 As 2022 draws to an end and you're looking for doable New Year's resolutions, I have one for you. Release your music. Yes it's time to stop procrastinating and set aside those excuses as we look at three reasons you should release your music in 2023. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well and I also hope you have an amazing 2023. Now whilst this video is sponsored by DistroKid they didn't actually ask me to make it. I'm making this video because I truly believe that releasing your music is a transformational experience and I also want to bust a couple of myths which may be holding you back. Now rather than wait till the end of the video for my number one reason let's talk about it right away. Let me know in the comments down below if you've got projects on your computer which have been there for months or even years. Let's not talk about the ones that have been there for decades. Shame on you. I have been guilty of this myself and I can tell you that once you bust through this barrier that you're currently facing it's going to be extremely liberating for you but let's look at what some of those so-called barriers are. The mix is going to be better after you get that new microphone and re-record those vocals or when you get those new monitor speakers everything's going to be easier to mix and it's going to sound brilliant or if you just have time to tweak it a little more then you're going to make a much much better mix. You're kidding yourself. Honestly we are all at the stage we're at at the moment. We will always regret our mixes in the future. I think John Lennon even mentioned to George Martin once that if he had the opportunity he would he would have gone back and re-recorded the whole Beatles back catalog. So we all can feel like this even geniuses. Okay so look these things are not going to make your mixes much better. You are scared at the moment that people are not going to like your work so you just want to tweak it and tweak it and tweak it until everyone thinks it's brilliant. Look you're just not going to satisfy all people anyway even if you have a brilliant mix some people just aren't going to dig your style of music. So look don't be so concerned about your music being brilliant enough to release but more importantly what's going to happen is is that once you have released that music it's going to be done. There's nothing else you can do about it and now you can free yourself up to create your next pieces of music and those pieces of music are going to be based on your experience and your learning. Okay you're always going to be improving so please just stop this it's time to release your music now. So the other thing that may be holding you back is you're not sure how expensive it's going to be and you're not sure if there's hidden extras which these different services are not telling you about. Well I can't really speak for all of the services because I exclusively do use DistroKid to release my music so I can talk about them and I can be honest with you and say for $19.99 if you're releasing your original music you can release an unlimited number of songs per year for that to all of the major streaming services. We're talking about Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, TikTok all of these kind of places there's a long list. Now there is no hidden extras there's some optional extras which I'll talk about but as I say if they are your original work then you can just release hundreds of them if you want for no extra charge. Now the other thing you may be thinking of is does DistroKid take a slice out of my royalty? So let's dive into this a little bit because I want to be really clear about this. So first of all you will get royalties from places like Spotify, iTunes, Amazon all of those places they get paid to DistroKid okay and DistroKid pays those to you. Now they have an obligation to pay any taxes which are due and I think that's going to vary depending on what country you're in and what agreements they have with the US etc okay. So I'm not a tax expert or anything like that I'm not giving you tax advice but just what I can be clear about is DistroKid themselves don't take any of your royalties but they are obliged to pay some of those taxes for you. Now think about that it's kind of a good thing because it means you're not going to get into trouble with your taxes that's going to be done for you. So look that's clearly what happens there just so you're aware there's no like hidden stuff in there they're not going to start charging you you know a dollar per song whatever you know they're not going to be doing that sort of stuff. Now there are some extra promotional things I think you can pay you'll see that at the bottom of the form when you submit a song but the main thing I want to let you know about which is an additional charge is if you're releasing cover songs okay. So if you're releasing other people's music something you haven't written by yourself then you do have to pay a fee for that. Now the last time I did it and I think it's still the same it was one dollar per song per year so I did I don't know like I think I did seven cover songs at some point as like a cover album and it cost me seven dollars for the years. So look you have to pay that every single year for while that song is released okay so just see where on that. I think that's just incredibly cheap considering you are using someone else's work. Now the other thing I just want to mention this is not to do with cost but the other thing I want to mention about this is in terms of getting permission for you to release that music DistroKid does all of that for you okay. So you're not going to be going out there and sort of contacting record companies or publishers or artists to ask for permission to use their work