War of the Record-Slingers

There's a fight going on online that most people don't know about. It's a war of allegiances, a battle of musical brawn and business know-how, and it's definitely not what you know, but who you know. This battle royale is between the modern age's few online music distribution companies, and they're tearing each other apart for your business.

Simply Googling online music distribution companies will elicit a bizarre mish-mash of news articles, blog reviews, and forum posts that could make any poor musician's head explode. It's not informative, it's not authoritative, and it's not – well, it's not very friendly. Nevertheless, music distribution is done online now, and the sooner everyone gets used to it, the better off everyone will be.

So what is music distribution, anyhow? Music distribution is the art and process of transmitting music and other recorded audio mediums to places where listeners can receive the product, for a nominal fee, of course. Naturally, this makes online music distribution companies something of a middleman, but they aren't middlemen without purpose. In fact, attempting to self-publish a record album without the involvement of online music distribution companies would be insane.

How insane? Try to imagine emailing customer service at iTunes requesting for information with regard to submitting your album to the Apple people in order for selling it on the iTunes store. Imagine them replying with a FAQ that doesn't answer even half of your questions. You're further behind than you were before you started, now. Imagine phone calls, endless file transfers, filling out forms... Now imagine doing it more than 500 times at more than 500 entirely different websites with an endless variety of methods and requirements. Yeah.

Much, much easier would be going to an online music distributor, someone cheap, dependable and personable (good reputation a must). MondoTunes is generally considered the smartest choice right now, though distributors have cultish fan bases and people will say bizarre things in defense of CDBaby or whomever. Mondo's generally considered the best right now because right now they're cheapest, they go to all the big stores and something like 700 others all over the place, and they've got the best customer service by far. Check out their reviews and testimonials to make sure nothing has changed since the writing of this article, but to be sure, the war of the online music distribution companies won't be coming to a close anytime soon.