pud

Wish I had this back when I had 100,000 mailing list.

“Spotify killed revenue flow for anyone outside of the publishers and big artists/ players. Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical distribution”

To the contrary, physical distribution was only available to big artists/players. There was mostly no way for independent artists to get into the record stores.

Streaming (via distributors like DistroKid) made it possible for millions of independent artists to make money from their music.

Source: DistroKid founder here. Hi.

I use, almost exclusively, the open-source version of ColdFusion (called Lucee).

It’s fantastic. And users don’t care what your stack is, a long as it woks.

https://www.lucee.org/

I think most people don’t know this (I didn’t until recently) but you can upload documents to ChatGPT if you’re a paying member: https://chat.openai.com

Choose GPT4 and Code Interpreter (you have to turn it on in your Settings).

Then click the “plus” icon in the chat box.

Don’t upload anything sensitive.

Last week my company launched an iOS app that gets music into Apple Music and Spotify.

Timing unintentional but neato that musicians can now record, distribute & promote all from the device.

(not mentioning name of app cuz promotion, also we're not the only app that does this)

Hope you find my Medium post thought provoking.

Incentives in the music industry are setup such that any company offering promotional services to artists (ad agency, PR firm, promoter, radio promo, marketing department, etc) can quietly go to fiverr.com, buy 100,000 bot streams for $20, then take credit for their client’s rise in popularity—-getting the artist to pay again.

Which, because of how streaming services pay, steals from artists who have real/organic streams.

Aw shucks.

Indeed.

Rock on inopinatus

Fandalism was bootstrapped too (and didn't much affect DistroKid's growth; at least not as much as I would have hoped).

Honestly I don't feel that Fandalism (which is also a one-man biz, too, I spose) added that much to DistroKid's growth. It was mostly some press, some blogs, and a good product. But yes- having a built-in user base with Fandalism didn't hurt.

In hindsight, the other distributors are so clunky and expensive, the bar is super low. Like, if you wanted to compete with Google search it would be hard. But if you wanted to compete with something moderately terrible (with all due respect. i do respect my elder competitors and are thankful for the road they've paved) -- it's much easier to grow.

True. Every Fandalism user does get 1 email, from Fandalism, about DistroKid.

Yes we provide lots of stats to artists. No, we're not planning on a recommendation system (plenty of online radio thingy thangies that are already great!)

There are two DistroKid banners on Fandalism.com.

According to our tracking URL, the main one has been clicked 57,543 times, converting into 207 customers.

How do you handle support?

2 full-time support reps (who are amazing), so we're not really one-man, anymore.

How are you able to find infringing music?

Obviously I can't get into details (lest the baddies figure out how to get in). But we have about 40 different checks to make sure the artist is who they say they are (or manually verify if the check fails) and other things.

I've since discovered the joys of git. Dunno what I was thinking with Dropbox. Did the job I spose.

This pub, this very pub we're sitting in. I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Pubmaker?

Naa!

See the wall over there, that protects our town? I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Wallmaker?

And the bridge, you know, that crosses our river, I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Bridgemaker?

But I tell ya, man! YOU F*CK ONE GOAT!

- the CFML guy

ABP - Always Be Parlaying.

I just made that up. Maybe it'll become a thing.

I agree with you.

But VCs are still investing in startups that do what DistroKid does. Those startups all take a percentage of royalties. So there's probably a sense of "if we release the new Jay-Z record, we'll make that $100MM revenue..."

DistroKid doesn't take any percentage. While we're leaving money on the table, the hacker in me (in the HN sense) kinda feels good that we're f*cking it up for everyone. At least I hope that's what we're doing. \m/

Thanks!

Plans start at $20 per year. $35 gets you more advanced features (ability to set release dates, customize pricing, and more).

We also have optional paid services, such as cover song licensing ($12/year per cover song), YouTube ContentID ($4.95 per single) and a few others.

When an entrepreneur is excited about a thing she's building, the truthful answer to "how many hours per day do you work" is typically "zero or twenty-four, depending on what you consider work."

I agree entrepreneurs can get burnt out, but at that point it's become a "job" and is probably time to move on.

Me too. Hi.

If an entrepreneur is worried about "Work Life Balance", I think he/she is in the wrong business.

Fuckedcompany founder here.

:)

DistroKid founder here.

When people generate fake streams on Spotify (ex: put a 45-second track on repeat all week, volume on zero, for the purpose of fraudulently extracting money from Spotify...), said people are actually stealing from legitimate artists. That's because Spotify pays artists a pro-rata share of Spotify's revenue, based on how many times an artists' music was streamed.

Math: If there's $10 in the pot and my band has 5 (real) streams, and your band has 5 (fake) streams--I'm getting $5 instead of the $10 I deserve.

Spotify's fraud detection system is a very good thing for artists. The system exists solely to protect artist, and has no other obvious upside for Spotify.

Founder of Fuckedcompany here.

Thanks!

I wrote a book, too:

http://www.amazon.com/Fd-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flame...

Founder of TinyLetter here. Cool article! Glad TinyLetter is still going strong & a successful acquisition for MailChimp.

You rang?

You can also just be yourself, all the time, wherever you are.

I worked at Radio Shack.

I was in high school and lived with my folks. I had almost no expenses. It didn't occur to me until much later what a bummer it all was.

- You get paid commission, something like 1% per sale. Commission was pointless because almost everyone already knew what they needed (AA batteries or a headphone adapter...).

- If your commission didn't add up to minimum wage, you got minimum wage. Since it was nearly impossible to sell $800/hr at Radio Shack, everyone made minimum wage.

- There was a computer screen in the back room that showed a leaderboard of on-duty employees, and how much each sold for the day in real-time. So even though everyone was making minimum wage, the employees were pitted against each other. This made every employee your enemy.

- If somehow you made a commission for the day, when the item was ever returned, they dock the commission from your next paycheck. So you ended up making less than minimum wage.

I made an iPhone app that does kind of the same thing, but converts letters to their upside-down unicode equivalent. It's fun for sending upside-down texts.

Free and ad-free, just a fun project:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texting-upside-down-free/id4...