Reentry Phase II: Mastering and Album Release, April-July 2025
Armed with an album of nine songs, the final step of the recording process - mastering - remained for me. Mastering ensures that songs will sound good on various playback systems, that they are sufficiently loud for playback, and that songs across an album will have roughly the same volume level, as you don’t want loudness bouncing up and down from song to song. I had attempted a DIY approach up to this time, only farming out my logo design to a good designer friend. As mentioned earlier, I am much more of a musician/composer than sound engineer, so I knew that I had to outsource the very specialized task of mastering. Professional mastering engineers will normally use high quality and very expensive recording equipment (some that may RENT for thousands of dollars in certain cases), and this enables them to hear things that people like me with a more modest home system would never pick up by ear in a recording. A cardinal rule for musicians - NEVER put out crappy-sounding audio products.
Fortunately, the digital world offers the option to find and secure an expert based on their prior customer reviews and bio. I identified SoundBetter as a vendor connecting customers with experts and selected and engaged my mastering engineer accordingly. He had indicated in his bio that he specialized in the Chill genre, which dovetailed into most of my music.Transactions were conducted virtually with my LA-based engineer, from back and forth messages on the project, to my uploading pre-mastered songs to a file share, to the engineer delivering the mastered songs through the file share. This was one of the heftier expenses on my budget to date, but the results were staggering: The audio quality of the mastered versions of my songs blew me away, and I was now ready for distribution and release of my music.
Since I began studying the distribution process a year earlier, I had great trepidation torward this stage of the process - especially toward the vendors. The recording and distribution world was completely different before digital options: It was based on physical studio locations and was guarded by gatekeeper record labels where you had to “know somebody” to get your music into the public eye at all (not that this latter item doesn’t still come in handy for playlist placements and visibility).
Today, just about any independent artist can get their songs out in the wild. Distribution vendors, or aggregators, generally function as a service that distributes your music to digital service providers/DSPs such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, Pandora, YouTube Music and many other streaming and downloading services. Aggregators obtain an international code for each of your songs to track plays and royalty payments. Next, they collect royalties for your songs based on consumption and relay those royalty payments to you. I was wary of aggregators because there are several large vendors in the market, and each one has countless negative online reviews to the tune of “they are non-responsive and never return my emails,” “they didn’t get my music out,” and commonly “I never got my (royalty) money. ” To be fair, some criticisms may just come from trolls, and aggregators also have some positive reviews mixed in, but then you don’t know if these are staff postings. I was considering one of the leading aggregators when I bumped into a headline stating that a major recording company was suing them for hundreds of millions of dollars for copyright infringement: No thanks. Generally, major record labels (Sony, Warner, Universal) are trying to claw back into this space that they once dominated, and lawsuits against distributors aren’t uncommon.
I discovered a boutique aggregator, IndieMassie, did some research, reviewed TrustPilot feedback which touted their responsiveness in particular, and determined that they were the safest if not guaranteed distribution route to take given my options. I engaged them, paid an annual service fee of $50, uploaded my songs to their artist site, and on July 7th, they were released to several DSPs. This experience worked wonderfully for me, and no, I’m not on their staff.
Indiemassive and its competitors cover digital streaming and downloads, where the listener is proactive and selective, but separate engagements were required for radio play, called “lean back,” where the listener is passive and takes the songs the station (e.g. SiriusXM) dishes up. More on this and the following distribution steps in a future post.
My album, Foundation with its nine songs, is now out on DSPs. A personal milestone.