DistroKid takes care of that for you so that's just one place where if you're intending to do that it'll be the $19.99 per year plus the dollar but as I say just to reiterate if it's all of your own material that's it $19.99 per year. Now if you do follow the VIP link which is in the description down below it'll be less than that even because you're going to get 7% off right away okay. Now that does mean that I will get a small cut from that but no extra cost to you so I think that works out that you're going to get it for I think $18.59 per year so well worth it shouldn't break the bank and if cost is the thing that's been making you hold off then I hope I've set your mind at rest okay. I get it if you've never released music before you're probably thinking that getting your music to Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, TikTok etc is going to be really complex and time-consuming well I'm here to put your mind at rest because when you release your music through a distribution service like DistroKid that's what they do they distribute it for you they create those accounts which are needed for all of those platforms and they get the music to those platforms. Now there's just going to be two things that you really need to release that music one is the music itself and that's going to be in the in the form of an audio file which you've exported from your door and secondly you're going to need some artwork now this is another thing I reckon a lot of you could procrastinate over yeah you think oh I need to get an artist or a photographer it needs to be fantastic artwork just stop that okay that's another thing which is holding you back unnecessarily here's my opinion it's not like the old days when people used to go to a record store on a Saturday and go through all the album covers and they'd be drawn in by some incredible artwork I don't really think that that applies so much anymore I'm not saying you should have terrible artwork but the way people are going to discover your music is really different these days there's some great sites like Canva etc where you can easily just create some album art in just a few minutes if you're not artistically inclined in that way okay so please don't let that stop you so it's an easy process once you have those two things there's just a form on distro kid it's one of those really easy to fill out forms because if you fill anything out which is kind of wrong they'll let you know right away they're not gonna let you fill things out wrongly is wrongly a word let me know in the comments down below anyway incorrectly it's probably a better word so you know they're going to they're going to guide you through that form it takes no time at all honestly once you get into the swing of it it just takes a few minutes to actually release your music now you're probably thinking well how long does it take before my music is in those stores so let me be clear on this this is my experience I don't know what guarantees there are but in my experience with the major platforms like Spotify your music is usually there within a couple of days okay it's pretty quick sometimes over the course of a week or two it starts to filter out to some of the other services okay so if you want to actually have your release available by a specific date if you want to announce it to people then it's worth just planning a little bit in advance to make sure it is going to be in those stores ready for your release date now one thing I do want to mention though I talked about this earlier if you're releasing cover songs like I said earlier Distro Kid do get hold of all the permissions you need and everything to do that for you however that does take a little bit of time okay so my personal experience again has been when there's cover songs involved it's taken between sort of a week to two weeks before they're available in stores I just want you to be realistic about that but the process itself look if you're capable of opening up a Facebook account or a YouTube account then honestly you're capable of releasing music through Distro Kid now one of the things which is really useful in order to help you to break through this barrier which is stopping you from releasing your music is to announce publicly that you are going to finish your album EP or single and release it this year so I'm going to help you out by letting you do that in the comments down below but I don't want you to just announce that you're going to make a release I want you to tell me about that music what you've got planned some of the background and then once you actually do release it come back here and leave a link to that music I am perfectly happy to have links to your music in the comments down below I love sharing my viewers music when I get the opportunity so please take advantage of that and do that now one of the things you're going to realize once you start using Distro Kid and don't forget to follow that link down below is that they've kind of thought of everything in terms of you releasing your music for example if you're in a band or some kind of group with many people where you're going to have to split the revenue between different people you can do that from within Distro Kid that automatically make payments to various different people depending on how you have that set up you can even do something called recruitment that's where a person is entitled to a certain amount of money to pay back for services they've provided or have you and then once that's paid back then that split changes so all of these kinds of things have been thought of if you want to find out a little bit more about that then just take a look at this video right here I made a video about splits and recoupments thank you so much for watching today and I'll see you in the next video