The best way to distribute your music digitally

The rapid advances in the digital music world have made it easier than ever to distribute your music online. Artists are capable of uploading tracks within hours of completion to multiple outlets across the web. It is extremely important however to pursue the correct outlet for your music to be effectively released. There are several programs available to assist in online distribution and it's important to understand what services they offer and select the right one for you.

There is a virtually endless variety of online stores to sell music through. It is a realistic endeavour to conduct a do it yourself (or DIY) distribution campaign and upload to several outlets yourself however it can become troublesome to keep up with several different sets of payment arrangements and records. Each store has its own format and payment arrangement and several stores require you to check the records periodically yourself as opposed to providing sales information without provocation. Without an outside source of help to maintain these statistics it can be all too easy to lose track of this information and lose money.

Luckily there are programs such as The Bizmo, TuneCore, CD Baby and the like that can help. These programs will allow you to upload your music to their interface alone and they go on to distribute it to several online music outlets at once. This saves an incredible amount of time uploading and registering with these stores one by one yourself and these programs will also keep up with the payment information so you don't have to. Certain stores such as I-Tunes require particular file formats that are difficult to convert to but these programs will format your music so it can be available in these store fronts. Each program has varying costs and pays out different percentages of your revenue so the amount of online stores your music will be available through depends on the program you choose and the payment you decide on.

TuneCore for example has different fees that let you decide how many stores and tracks will be included in your package but they also offer a package option for albums in all of their available stores for a flat fee. TuneCore also pays 100% of the online revenue to the artist where programs such as The Bizmo and CD Baby pay 70-91% of revenue but have their own advantages in other areas. The Bizmo actually has programs to sell many different kinds of products including physical merchandise and tickets among other things.

Using these programs is a necessity in the digital music environment because of the other factors that go along with promoting your release. Getting your tracks and artwork up online is the first step but to properly distribute your tracks you will have to generate interest through things such as shows and social networks. Twitter and Facebook are effective places to post track samples and speak personally to people to promote your tracks and with the assistance of online distribution programs you will have several outlets for people to hear your creations.