Distro Story

When we started creating albums at Fried Roots, our mission was to sell our music online and have our albums with multiple digital retailers, such as iTunes, Rhapsody and amazonmp3. At the time, we just set up our own website and band blog and didn’t really know how to integrate a store on our site and wondered who was going to monitor our store in case any problems were encountered by our fans when downloading our music from our own site.

A digital distribution service gave us an easy way to spread our music with multiple online retail stores while we can focus on our marketing plan. When choosing Songcast we evaluated these areas:

1. Retailers
2. Royalties
3. Barcode
4. Cost
5. Album Sales Tracking

Songcast has retail partnerships with iTunes, emusic, amazonmp3, Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo music.

Some fans prefer spending their money with trusted retailers, so it can give you an edge in establishing some quick credibility for your music operation

I also want to keep all my profit from album sales. They provide you 100% royalties. Other services can take 10% or more from your album sales, depending upon their agreement. Once you sign up you also receive a free barcode for your music.

Songcast membership costs $5.99 a month, allowing unlimted album uploads into your account. There is a one time setup fee of $19.99 per album or $9.99 per single upload. This fee covers the cost of encoding your audio tracks, connecting and processing your album artwork, and managing your album(s) with download retailers. I am a big fan of the unlimited album upload feature: other distribution services charge $20/year per album uploaded. This can add up if you plan to have multiple releases.

Songcast also provides you with a free profile page where you can write a little bio about your band and display where your album is located. They give you an iTunes linking code to where your album can be bought and a cool Amazon widget seen below. Great for social networking and promoting your album.

The album stats are very helpful. You can see your stats broken down by month and can download the spreadsheet. Find out what albums or singles sold, country sold in, payrate, and from which retailer or store. Some retailers pay even when your music is streamed. Nice seeing a “stream payrate” column. Even when people preview your tracks, your music is working for you.

Upload your singles, albums and ep’s and let the world hear your music.