DistroKid.com Part 11

I just checked Amazon and Google Play for the "music from Major Stryker" album, and it doesn't appear on Amazon yet, but it does on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Bobby_Prince_music_from_Major_Stryker?id=Bxq7ksh4u62cfrfpt4uccrp533m

On the iTunes release, I received an automated email from DistroKid when the album was live on iTunes. I did not receive a similar automated email about Google Play. Don't know what's up with that, and I don't know when Google Play added the album.

So, I'm still giving DistroKid.com a chance to get everything together.

And I forgot to say that there's a new link on DistroKid.com that allows you to "Delete album from Stores." I'm not gonna click the link to test it yet. But, I'm going to guess that the single I first submitted ("In Hiding" from Duke Nukem 3D) can be deleted and then resubmitted with the other DN3D songs. That was something I was wondering about many posts back.

As with the "days of old" in record/CD sales, the cost of the albums and singles is set by each store. iTunes has the Stryker album at $9.99. Google Play is at $9.49. Both stores sell singles at $.99.

Google Play has longer track previews than iTunes. Some of the tracks played longer than others. I don't know what their algorithm is for that.

These are some exciting times for independent artists. Once again, I highly recommend that if you have a successful album, you should put some of your income into hiring a great publicist. Such a person/organization can keep you in the public eye and get you noticed by even more potential fans.

DistroKid.com Part 10

Still nothing heard about the status of Google Play and Amazon.

Royalties from iTunes were available some time in August, but I never received an email from DistroKid to that effect. I happened upon it by visiting DistroKid.com.

Details on sales are Sales Month, Store, Artist, Title, Quantity, Customer Paid, Your Royalties, Country of Sale, Exchange Rate, Tax Withheld, and Earnings.

I'll post further information as it becomes (or doesn't become) available.

***EDIT***
After hearing from some of you who are disappointed or put off about how slowly this situation is panning out, remember that DistroKid.com is a one man operation. And, he has continued to add to and edit the website.

When I was typing this post, I was saying that DistroKid only lists income (no statistics). Something told me to check again before I posted, and surely enough the statistics had been added.

I'm still giving the guy a chance to get everything working. I love it that he is at least trying to compete with the rest of the aggregators. If nothing else, he may cause them to think twice about raising their rates.

JTV Digital Music Distribution

Anyone out there who's used JTV Digital Music Distribution?

They responded to my earlier post, DistroKid.com Part 2, and said, "Please test our service ... if you're looking for something a bit more "serious" :-)"

Their advertised flat rates are iTunes single - 69 cents; all stores single - $3.05; all stores album (12 tracks) - $36.70; all stores EP (5 tracks) - $15.25. On top of that, they get 10% of the royalty payments.

The stores as of this posting are 7 digital, Amazon, boinc, Deezer, digital-tunes, Google play, gracenote, Grooveshark, iTunes, juno download, movistar, Nokia ovi, rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify and Shazam.

My initial reaction is that they are in a totally different league from DistroKid in their pricing. With JTV Digital, my 21 track "music from Major Stryker" album would have cost $73.40 to distribute as two albums (only 12 tracks allowed per album), plus 10% of any royalties earned. 

JTV Digital has twelve more stores over DistroKid's four. This would definitely have an impact on those who want to be in more stores.

DistroKid.com Part 9

I've still heard nothing regarding Google Play, which was supposed to take three days, or Amazon, which was to take weeks.

The email address for distrokid is support@distrokid.com. You can also tweet @distrokid.

There's been no response to an email I sent July 9 regarding merging the free uploaded song with an album I'm waiting to upload.

I hear crickets chirping when I go to distrokid.com.

Oh, and if you want to see the home page of distrokid.com, you have to sign out of your "dashboard."

With the superior connectivity between iTunes and distrokid.com (uploaded and live for sale in less than three hours), I'm wondering why distrokid.com cannot receive "nearly live" sales data for songs/albums that can be routed to each appropriate user's page. I'd bet that the labels get that kind of access to data.

I will keep you posted. I'm beginning to think that distrokid.com is an excellent method for getting one song or one album up on iTunes/Spotify. I'm not so sure at this time that I'll upload anything else.

Voyetra Sequencer Plus Visited Again

There are still folks out there who are trying to work with Voyetra Sequencer Plus Gold software. This is for those who still use SP Gold for whatever reason. It's especially for those who have old .sng files and want to work with them.

I use SP Gold for working with the few original native SP Gold files I have been able to locate on old data tapes/CD's.

I've lost (hopefully misplaced) the instrument bank files I created to use with SP Gold. I created them to be able to use melodic mode on the OPL2 FM synth chip found on early sound cards.

