is generally the way to go.

4. Provide a good range of background information about your act – but don’t overdo it

Include a brief summary of your act’s history and music in your pitch emails. Give your contacts a good sense of who you are, what kind of noise you make and a short list of past achievements. But don’t go overboard and write an essay; if you must wax lyrical about your band, provide links in your pitch email to locations where you are doing said waxing – for example, point people in the direction of that tenderly-crafted biography on your website which says that you’re the best thing since Peter Andre. Other perhaps more helpful things to point people in the direction of include hi-res pictures, videos of you performing live and so on. Or hard cash.

5. Ensure your promotional materials look and sound good

Be selective about what you send people. If you have crappy band pics, it may be wiser to omit them from your pitch than send an A&R a boring, low-res picture your mate took of your slightly overweight band standing up up against a wall in Hackney. And, of course, make sure the music you send is produced to a good standard. Even if you’ve just written the modern day equivalent of Bohemian Rhapsody, make sure you’re not just emailing people a demo of it recorded on a dictaphone. These days, every musician has a Pro Tools setup in their lavatory and music industry contacts generally expect higher production values as a result of these now-ubiquitous studios-in-the-jacks.

6. Don’t pitch until you’re ready

It’s very tempting, upon recording that sure-fire hit, to think “God, that’s an amazing song, I’m so talented, I simply must send this demo post-haste to that A&R called Nigel that I met the other night in that interesting bar in Soho.” But wait a minute. What if Nigel actually likes the demo? Have you any other songs to follow it up with that will further pique his interest? Are there any gigs planned? Do you have 100,000 Facebook fans handy to help you fit into the ‘low-hanging fruit’ category of artist that gets signed these days? Nigel has a short attention span. He’ll listen to your song once. But even if he likes it, if you don’t have any more material, gigs or any sort of a fanbase handy, it’s likely that Nigel will stop taking your calls pretty quickly. The lesson: don't pitch until you're ready.

And finally, after reading this article, don’t send Prescription your latest album and ask us to do our usual great music PR campaign thingy for you. Oh alright then, I suppose you can. Here’s the link.

About The Prescription

'The Prescription' is written by independent musician and Head of Digital Communications and Irish PR at Prescription PR, Chris Singleton.  

Find out how Prescription PR can get your band noticed - contact us today. We offer music PR, digital marketing and music web design services.

Don't miss great free music promotion advice from Prescription PR

- Get our music industry advice articles in your inbox
- Subscribe to updates by RSS
- Follow Prescription PR on Facebook
- Follow Prescription PR on Twitter
- Find out more about Prescription PR, a leading UK music PR and band promotion agency - visit our website.