After doing my live extemporaneous piano piece on Facebook Live yesterday, I had people telling me the music had blessed their lives and that they’d love to have it on an album. Today, I decided to search for “how to submit your music to iTunes.” I found a service called TuneCore.com that will take your music files and CD cover and put your album on iTunes, Spotify, Juke, Napster, Amazon (as both a physical CD and download) and lots of other places.
They charge a flat annual fee to distribute your music for the year and then they give you 100% of the proceeds that come after the expenses of having your music on the services.
I’d tried to research how to put music on iTunes in the past, and it seemed like a major hassle. I decided to put my Confidence Rising! Trust Your Heart. Be Yourself. Bless Lives. Meditative Melodies on TuneCore. It’s the music that goes along with my book of the same name.
It was very quick and easy to upload my files. My music is all submitted. TuneCore says it takes a couple days for them to review your album, but it only took about 5 hours. I’ve already gotten a message that it has been approved and distributed to the various outlets. iTunes takes 2-3 days after the music is submitted to them. Other services take anywhere from a few days to up to 3 weeks.
I can’t tell you how excited I was uploading my music to TuneCore knowing people will be able to access it through every major music outlet! It’s not that I anticipate selling a bunch of music. It’s just that it’s downright thrilling to know I have a music album of my very own that people can actually purchase. It’s 100% my own original compositions. I’m totally psyched! This is one of those unspoken dreams come true — something I always wanted to do but never had the guts to write down on paper until January of this year.
Hopefully, the rest of the distribution process goes smoothly. It was so fun updating my Facebook page to say that I’m not only an Author but also a Musician! 🙂
What is one of your unspoken dreams? Have you researched how it might actually be possible? Go for it!
Update: 10/18/2018 – I got a notice from TuneCore that they’d put my album on hold because there were words on my CD cover art that didn’t match the title of the album I gave them. I had “Meditative Melodies” on my album cover, but didn’t give that as the name of the album. I had been debating on whether to do that. So they put my album distribution on hold until I fixed it. Instead of taking Meditative Melodies off the cover, I added it to the title and responded to their email. Hopefully they’ll accept that and activate my title swiftly. So something to remember… make sure you don’t add a bit of text to the image that isn’t part of the title and the artist name(s) you gave them.
Update: 10/25/2018 – By Sunday, 10/21/2018 my music was officially up on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, and GooglePlay. By Monday 10/22/2018, I noticed my music was up on Amazon in a digital form. I still don’t see it as a CD. I noticed TuneCore placed videos of each of my songs on YouTube by 10/24. If you pay a one-time fee of $10 they will profit share the ad-money from your songs on Youtube with you.
TuneCore Social Service Not Recommended – I do NOT recommend getting TuneCore’s $7.99/month social media service for promoting and tracking sales of your music on social media. I never could connect their service to Facebook. The app is buggy as well as the computer version. From what I saw of the service it looked very limited, but again, since I couldn’t connect to anything more than Twitter, it was of no use to me. I reported the problem, but after 2-3 days of no follow through from their tech support, I asked for a refund and to cancel the service. They said they would cancel my autobill but could not issue a refund. Finally, someone asked about the trouble I was having, but I still have not gotten any response to my submission of explanation and screen shots. I tried to use the service the first day I signed up with TuneCore, wrestled with it for several hours over a couple days. The situation has still not been addressed/resolved as of 10/25/2018.
