Social media, FaceTime, vlogging, podcasts… we’re so very interconnected with the internet. Musicians are constantly refining how to optimize their individual corners of this vast space and this trend doesn’t seem likely to end anytime soon with the launching of more social and sharing outlets every time you jump online. (Although, who’s to say anyone is every really “offline” anymore)?
One of the unfortunate and ironic downsides to having so many portals for communication is the fact that when a musician finally gets to the matter of their tracks and albums, upload after upload is liable to take up chunks of their time if they have logins for multiple platforms – and these days, it’s practically mandatory to be on at least a handful of them; often starting with either Twitter or Facebook. It’s like a given. (Think of the “R, S, T, L, N and E” ‘freebie’ letters in Wheel of Fortune’s bonus rounds.) Add in the many separate portals where listeners go to actually purchase the music being talked about and the upload/metadata process can feel like it’s starting over yet again.
Have a headache yet?
Thankfully, two popular portals have teamed up to bring a small slice of integration to artists and save time from adjusting text and file types for site after site.
Streaming and sharing service SoundCloud is working with independent music store, CD Baby, to bridge the distribution gaps that artists -especially independent ones- have to deal with amid their pile of online presences. CD Baby’s president, Brian Felsen, explains in a fresh press release posted 10AM PDT today, that…
“With just the click of a button, [CD Baby will] sync the music you sell on [the site] to SoundCloud for free…Within 24 hours, your tracks will be in your SoundCloud account, and you can begin sharing that music using all the awesome tools SoundCloud has to offer.”
If this isn’t time and energy saving enough, the partnership will eventually have a fuller effect, going both ways. If an artist already has music uploaded to SoundCloud, eventually the goal is to be able to have those established tracks be ‘backward-compatible,’ so to speak. The SoundCloud songs will be capable of going into CD Baby and available for purchase there, as well as the other third party distributors like Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and Spotify, (to name a few of the heavy hitters), and all “with the push of a button,” as Felsen declares in the release.
The icing on the cake that celebrates the partnership nicely benefits the artists presently only with CD Baby. To encourage the integration, users will be given a special 30% discount on SoundCloud’s “Solo” user level – from $116/yearly (€79/yearly) to $35 and €24 respectively.
The magic ideal between accessible but not excessive is tricky, but this connection seems to make a good amount of sense – if you like someone’s music, the natural progression is that you look for a place to buy it. SoundCloud and CD Baby are two powerful forces in the music world. Let’s see how musicians take to their getting together.
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