Hey guys, I'm Kaylee Shore and this is too much to say. All has been questions releasing yes, so I'm so sad.
Now turn it.
Out you Okay for starters, I wanted to say sorry that there wasn't an episode last week. I have been crazy busy going between Nashville and LA and unfortunately sometimes life just gets in the way. I'm also working on releasing a new single for the first time in over a year and a half, which as the longest I've
ever gone without releasing music. But I wanted to talk to you guys today about the process of releasing music, why it's not as simple as just putting something on the Internet, and all the things that go on behind the scenes with your favorite artists, especially if they're independent in trying to get a single out. So this song that I'm releasing is called American Nightmare, and I'm really.
Proud of it.
It's a message that I really want to put out in the world, and I wrote it with one of my best friends, Callie Rody, and this incredible producer named Dylan Scott. And it's really just not as simple to put out music as people think it is, and not even just you know music fans, but also you know, when you move to Nashville, you're like, oh, okay, like everybody's just trying to help each other, and that's true, but also people need to eat, and so you want to
be respectful of producers in their time. But also it all adds up really quickly. So some of the costs that go into just the very beginnings of a single. And I'm using like an average of numbers from music I've done in the past, so not even specifically this song, but just like an aggregate of what those things cost. So recording a song can cost you anywhere between a thousand and five thousand, and I would say that the
typical range that people are paying is twenty five hundred song. Now, if you have a friend who will do you a favor and maybe take more of the royalty percentage, you
can get a lower up front rate. But typically if it's a producer that you're working with for the first time that's not one of your best friends, you're probably gonna be paying about twenty five hundred dollars as an independent artist, and then you give the producer anywhere from five percent to fifty percent, depending on how much you pay up front of the royalties, so sometimes after everyone else is paid, the artist ends up owning less of
the song than everybody else, and that's never fun, but it is how it works.
So you have just those.
Fees, but then that doesn't include mixing, and mixing is where they get all of the parts in the song at the volumes that they should be.
Sometimes a mixer will think that.
A guitar part needs to be up higher and the vocal needs to be lower, and they just make sure that everything fits together seamlessly. And then on top of that, you have to master. And master is getting it to the audio quality where it can be played on huge speakers, it can be played on the radio. You really you have to master a song, and there's ways that you can do that really inexpensive by using like an AI service,
but most people still don't like doing that. So you're gonna be paying about five hundred to one thousand for mixing and about five hundred to one thousand for mastering as an independent artist.
So if you are doing.
The math, you could very easily already be at forty five hundred dollars for this song and.
It hasn't even come out yet.
Then there's the fees that happen with the distributor, so you give away a part of the master, part of the royalties.
It does depend on what company you're working with, but a.
Distributor is who gets it to Spotify and Apple Music and YouTube. They do all of the back end, the administrative metadata stuff. They help you get on Spotify and Apple Music editorial playlists, and so they're really important, and they take anywhere from ten percent to fifty percent, especially.
If they helped you pay for the track up front, but.
I would say they're typically more in the fifteen percent range, and so you also so you're not paying those people up front, but you do give them some of the back ends. So you can see how if you gave some the producer fifty percent of your master, you give your distributor fifteen percent, you already own less than half of your song.
And that's never fun. So it's it all adds up really quickly.
But these are parts of it that you need, Like, they're not things you can really skimp on. They're not things that you can pick and choose which one you want to do, Like all of these are necessary. You can also decide to go through like a distributor that's not going to have like the pitching capabilities, and they'll charge you like an upfront fee for the year that you have to renew every year, and that can be
like fifty dollars, but that's fifty every year. But those are becoming less and less popular, especially if you're an artist that has a more established fan base. You really want to have a human being that you can talk to about what to do with your song and get
their opinion. So that's why distribution companies are now very popular, and I personally think much better than a traditional record label because a traditional record label, we'll take eighty five percent of your master and then of what's left, the artist has to pay out.
The percentage to the producer.
So I had fifteen percent and then had to give a producer twenty five percent of that, and after commissions, I was making six cents on every dollar of my music.
So there's that. So distributors are really really popular.
So those are the costs that it takes just to get it online, just to get it to the streaming services. And we come back, we're going to talk about the things that are slightly more optional but still really really important when it comes to rolling out a single. So your song is ready to go online and you need to give it a six to eight week lead time so that the distributors have time to pitch the song
to make sure that it all gets uploaded seamlessly. Sometimes an artists will drop a song faster than that because it is possible, but then they get kind of screwed over because there's just not enough time. And sometimes that's why you'll see an artist who has a song come out and it'll be on Apple Music but not Spotify, or it'll come out of the wrong day, and that's just you really need to have that two month ish period built in in order to make sure that everything
goes smoothly. So you have that time period, and during that time period, ideally you would already have the album artwork, but you can upload that after you upload the master into the distribution system. You have to have artwork and artwork, I mean, it's it's definitely possible to do yourself. I did the artwork for Amy by myself and took that on my iPhone and photoshopped it myself, and honestly, it
was kind of fun. But I did have a record label and I was sort of disappointed I didn't get to do something more creative, but I did it did have fun, I will say that. But normally for a photoshoot, I mean, if you have a friend who will do it and wants to help you, you can get a photo shoot for like three hundred dollars. But if you're just paying somebody who you picked because they're you know, a celebrity photographer whatever, that's between one and five thousand, and you only get access to.
