Getting your band's music onto iTunes - Ditto/Tunecore etc
Howdy, I'm new on here so I apologise if this topic has been covered on another thread.
My band recently released a download only single in late December via Ditto Music, who claim to be able to get your music up on the iTunes store within 24 hours of submitting it (something that the Tunecore guy has publicly frowned at). Our single finally appeared on iTunes 12 days later than the planned release date. So we had a launch gig for a single nobody could buy, we were given some excellent regional press that same week with the planned release date mentioned, basically the whole process was a farce and I worry we might look like idiots as a result. But I digress.
Though late December is hardly a peak time for new releases, we submitted the track early. They didn't respond to emails and were impossible to get on the phone, and had an answerphone that went dead after about 5 seconds. Not good form, I'm sure you'll agree.
So what I want to know is this: how have you found the process of getting your stuff live? Have you used Ditto or Tunecore or another provider? Was it a good experience or a bad one? I'd like to hear some thoughts/anecdotes/rants. Thanks guys.
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Oh my god.
About 3 years ago, Shadyadie posted a now-legendary thread about Ditto entitled 'is this a great big pile of shit?'
Despite it being the greatest thing to ever happen to the Music board, it mysteriously disappeared. Basically, people from Ditto signed up pretending to be other people, and made themselves look like total cocksplats. It was incredible.
Wow - my first reply!
Cheers for that!
My first thought is 'phew, glad we're probably not alone here' closely followed by 'why the crap haven't they got their act together after 3 fuckin years?'
So is the same thing desined to happen here? Are the Ditto ninjas coming? Cos I'm ready for them.
*destined
;)
i had to remove it due to legal reasons
Makes sense.
Excellent thread, though. It was probably the best JAGging seen on here.
that's also very funny
given some of the lies they were spouting at the time.
Hello.
I do some freelance development work for them from time to time so this may be considered JAG-tastic (and I certainly don't want to come across as a dicksplat like the Ditto lot in the legendary thread that Mozalini mentions), but AWAL get on with what they do quietly and efficiently: http://www.awal.com
They take a 15% sales commission but there's no fees to get your music up or assign UPC/ISRC codes or owt. And for those into 80s northern post-punk, one of the directors was the bassist in The Comsat Angels, so their business ethos is set up from a band's point of view.
</JAG>
No worries
I'd like to get some recommendations for the future, I'll mention it to the band. Cheers
I'm not in a band, so I don't have first-hand experience,
but I've heard good things about songcastmusic.com. It's £12 initial fee + £3/month storage, I think, and they put your stuff on iTunes, Amazon, emusic, Napster, Yahoo, etc. Which sounds pretty good to me. Cheaper than getting a disc-run done, for example. Although I don't want to sound like I'm plugging them, so I repeat I have no actual experience.
That ditto thread was immense. Hopefully this will cause it to be bumped... It wasn't the barcode thread though, was it?
We didn't do a physical disc run
Which is why this was so embarrassing! Cheers for the suggestion.
the shadyadie ditto thread = the barcode thread
it was, sadly, deleted at some point
did people notice these were deleted or are you noticing now? just curious as i thought, seeing as it was so old, it wasn't worth getting into a legal battle over. am sure folks can find it via google cache if they really want to read it.
Its disappearance has been remarked on before
Every so often there's a reference to it on the boards.
I missed out on the Ditto thread
I used them for the three singles my label put out last year - they were very efficient on the first two, but the third one was a day late on iTunes and two weeks late everywhere else.
In fairness, they were good at keeping me updated on the delays by e-mail, and paid the (extremely minimal) royalties on time.
Was this before or after
They started promising a 24 hour turnaround? Cos 5 weeks seems to be the standard everywhere else.
Before
I can't remember exactly, but we gave them the masters 4-5 weeks upfront each time.
why not just make it available, direct-to-fan via bandcamp and worry about the major stores later?
http://www.bandcamp.com
posted a link to this earlier in the week http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/01/bandcamp-is-a-diy-site-for-musicians.html
Yes
We do have a bandcamp now - we just assumed the iTunes release would be on time, we had no reason to suspect otherwise. But we'll be using our bandcamp a lot more from now on I think.
For the sake of fairness
We used ditto for our previous single release and it was fine, but that was before this 24 hour iTunes thingy, so we submitted everything 5 weeks before release date and appeared
we have used EmuBands
for a couple of our releases, they were really friendly and always replied to emails pretty quickly
http://www.emubands.com/
I think you can get discounts if you have a hunt about online
May have been down to the xmas holidays
Not really defending Ditto here (have no reason to) as they should have told you about this but we deliver direct to iTunes for most of our stuff and they always close down for a week at xmas - this year it was 23rd-28th Dec so you can't release between those dates. An aggregator I also use told everyone:
"Please note that products with a release date between 17.12.2010 and 07.01.2011 must be delivered to iTunes by December 9th at the latest! iTunes annual content freeze starts the day after. The technical staff won‘t resume work before January 4th 2011."
I imagine this may have been your problem, plus they will have had a lot of releases in Dec before the holiday so it takes longer to get stuff up.
Regarding alternatives, I haven't used any personally but have heard postive things about AWAL and Tunecore.
Thanks
This is helpful, in a kind of it-would-have-been-more-helpful-earlier kind of way! If we'd known this we probably would have chosen a different release date. The dates don't tally up though - so something else is afoot/amiss. I guess we were inadvertantly caught up in general seasonal slowdown. But that is only a guess.
TuneCore are fine, or have been for me
In fact when DittoMusic started making their 24 hour claim, the head of TuneCore was quite critical of them, saying that it does *usually* take 24 hours but it was irresponsible to guarantee it because it sometimes took a week or so. I've never actually used Ditto though.
Having said that there are good reasons why you might prefer the commission approach of AWAL to the flat-fee approach of TuneCore et al.
Ditto Music is complete crap if not straightforward scam
Hello,
I wanted to share with you my terrible experience with the digital music distributor company called Ditto Music and to advise you to avoid them at all costs.
I’m a producer and guitar player operating under the moniker Zero Slum (http://www.zeroslum.com). After I worked hard for an year and a half on my full-length album, I wanted to distribute it properly to online retailers and I searched for an online retailer. I found Ditto Music to be offering a service at competitive price, and I decided to go with them, even though their website looked a bit sketchy and cheap.
So I paid about 130 pounds to have my album distributed on iTunes and a long list of other online retailers. Ditto’s website says that music uploaded to them should be on iTunes within a couple of days and within 5 weeks to any other online store.
After two months, my music hasn’t appeared neither on iTunes nor on any other online store. I have been calling them more than ten times during this whole period to ask what is going on, and they have always said they are “working on it”. I have been very cooperative when talking to their customer service people and I told them that I can upload again any of my files if needed, that I can send them links to download. The fact is that their system is kind of slow and crap and you can’t be sure what has worked and what not. All I received from them as feedback was that they are going to send me an e-mail with the status of my release. I did not receive any e-mails from them all this time. So I gave up after all that waiting and removed my release from their system and asked them to return me my money, but I haven’t seen any of it.
So don’t be lured by the cheap prices they are offering – the fact is that they are crap and I don’t believe that they are a legitimate business.
I will go on to upload my music on iTunes via some of the more established companies like Tunecore or CDBaby.
I have no affiliation whatsoever with any competing firms, I’m just a musician that wants to put his music out, get heard, possibly earn some income. I have no interest in dissing Ditto Music; and I barely have the time, but I’m going to post this as much as I can so that other fellow musicians are warned. I have discussed with others my experience and I have heard that other people were treated quite miserably, but apparently no one took the time to write about it and post online – at least I could not find any negative reports about them.
So hopefully, this message will be of use to anyone making a search about Ditto Music and deliberating whether or not to use their services. Ditto Music has not shown in any way to me that they are not the next online scam.
Best Distribution
Us musicians getting shafted by labels, distributors, bookers, etc, etc, has become too darn common. Our band dealt with the same thing with another UK based company. To the point where we just decided to release material on our end. We finally were referred to MondoTunes (www.mondotunes.com). The best move we've ever made. These guys are all really cool musicians and are affiliated with Interscope Records. They use the same distribution as UMG digital and so forth. They're straight forward and tell you exactly how it is. They reach 30 times more stores then the rest of the posers. We highly recommend it to all musicians! We all work hard on our music, we need to make sure distributors and other service companies do the same.