Short version:

I made something called DistroKid and made it big!

Complex version:

DistroKid If you haven’t heard of us, DistroKid is a music distribution service.

That is, we help musicians and record labels sell music on online stores and streaming services (iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, Amazon, etc.).

Then we charge the user a fee, and then we distribute the revenue in proportion to the artist, or the partner designated by the artist.

When I first came up with the idea, there were already two companies doing similar things, TuneCore and CD Baby. Both companies are big, but very old. I have great respect for them; They are pioneers in this field. But I knew I could challenge them with today’s technology:

The price is lower: musicians can upload unlimited music for $19.99 per year and keep 100% of the royalties. Our competitors charge for each album and take a cut of royalties.

More features: song license procedures, automatic payments, YouTube ContentID matching, two-step verification, and more.

Getting into an online store is faster: it usually takes only two hours.

I thought it would take a month or two to build DistroKid, after all, just plug in some apis and upload some folders, right?

But I was wrong.

It took me a year, the longest project I’ve ever worked on. If I had known it would take so long, I would never have done it. DistroKid launched in 2013.

This industry is very competitive. We have dozens of competitors. But DistroKid is doing well. This was the first product I built on my own.

I found that in this crowded industry, very few users could find us. Instead of saying “Thanks for signing up,” our sign-up page says “Congratulations!” Because you found us, and you made the right decision.

Here are some numbers:

  • Upload 500 new albums every day
  • 2,100 new songs are uploaded every day
  • 100000 + artist
  • A total of 250,000 albums have been uploaded since the launch
  • It has uploaded 1.2 million songs since its launch
  • Artists paid $2 million this month
  • It has paid $17 million to artists since launching
  • 3 billion online streams

 

Since launching four years ago, DistroKid has become one of the largest music distribution platforms in the world.

Our secret:

We only have three employees. One programmer (myself) and two customer/artist service representatives.

DistroKid has several automated bots running 24/7. These bots are responsible for a lot of things. For example, matching songs and album covers, matching song titles according to online store requirements, providing files and covers for online store, etc.

That’s why we charge less than our competitors and offer more features.

By contrast, our competitors have tens of millions of dollars in financing, huge teams, but their employees are doing things that are more computer friendly. And their large, old code base makes it difficult to add new features. And they take orders from venture capitalists or private-equity firms, ready to look for exits. They are under too much pressure from outside the company to squeeze money out of artists.

DistroKid can maintain a small team and doesn’t seek investors. We need to make the world a better place for musicians, not make money off of them. If we were like our competitors, we’d be making a lot more money than we are.

But we don’t want to do that.

DistroKid’s goal has always been to be more musician friendly, helping them bring their work to online stores and streaming services. By doing so, we can help more musicians get their music out there and make good music heard by more people.

If you use DistroKid, we thank you. If you are our partner, thank you very much. We love you.



The original article:
What I’ve been up to for the past 4 years


Translation: the SDK. Cn


Author: Lu Xingyun


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