Hi, all!
Feel free to do a quick introduction if you’ve joined this instance, or if you’re from another instance but interested in the communities here.
I’ll go first: I’m Beto, originally from Brazil but living in California. I started writing songs when I was 14 years old, and always loved making music.
I have a one-person band called The Fishermen & the Priestess, and I post all my songs (releases and experimental tracks) on a Funkwhale instance (which is another federated project).
My songs are usually ambient/downtempo and very hopeful. I love using cassette tapes, tape loops, and 4-track recorders, and I’m planning to release my next album on microcassettes.
I’ve done a little research but have been putting that off so I can focus on what we have left to finish. We still have a lot of artwork to do as well. Album cover, some videos, some historical fiction writing for our websites.
We’ll either use CDBaby or Distrokid but probably CDBaby. I like the idea of paying once instead of a yearly fee to keep stuff online. I don’t expect to make much (or any) money on this but I’m going to invest in it and do it right just in case. I’d hate to put it out there and miss out on those fractions of pennies trickling in.
Several articles I read about releasing music suggested setting up a publishing company to retain more control of the royalties. Is that something you did?
Yeah, CDBaby makes sense… I went with Distrokid because I make a lot of songs, but in the end I only publish a minority of them so maybe CDBaby wouldn’t been better for me. I never made enough money to worry about royalties (I just checked and I made $24 overall from Distrokid), but to be fair I don’t market my albums other than letting friends now.
One thing I did though was sign up for USISRC.org, so I could get UPC/EAN numbers for my songs. It’s a one time fee to get as many numbers as you need.
That’s good to know. Seems required for Distrokid but not CDBaby. Have you used BeatStars at all?
I didn’t need it for Distrokid, I just thought it would be cool to be able to assign the numbers to my songs at will. 😝 I haven’t heard of BeatStars, it looks interesting!
Hahahah…that is pretty rad. I looked through some of the guides and saw you’re limited to 100,000 a year. Hope that’s enough :D.
I suppose if someone was just cranking out generative tunes that wouldn’t be too hard.
Ha, for sure, my record is 100 songs in a year, so I have plenty of numbers to spare. 😝