FindYourFans

The first step in blowing up Caleb Brumbelow’s online music career will be to get his album into all the top digital retailers. For a discussion about why I chose TuneCore, please see Choosing a Digital Distributor.

I’ve found that just about everything I try to accomplish online is harder and takes longer than it should (or than I want it to). So the goal will be to streamline the TuneCore process, and document the best, fastest, most efficient way to setup a new account and upload an album. For Caleb’s 16 track album, I spent about 1 hour gathering materials, setting up accounts, and adding album data. Then the uploads took about 12 hours (due to my slow Windstream account, and large wavefiles)

Materials and info to gather before you start:

Materials/info About you:

1. Your first and last name
2. Band/Artist Name
3. Record Label name (optional)
4. email
5. Phone Number
6. Country
7. Zip Code
8. How Did you hear about us
9. A new Password

Materials/info about your music:

1. Album Title
2. Artist Name
3. Whether or not this is a compilation album
4. 2 Genres that identify your music
5. Which stores you want to include your music in (I always select all stores)
6. Confirm your rights to distribute the music
7. Original release date of the music
8. Label name
9. UPC Code (if you have a physical CD, make sure to use the UPC of the CD, if you don’t have a UPC, TuneCore will generate one for your album)
10. Recording Location
11. Album artwork image (Typically this is the same artwork as the front of your CD. TuneCore accepts .jpg, .gif, or .png. The image must be a perfect square and greater than 600×600 pixels. It must be in RGB Color mode, and have a resolution of at least 72 dpi. The artwork needs to have the artist name and album name on the image.)
12. Audio files for each track. TuneCore recommends uploading wave files. Here is what they say: “We have found .wav files to be the most reliable and therefore recommend them first and foremost. Remember that they must be set at a 44.1 khz sample rate, 16 bit sample size and the channel set to stereo. Not sure how to convert your music? – Check out our tutorial.”

Step 1: Setup a new account

1. Go here
2. Click on “sign up for a free account”
3. Fill in the information
4. Continue to the next page
5. Check your email to verify your account, click on the verification link in the email.

Step 2: Add an Album

1. Click on “Add Album” after verifying your email address above.
2. Enter the information about your album
3. Choose your Amazon MP3 pricing (I always choose Front Line pricing – the highest – I don’t think a difference of a few dollars for a digital album influences a purchaser’s buying decision much at this time). Plus if people want the best deal, they can always buy directly from Caleb’s website here.
4. Click save info
5. Choose your Amie street pricing (this is a very interesting new digital store. Check it out here. The price of your music is dependent on it’s popularity. The more popular your music, the higher the price, the less popular, the lower the price. A very cool experiment. With great promotional opportunity. I always choose Front Line Pricing here as well.)
6. Add your album artwork by clicking on the album image. Click browse, and select the image file from your computer. Hit Upload.
7. After the artwork appears at the top of the page and looks ok, hit return.
8. Click on “Add Your Tracks” You can now build up your album track list by entering a song title, then clicking “add this track.” I like to do a rough, quick data entry of all tracks, then go back and double check for errors slowly and carefully. You’ll kick yourself later if you have any errors in the track names, and it can hurt searches in the digital stores. *Note* TuneCore annoyingly capitalizes every word in your song titles. Maybe they have a good reason for this that I don’t know about. Just be aware that all your song titles will be capitalized. Continue until all tracks are entered.
9. Upload audio files for each track you just entered. Their interface makes it appear as if you can upload multiple tracks at one time, but when I’ve tried this, I’ve had many stalled uploads that required starting from scratch. Better to hang around the computer and do one at a time.

Step 3: Pay for the album

1. First, do a final, careful check of all data, images, and audio files associated with your album.
2. Choose the Paypal account you want to use
3. Click Pay

You’re done! The album is on its way to the stores. In my experience albums have gone live in roughly 3 weeks, slightly better than TuneCore’s estimate. Here is the Green Zone Studio website stats for today – not much change. Today’s activities won’t bear fruit for another 3 weeks or so. Click on the image for a larger view.