Part of the photos.
So you could pay someone, let's say seven hundred and fifty dollars and you can only they'll send you a folder and you can go through them and you can pick like six ones that you like, so you're really you're ending up paying like over one hundred dollars per photo, and then you're allowed to use them and like you own the rights to them. But some photographers are more
intense with that than others. And sometimes you can find when he will just give you the whole drop box and let you go crazy, and that's always really nice. It's very nice of them, and that's why working with your friends can be so great. But you have those fees, and then you have graphic design on top of that. So unless you can use photoshop and do things yourself, you're going to be looking at probably another three hundred dollars for someone to design the single artwork. And now
Spotify canvases are really important and people love those. They keep people engaged when they're listening. They give you sort of a visual projection for the song, like you can kind of see the world that it lives in, and I think they're really important. And so if you're going to have something that's animated, which it has to be, you're going to be looking at probably another two to three hundred dollars for someone to create something. Again if you can't do it yourself, so that also adds up
quite a bit. Then from there you have the more extra things to do, but they are also really important. So we're going to dive into that when we get back, but so far everything we've said is kind of that's what you're doing and you can't avoid it. So to recap just on the necessities for releasing a song, we are currently at forty three hundred, and that is for recording it, mixing it, mastering it, doing a photo shoot for the art and then getting graphic design for the canvas,
and that's still a very conservative estimate. It could be quite a bit more. So, just for those costs alone, you're already there. And after that, there's so many other things artists want to do with songs. I mean, a visuals are so fun. I love doing music videos. It's
so inspiring to me. It's something that I think every artist dreams of, like when you're in the car and you're looking out the window in the rain and you're pretending you're in a music video, Like everybody wants to do that, and it's just fun and getting to bring these songs to life.
But more and more those are kind of going obsolete.
And if you're a major label artist, you can pay i mean hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for those, but if you're an independent artist, you're probably looking between on the very low end of things, two thousand and on the more realistic end of things, between seven thousand and ten thousand. So that is already more than it ever costs to release the song. So if you see an artist with the music video they really really really
that was important to them, please watch it. And sometimes people have friends who will cut them favors, but you can never rely on that, and you know, this is all just going under the assumption that we are paying people's going rate. After that, you really really releasing songs without a publicist is very difficult, and press is still very important. It's a great way to get media opportunities.
But also those publicists can have relationships with Spotify and with different social media companies and they can tell you how to run ads, and it's a really important piece
of it. And on the low end, for a publicist, you're going to be looking at twenty five hundred dollars per month during the release cycle, and then on the more realistic side of things, you're looking at five thousand a month, and you'll probably do that for about three months, but if you're releasing a project and a string of singles, you'll need them for longer, so multiply that by six months. So we are up there, and I've done releases where
I've done all of those things. I've done releases where I've done very few of those things, and just the basics. For this current one, we will be doing the basics, maybe a publicist, which would be great, but that is a lot of money, and the average publishing deal if you're a signed songwriter, pays between two thousand and three thousand a month. Some people have more. But it's also not really it's not free money. That's your money that you're spending. That's your money from down the road.
That you're spending. Now it's like a credit card, it's like a loan.
So there I mean that, and that barely covers the cost of living in rent.
I mean, that's like thirty thousand a year.
So you have to get really creative to figure out how you're going to pay for this stuff. And for me, normally I was able to fund my entire career.
I funded it all by myself.
But I was able to do that with royalties from my other songs. So I would just make money from one project, save it up, and then least another one. And so I was never really profiting that much, but I was able to consistently release music. And because I went from making you know, between fifty to one hundred percent of my like royalties to making six percent of my royalties, I don't have that that to there's that doesn't exist anymore to pay for this new music.
Because it was so drastically cut.
So all of this being said, when you're commenting on an artist thing and you're saying, oh my god, drop this, like just remember that we want to so badly more than anything. But figuring all of that out is really
really difficult. And honestly, I'm independent on the management side now for the first time in nine years, so I am in between managers and that's really difficult because I'm doing all of this business stuff myself and I'm negotiating numbers and that's normally something that, like, you know, you want to be able to work with your friends and not have awkward conversations about money, and so that's why
teams do that. So it's been really overwhelming, and I'm trying really hard to get this song out, but I wanted to kind of be vulnerable with you guys and let you know exactly what goes into releasing a song and how difficult it can be to come up with that.
People hate talking about money.
It's tacky, but I think that a lot of people don't know what goes in to a release. So figured I keep you guys posted, but hopefully I'll have a release date really soon for American Nightmare.
I'm so excited to put it out.
I've done a lot of teasers on my Instagram and TikTok, so you can go check that out. And thank you guys for your patience with me as I've been a little bit all over the place. I appreciate you so much. I'm Kailie sure and this is too much to say asking questions so soon. Now tell it out, you