Wonder why your music can’t get traction? Distrokid is adding 1M tracks a month

Just in case indie artists weren’t feeling frustrated enough about their inability to gain significant traction with their music, new numbers out from indie music publisher Distrokid are only likely to depress them further.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Indie artists are getting more and more depressed about the fact that the competition is so fierce that it’s difficult for their music to get any traction. This fact was brought home again recently when online distributor Distrokid revealed its upload numbers at around a million tracks per month, which shows just how much competition there really is.

Distrokid, which estimates that it distributes “30-40% of all new music in the world,” says that its catalog holds nearly 20 million tracks from more than 2 million artists. The company said it was uploading around 35,000 tracks per day, or around 24 tracks a minute. Do the math and it works out to around 1 million tracks a month.

However, to put that into perspective, Daniel Eck, CEO of Spotify, related that Spotify now releases around 60,000 tracks per day, or about double the Distrokid amount.

And artists wonder why it’s so difficult to make anything happen online. Regardless of how good you are, your music is drowning in a sea of dreams along with thousands of other artists. Those that have some label muscle behind them definitely have a leg up, even though the DIY ethic (as well as a lot of propaganda) says that you can do everything yourself.

While so much DIY is possible to help along a career, it’s more apparent than ever that having some professional expertise to help you goes a long way.

By the way, Distrokid let this distribution figure slip while announcing a new feature called Splits, which allows collaborators, producers, bandmates, managers and others to get paid directly by the company. Obviously this is much more preferable all the way around from one person receiving the royalties then having to do all the accounting. The problem is that you have to make some money first to be able to share it, something that the massive amount of competition is making it so much more difficult to do these days.