How To Sell Your Music On iTunes Using Tunecore

Posted in General. Written by Eric Hebert on April 26th, 2007

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Okay, so you’ve gotten the band together, have some original music written and recorded, and are ready to start selling your music. Now, you can obviously go through with the traditional methods of finding a CD manufacturing company, getting them printed and labeled and packaged and shipped and distributed -uhh! That’s gonna take a lot of time and even more money.

The way to do it in the 21st century is to go digital! That means getting your music listed on iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic, and any other music service you can get your hands on.

Believe it or not, it’s not as easy as picking up the phone and making a phone call. Most of these services require you to fill a boatload of paperwork out in order to get your music listed with their service. Now, your a musician and need to focus on your music, not the paperwork. That’s where our friends at Tunecore come into play.

Tunecore

Tunecore takes the workload out of getting your music into the hottest online music portals out there. With Tunecore, you can get your music on each of these popular music selling websites, without the hassle of all the paperwork.

iTunes US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Japan
Rhapsody
Napster
eMusic
Music Net
Sony Connect

If you’ve never heard of Musicnet, they distribute music to these other music services:

Y!Music
Urge
Virgin Digital
Music Gremlin
Ctrax
iMesh

Here’s a quick rundown of how the service works:

1. Sign Up for a free account

2. After approval, you can begin to add an album under “My Discography”.

3. Enter your Band’s name and Album details.

4. Determine if the album has more than one artist or band.

5. Let Tuncore know if the album contains explicit lyrics.

6. Choose two categories that your music will fit into.

7. Pick which music stores you want to sell your music.

8. Add additional information, such as liner notes, a UPC code (Tunecore will handle this if you do not already have one!), or the date you want your music to go live.
* It will take 6-8 weeks for Tuncore to get your songs online

9. Choose your artwork (600×600).

10. Add track/song information, including ISRC codes, which Tunecore can provide.

11. Confirm and Upload music!

Pretty simple process to get your music out there! Tuncore has also partnered with traditional CD manufacturers, t-shirt companies, and offers other services to get your music out there.

So how much does it cost to do all this?

Okay, so you want to use their basic service to get your songs on iTunes.

$.99 Per song (one time charge)
$.99 Per album (one time charge)
$9.98 Per album, per year

You keep all your rights.
You own your recordings.
You get all the money.
No contracts.

A dream come true to musicians out there. Stay tuned as I dig deeper into Tunecore as I use it to promote my own band in the near future.

Did I mention my band? Stay tuned for more info on that exciting project as well…