Get Your Music on iTunes

Ever have the dream of becoming a musician? Ever have the dream of getting your music on the iTunes store? I have had both of those dreams. I used to want to become a musician, but then I discovered that I wanted to become a music teacher instead. However, one dream didn’t change, that was getting my music onto the iTunes store. I’m going to tell you how I got my album onto the iTunes store. It cost me less than $100, and it took less than a month.

The first step, is making your album. I can’t really help you with that part, as it’s your music. As long as you’ve made at least one song, you can get it onto the iTunes store, you can have over 20 if you want. Once you’ve made your song(s), you’re ready to look into digital music distribution.

Digital music distribution is when you pay a company to distribute your music digitally across stores such as iTunes and AmazonMP3. First thing they do is charge you an album setup fee (for converting your songs to the audio formats that each store requires and distributing your music to each online store) which usually costs between $10-20, and they also charge you a monthly or yearly subscription (for processing your royalties from the online store to you) which costs roughly $6 per month.

After uploading your song(s), album name, album info, and cover art, it usually takes 4-6 weeks for your album to appear on online stores, such as iTunes and AmazonMP3. For me, my album was on AmazonMP3 in maybe 3 weeks, and in 4-5 weeks it was on iTunes. It’s a simple and relatively fast process.

Your music is then for sale. As far as royalties go, I know iTunes gives you 70% of sales, and I’m sure AmazonMP3 is roughly the same. The price of each song is usually $0.99 on iTunes, and $0.89 on AmazonMP3. You collect the royalties once per month, with a delay of two months. This means if my album was released in June, I wont see my sales or royalties until August. And any sales from July wont be seen until September, and so on.

If you’re an Indie artist, I highly recommend digital music distribution. If you sell one album each month, that should pay for all the costs, so if you sell at least 2 a month, you’re already making profit. If you’re wondering how you get the money, I know you can withdraw it into a PayPal account, which can easily be linked to your bank account. The online music distributor that I dealt with was SongCast Music, but I do know there are others out there, as this is increasingly becoming a more and more popular way of selling your music.

So give SongCast music a search, or try searching for “online music distribution” to try to find other distributors. If you have any questions or comment, please feel free to add them. Thanks for your interest in my article, I wish you the best with your music.