DistroKid Added Beats Music & More Single Fee Distro Outlets, But Who Knew?
DistroKid is has gotten a lot of attention for their limited, low cost digital music distribution service. At some point they added multiple additional services. Perhaps these are the ones marked "beta": Beats Music, Rdio, Deezer though I can only verify that Beats Music was added in January. Oddly enough, some of the pople that would normally cover such news as a matter of course found out long after the fact. DistroKid may be doing just fine but this is one of those reminders that a company blog, for example, is a great way to keep people posted and set the ground for more coverage.
Jesse Cannon at Musformation posted this week about DistroKid's new outlets and that's the sort of thing he tends to pay close attention to.
"A few days back I was looking at Distrokid‘s website and had noticed they now had a few new sites they would aggregate to in beta and figured I would pass along the word since I think they offer a great service."
It appears that Beats Music, Rdio and Deezer are the new services marked beta on DistroKid's homepage. Other than a tweet from January about Beats Music being added and a couple of passing mentions buried in blog posts from February, I'm not seeing much about this.
And if you look at that tweet you see a lot of people asking questions that aren't answered.
I'm not going to give Philip Kaplan, DistroKid founder, a hard time about this. My understanding is that he does this stuff by himself so that makes it hard to do things like write blog posts and respond to customers questions.
And maybe providing a stripped down service in this manner is exactly what people want. Especially if other users are answering their questions.
But note that when there's a gap in public communication and in customer service communication, that's what opens things up for competitors.
However, in DistroKid's favor, the only real criticisms I've seen have been in Hypebot's comments.
And the problem there is that the same people come on, complain in the same ways and actually end up undermining the brands of their own companies.
Instead of doing something obvious like contacting me, for example, to ask if I'd like more information about what is needed beyond a bare bones service, they just get grouchy in the comments and make themselves look like the type of people I don't want to talk to. And so I haven't reached out on an important topic.
That's too bad because artists need distro and Hypebot wants to help them just as do people like Jesse Cannon. Yes, it is our business but, for my part, I'm also writing about DIY music because I want to see people empowered to take charge of their own lives.
However I'm faced with a situation in which none of the leading distributors strike me as particularly communicative or worth interviewing. And I bet that's not true but given poor communication on the part of business people combined with mixed response from artists with the trolls most likely to speak, there's a big disencentive for me to do more.
And even that I say in a helpful spirit though I have difficulty imagining anyone involved seeing it that way.
More:
- Music Tech Founders On Creating A Constant Flow Of Music
- Tunecore Founders Link Startup Audiam To DistroKid To Offer Cheaper Music Distribution
- DistroKid Launches Much Cheaper TuneCore Alternative
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) posts music crowdfunding news @CrowdfundingM. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
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