So when the post Sean created about what everybody wants to learn this year, I just received a notification from an account posting how to flip money, adding onto yesterday where someone messaged me and was offering services, even though they just joined the community yesterday and you see what the problem is starting to become. There’s a lot of spam, or at least, in these two instances starting to come into the community and it’s kind of confusing because this is supposed to be a private place. I just wanna urge new members and others to be wary of who you talk to and the material being posted until there’s some further clarity on why this is happening. Since I’ve been here for the past year, this is been a great place for discussion and collaboration but trying to sell people on products and run scams should not be what’s going on here. I understand that there are also people on here that provide services I mean we pretty much all do but the main goal of being in this community should not be to try to gain new customers from the community. Again, just stay sharp and watch out for strange account activity and posts.

Hey everyone, we're planning our content for YouTube video, podcasts and community in the coming months. 1. Is there anything you are especially curious to learn about or understand more deeply this year? 2. Is there anything in particular you need help with at the moment?

There’s a user by the name of Sam Sam, who joined January 18 and messaged me telling me how he liked my story I wanted to know if you could listen to my music, I question how he could care about my story if he’s never heard my music, so I assumed he read about me on a post on here, but he has no contributions. He also completely avoided the question when I asked where did you hear about me. I sent him a link to my YouTube because that’s the platform he preferred any question why my engagement was so low to which I explained what indicators contribute to that at the moment. Long story shorter I’ve seen this tactic before and not sure how this guy got into the community but I don’t think he’s a legit person that should be here. This is the last place I want to deal with scammers.

Wanted to share my experience with too lost distribution and see if anybody else had any stories. So first off creating an account can be a hassle if you don’t do it exclusively from a computer at first. I tried creating the account on my phone and then it told me I needed to switch over to a computer then I had to switch back to my phone for verification process. Now this wouldn’t be a problem but me being completely blind. It was actually a hassle having to switch over to my MacBook and navigate so this took me a few days to finish. I also haven’t been receiving any emails in regards to any actions on my account. The only time I’ve gotten an email from them is through a support ticket that was not very helpful. when they say upload 14 days in advance minimum, they mean it, they’ve only been around for two years so they can’t process Music as fast as other distributors. I tried uploading a release seven days before the date and it didn’t make it so I ended up switching over to DistroKid, which worked in like four days. I will say this, their website is organized nicely compared to others and it’s straightforward to the point. I like the fact that they also have monthly payment options if you don’t want to pay for the full year and even if you don’t pay for your account for whatever reason instead of completely deleting your account, they’ll just take 15% of your royalties until you start paying again. DistroKid could learn a thing or two from them. This distribution company has been around for only two years going on three. And some of the reviews I’ve read state that their websites had issues in the past with payouts, because of how certain IT things were implemented. Basically, they have growing pains. I’m gonna try another release and schedule it out a month and I assume everything will run smoothly at that point, but this is definitely not the distributor you want to go all in on for an album just yet in my opinion. They do have a nice set of features, and being able to get in advance on your streaming royalties years in advance seems like a cool feature, but again that’s reserved for a certain tear of artist. Overall, I don’t think it’s prime time ready but this is definitely the best alternative to DistroKid.

So there’s a friend of mine, who was updating me on where he’s at musically, and he said he was generating his own IRS he codes so he could have more control over his music, and he claimed to be and I quote “his his own distributor“. I responded that’s not how distribution works and that that type of thing really doesn’t matter anymore since distributors provide those codes. However, this did get me thinking. Is this just some outdated practice that still gets passed on or are there legitimate concerns about this? I’ll include a Reddit post about this topic and the only piece of information that I could take away. is that generating your own codes? Will let you track more data. What does this mean? Exactly? Are we talking More in depth analytics? Seeing what plays are getting in other stores/territories outside of your home country? This led to another question, do these generated codes mean that the distributor or label who purchased these bulk codes have ownership of my music? Again the Reddit thread said that some distributors charge or withhold royalties until you pay off the fee of the code, and while I haven’t did an in-depth reading of terms and conditions for any of the major distributors, I feel like this would be a louder argument if there was any real problems. So does anybody have any information on this or how do you handle releasing music, do you go with the generated codes or create them yourselves and if so, why? https://www.reddit.com/r/musicindustry/comments/qsnkfq/music_distribution_and_isrc/