The reason for using melodic mode is it gave me freedom to use any combination of nine melodic and/or percussive notes. Percussive mode allowed three percussive notes and six melodic ones.

The down side to using melodic mode was that I had to bastardize some melodic instruments to make them sound percussive. I did that by playing melodic "instruments" well above or below their normal range. This is the reason that many of my old game songs have strange sounding tuned drums when played back on wavetable sound cards and in some emulators. Wavetable sound cards used instrument samples, and the instruments would sound melodic even above or below their intended ranges. With the OPL 2, if you played "instruments" out of their range on it, you'd get some of the craziest sounds, including many percussive sounds.

You can still get SP Gold on the Turtle Beach site. That site has a wealth of info, drivers, whatever for SP Gold. SP Gold and drivers are here: seq_gold.zip

I don't think you need the drivers separately unless you're still running an older operating system/computer with a sound card. The basic drivers came with the SP Gold zip. That includes a MIDI simulator for sound cards and a General MIDI slave driver for FM Sound Cards (including the virtual one in DOSBox).

There's the manual and other great information available, too.

I use DOSBox to run SP Gold. Since I don't have the instrument bank files, I have not used it to actually play any of the songs. If you've used it with DOSBox and actually had it play in DOSBox, please comment with any suggestions you may have about getting it to work. DOSBox download is here.

DOSBox is great for running old games on "modern" operating systems. It also allows you to record the music from the games, raw MIDI commands and OPL commands. I cannot say enough good things about it's OPL2 soundcard emulation. It "understands" my bastardization of the melodic instruments!

Here's how I got DOSBox to run SPGold by default. This is for the latest version -- 0.74 running on a Windows 7 computer.

1. This assumes you have DOSBox installed in the default configuration.
2. It also assumes you have SP Gold installed at c:\VOYETRA.
3. Win Start button > All Programs > DOSBox-0.74 > Options > DOSBox 0.74 Options.
4. This should open dosbox-0.74.conf in Notepad (or your default text editor).
5. Scroll all the way to the bottom of this file. You'll see [autoexec]. If you already have something entered here, just comment what you added before, using # as on all the other commented lines. Add the following, starting on a new line:

mount c "c:\VOYETRA"
c:
seq.bat 

6. File > Save
7. Close Notepad.
8. Go to c:\VOYETRA.
9. Right click SEQ.BAT and select Edit. If it doesn't open in a text editor, select one to open it (Notepad).
10. Following the "safe, not sorry" rule, File > Save As ... > SEQoriginal.BAT.
11. Now File > Save As ... > SEQ.BAT so you'll be working on your edited file.
12. Copy and paste the following in the place of what's presently in SEQ.BAT:

echo off
C:
call driver
SpG %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
call driver /rem

13. File > Save
14. In the c:\VOYETRA window, right click DRIVER.BAT.
15. Select Edit.
16. "Safe, not sorry:" File > Save As ... > DRIVERoriginal.BAT.
17. File > Save As ... > DRIVER.BAT
18. Copy and paste the following in place of what's in the file:

echo off
if "%1" == "/rem" goto REMOVE
if "%1" == "/REM" goto REMOVE
VAPINUL.COM %1 %2 %3
SAPIFM1.COM /port:1 %1 %2 %3
goto OUT
:REMOVE
SAPIFM1.COM /port:1 /rem
VAPINUL.COM /rem
:OUT

Now, when you start DOSBox, you'll have SP Gold start "automatically."

You should note that you can still use DOSBox for games and such by quitting SP Gold (q q from the track view screen) and mounting your games directory to a new drive letter.

I hope this info helps someone.

DistroKid.com Part 8

I was just on distrokid.com and saw that there is a Twitter account -- @distrokid.

He's tweeted album sales figures for Mar 13-Jun 13 -- about 1.4k. There's a graphic at https://twitter.com/DistroKid/status/355812542297280512/photo/1 -- you may have to sign into Twitter to see the link?

The last tweet (14 hours before this posting) was informative:

"We accept only credit cards. We pay out royalties using PayPal. 1-year term starts from the day you sign up."

I haven't heard anything new other than this. I'll keep you posted.

DistroKid.com Part 7

Keeping you up-to-date:

"music from Major Stryker" album submitted to Spotify by DistroKid.com at 3:02 PM on Fri, Jul 12.

The album became live at 3:42 PM today (Sun, July 14).

You can listen to the whole album here: https://play.spotify.com/album/5ywL7dTpec7SIw5TR3gPqf

I have heard nothing further about Google Play and Amazon.

Hey Google and Amazon, wonder why iTunes is on top? You'd better up your game!

Who'd ever thunk that an album could be submitted to iTunes and be on sale in two and a half hours?