These have been available on iTunes and Spotify and a host of other streaming services since their respective releases. I use a service called TuneCore—they distribute music to digital storefronts. They are a classic Old World middleman. iTunes and the others don’t want to deal with individual artists, opening up the door for someone to come in and extract from the value chain.
TuneCore’s service is expensive, though to be fair, not out of line with their competitors. They charge an upload fee for each release, and then a yearly subscription fee for each. They try to upsell additional services throughout the year, too. In return, they place your music in the outlets of your choice, collect revenues on your behalf, and consolidate it into one account.
It’s not a bad service, and is probably very convenient for those artists who are making money from their work. My goal was not to earn money from these releases, so I guess I can say that I’ve been very successful. My experience with TuneCore in the past few years is as follows:
- It’s very rare that anyone downloads MP3s.
- I make about $0.03–$0.04 per month on streaming Spotify, Rhapsody, eMusic, and a dozen other outlets.
Of course, I can’t blame TuneCore for this. They are just offering exposure in a number of outlets. The hard part is not finding a place to sell your music, though. It’s building up a following and earning the right to ask people to pay you for your work. The pattern that I saw was a quick spike at each initial release, followed by a rapid decay rate. This was no doubt due to friends and family who were supportive, and a few folks they influenced to make a purchase. I am grateful for that.
But looking at it through a larger lens, it’s not really worth it to keep paying for TuneCore’s service. To date, I’ve paid them more than I’ve earned, and I don’t see that trend turning around. Like I said, my goal was not to earn money. I wanted to get some exposure for these songs. Though it was a worthwhile experiment while it lasted, I can get exposure in a number of other channels.
On the off chance that the folks at TuneCore are listening, there are two things that were disappointing about the service as an independent artist:
- I expected to earn more from the streaming services, but you’ve heard this before from other artists such as Johnny Marr, Thom Yorke, and David Byrne (though there are some great counterpoints from Billy Bragg and Dave Allen, too).
- Stop the spammy upselling. It’s annoying, and it doesn’t work anyway.
So I’m taking these songs on a brief “Farewell Tour,” posting a song once a week every Monday (with “Live Liner Notes”) until I take them down from iTunes.
Update: Re-Released Spring 2022
Streaming Links: Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Amazon
Or preview/download here on Bandcamp:
