As an indie artist, there’s always an extra step between wrapping your new song’s final mix and getting it onto streaming services: distribution. While signed artists have the manpower of a label or management team to work out the logistics, indie artists have to tackle the entire process, from ideation and recording to uploading and eventually promoting, entirely on their own. And before you land on curated playlists, your track has to get on the platform first. Because you aren’t just making a direct upload, it’s important to work with a licensed distributor who can take your audio, plus all of its metadata, and deliver it to the platforms you want it to appear on. But even before you open the DistroKid dashboard, it helps to know what information you'll need. Metadata is everything your distributor passes along to platforms alongside the audio file itself: your artist name exactly as you want it to appear, the track or album title, the release date, the genre, and the ISRC codes; a unique number used to track your release across services for royalty purposes. DistroKid generates those ISRC codes for you automatically during upload.
While your creativity might not have any bounds, your rollout plan needs some if you’re set on releasing on a specific release date. There’s a waiting period between uploading your track to a distribution platform like DistroKid and when it appears on DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music, and those times vary from platform to platform. Spotify usually takes 2-5 days, while Apple Music can sometimes take up to 7 days. On Amazon, YouTube Music, and TikTok, your upload will go live in 1-2 days, while Facebook and Instagram can take 1-2 weeks. Depending on the platforms that are most important for your release, the best course of action is to upload around 2 weeks ahead of schedule. On DistroKid, you can even set up a custom release date during your upload so it works in the background, going through reviews and delivery to each platform, while you work on the rest of your rollout.
An important part of getting that timing just right is knowing what you need ahead of time. Your cover art should be in JPEG format, usually 3000x3000 pixels and free of any explicit content. Your audio files should be WAV at 16-bit or 24-bit, 44.1 kHz, since MP3s aren't accepted by most platforms at the distribution stage. If your song is a cover or contains samples, clearing those beforehand can make or break your rollout. And always make sure your artist name is spelled consistently across every field; a seemingly small discrepancy like that in your metadata can push a release to surface on the wrong artist page rather than the one you've been building.
Once your first release is live, make sure to claim or build your official artist profile. You can register your Spotify for Artists profile directly through DistroKid, where you can add in your bio, photo, and more, while others like Apple Music for Artists are a separate, but still important, process.
That same forward-thinking applies to anyone else who has a stake in the release. When it comes to collaborators, DistroKid makes it easy to set up the right splits right when you upload. You can assign percentages to bandmates, producers, and co-writers so that any earnings go directly to them without you having to manage those splits on your own. While each collaborator needs their own DistroKid account to withdraw their earnings, you have the option to cover the cost for them if they haven’t yet signed up. These splits can always be changed after the upload goes live, but changes will need all collaborators to accept the updated terms.
Most of the friction indie artists face when getting their music onto streaming platforms isn't the process itself; it's just not knowing these steps were there to begin with. But once you do, you can move that finished record off of your hard drive and onto every platform your listeners are already on.
