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New Service Lets Musicians Sell Through iTunes For Cheap

This article is more than 10 years old.

A musician sits hunched over a guitar, occasionally tapping at the laptop in front of her. With the proliferation of music production software like GarageBand and Ableton, the image of a bedroom music maker is an increasingly familiar one. But how can these artists sell their tunes? DistroKid has a solution.

Launched just last month, DistroKid is a brand new service that lets users upload unlimited tracks to iTunes, Spotify and Amazon for just $19.99 a year. DistroKid doesn't touch the musicians' profits, and users get to keep all the royalties once the respective distributors take their cut.

“The way that musicians write music now is very different from the way it used to be,” explained Philip Kaplan, founder of DistroKid. Instead of crafting an album and recording it in a studio, Kaplan says the majority of musicians are regularly recording music at home.

DistroKid’s service is far cheaper than competitors such as TuneCore, which charges $29.99 per album for the first year, with subsequent years costing $49.99. Sites like CDBaby also keep $4 per CD sold and 9% of all distribution sales.

“On DistroKid, if you upload an album right now to iTunes it will be on iTunes usually within 4 hours,” said Kaplan. Kaplan wouldn’t disclose the proprietary technology DistroKid employs to get albums up so quickly, but said it’s much faster than the two days or couple of weeks competing sites take to upload songs.

Kaplan, who started email service provider TinyLetter and Internet advertising network AdBrite, launched DistroKid as a spinoff from his Fandalism social network to combat the per-record fees of current websites, which he thinks inhibit project musicians.

“Most musicians these days have over 100 songs just sitting there and it doesn’t make sense to choose which songs to upload to iTunes,” explained Kaplan. “And in a way your creativity is limited because there’s a cost associated with every song you record.”

Since its May launch, DistroKid users have begun uploading around 200 songs a day, and Kaplan predicts that number will increase greatly.

“I think every musician in the world who records anything, if they knew about DistroKid would choose it over everyone else.”

DistroKid may also expand to include recording advice from well-known musicians alongside other educational content. For now, the young site is concentrating on growing its user base and ironing out any kinks.

Your first DistroKid upload is free, so go ahead -- dig out that embarrassing recording of your teenage ska band and see if you can sell a song on iTunes.

Follow me on Twitter @natrobe.