Publishing and Selling Music Online

It’s never been easier to sell music and collect royalties. Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) help you collect royalties from music performances. Digital distribution companies help you sell and stream your music online. In a few minutes, you can release your music online to the world and collect royalty revenues. In the upcoming pages, you’ll learn how.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the following topics:

• Registering your music with PROs to collect royalties
• Tagging your music in preparation for distribution
• Selling music on online stores and streaming services using digital distribution companies
• Claiming revenue from songs on YouTube using AdRev

Registering your music

Before uploading your songs and selling them online, you should first register your music with a collection society. Registering your music is how you get paid royalties.

There are different types of royalties that you can collect. How these royalties get retrieved by PROs can be very complex and goes beyond the scope of this book. However, it’s straightforward to collect royalties. To ensure you’re fully covered for global royalty collection, you should register your music on four platforms that we will introduce you to in this chapter. If you register with all four of these, you should be able to fully collect royalties:

• Register your music as a songwriter with a collection society/PRO (for example, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), or The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) if you’re in the US).
• Register your music on SoundExchange to collect digital royalties such as those on Pandora, SiriusXM...

Tagging your music in preparation for distribution

Before uploading your music online, you should correctly tag it. What’s a tag? If you navigate to a song on your computer or phone, you’ll see a list of information about the song, such as the name, track number, album, artist, and so on. That information is imprinted upon the file. These are tags, also known as metadata. In the following screenshot, you can see tag information on songs:

Figure 14.1 – Song tags

You can add custom tags to your songs. The easiest way to do so is with tagging software. I recommend the free tag editor Mp3tag for your songs, which is available at www.mp3tag.de/en.

When you open up Mp3tag, you’ll see a screen like the following:

Figure 14.2 – Mp3tag

Mp3tag allows you to add tags for your songs such as Title, Artist, Album, and a cover image. The cover image should be square. The image you use for the cover should be a small file size. The...

Selling music on online stores and streaming services

Let’s talk about selling your music. To sell your music, you have two main options: get signed by a major label/publisher or use a digital distribution company. Labels and publishers each have their own unique way of operating, so I can’t speak for them. One way to get in contact with a label is through LabelRadar.

Get signed to labels using LabelRadar

If you’re interested in getting your songs signed by a label, one way to get the attention of labels is to use the song submission service LabelRadar.

Figure 14.3 – Labelradar.com

LabelRadar is an online service that allows you to upload and submit your songs. Once you’ve created an account, you can upload a song and submit it to labels or music promoters. The site gives you credits every month allowing you to submit songs to labels and promoters. If you need more credits than what are provided for free, then you can pay to...

Claiming revenue from songs on YouTube using AdRev

When someone plays a video on YouTube that uses your song without obtaining permission, you can claim revenue from the video. You don’t have to do any of the work yourself. YouTube algorithms behind the scenes detect when your song is playing in a video and mark the video as using your song. Any ad revenue the video was generating then gets collected for you. If you’re looking for more information about this, YouTube uses the terminology ContentID to refer to claiming revenue from videos.

ContentID monetizing is done using a service called AdRev. It’s the official service for registering music on YouTube. Some digital distribution companies may include using YouTube AdRev in their features, but if not, you can do this yourself for free.

If you signed up for Songtrust, it can claim revenue for you and you don’t have to register your music on AdRev.

AdRev is available at https://adrev...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about publishing and selling music online. You learned how to register your music to collect royalties from live performances. You learned how to tag music to prepare it for distribution. You learned how to sell your music on online stores and streaming services. Finally, you learned how to claim revenue from YouTube videos using your music.

Share your music

If you’d like to share your music with other readers and students and ask for feedback, feel free to post your music in the following Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/musicproducerandcomposercommunity.

Conclusion

Our book has come to an end… but your music journey has just begun. You can now produce songs like an FL Studio pro and kick off your music career.

I hope you had a fascinating time learning about music production throughout this book. You’re now up to date with the latest and greatest cutting-edge tools on the market. A few decades ago, people couldn’t even imagine doing what you’re now capable of.

A few final thoughts:

Music is meant to be shared. You can take influences from lots of sources and combine them to make something original. If you need ideas, try combining genres.

When you make something, be proud of it. Having a little ego at stake makes you strive to be better. Make something that you care about.

If your music isn’t connecting, try changing the context the music is delivered in. For example, consider experimenting with different names and visuals. Often the presentation of your music shapes how it gets...

More from the author

Feel free to get in touch and check out the rest of my courses and products:

• Website: https://www.chestersky.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/realchestersky
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamchestersky
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchestersky

Courses I offer:

• Music production: https://www.chestersky.com/music-producer-masterclass/
• Soundtrack composing: https://www.chestersky.com/soundtrack-composer-masterclass/
• Generating art using artificial intelligence: https://www.chestersky.com/stable-diffusion-masterclass/

If you liked this book, you’ll like my book Music for Film and Game Soundtracks with FL Studio: https://www.amazon.com/dp/180323329X.

Figure 14.9 – Music for Film and Game Soundtracks with FL Studio

In the book, you’ll learn the business of composing and how to communicate, score, market your services, land gigs, and deliver music projects...

Further reading

If you want to go further and learn more about the business side of a music career, I highly recommend the book How to Make It in the New Music Business: Practical Tips on Building a Loyal Following and Making a Living as a Musician, by Ari Herstand (ISBN-10: 1631491504). This book is hands down the best book I’ve read on the music business. I cannot recommend it enough.

You may be wondering, how exactly do royalties get collected and what share of royalties do you get? On the surface, this sounds like a simple question. It turns out the legal details are really complex. If you want to learn how royalties are collected, read the book All You Need to Know about the Music Business, by Donald Passman (ISBN-10: 1501122185).