About The Money: Music Distribution As An Investment

Imagine you’re a new, independent artist looking to test the waters of the business they call music. You have a soul-sucking day job, but hey, gotta pay the rent, right? Soon you’d love to quit and make music full time, but first you need to get some momentum going. You bedroom-produced a handful of songs and you’re ready to get streamed. Got $50 to drop on digital distribution for those five songs? “Ayyyyyy, I haven’t even bought a nice microphone yet!”

Do you really want to begin your career hundreds of dollars in the hole?

You can’t catch your dreams if you go broke trying. That’s why we’re dethroning The Old Way with Select Distribution, the smart, budget-friendly way to get your music on the biggest streaming platforms in the world. The Old Way requires you to spend at least $10 per song and $50 per album to get on “hundreds” of streaming sites, apps, and stores. That’s a fine offer for the more established artist with thousands of fans. That guy is confident he’ll make his money back in a few months. But the up-and-comer, well, she needs to be a bit more choosy with her money. Want to do some quick math?

• Let’s take an average per-stream payout from the top streaming services: You make $0.00586 per song stream.
• If you distribute The Old Way, you’re paying $10 per song, per year
• To just break even, you’ll need 1,706 song plays

Now, with Select Distribution, you’re only paying $1 per song, per year. That means you’ll only need 170 streams to break even for the entire year. But wait, there’s more!!!!! Actually, there’s less, and that’s a good thing. You see, The Old Way will claim the extra $9 is worth it because your song will be on every app in the known universe. “Wow! I’m gonna be huge in Estonia!”

Is it actually worth it??

Math time!

• Close to 75% of global streams come from the top 3 streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Amazon)
• The top 6 streaming platforms account for somewhere around 95% of streaming revenue (Spotify, Apple, Google, YouTube, Deezer, Rhapsody)

I ask you, not-yet-rich independent artist, is the least popular 5% of streaming services worth $9 a year to you? Why pay a premium to be on unknown platforms when all you want is the very best for your music?

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.” – Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media

It’s time to get the most out of every single dollar spent on your music. Select Distribution is musician designed and accountant approved. Go ahead and start smart.