first, thanks a bunch to everyone who came out to the drop party last night; it was fun! i didn’t take any pictures but i think there are a few floating about. if i can get my hands on some i’ll post them up for you to see.

so how does one get an unsigned, independent record on itunes? i’m here to answer from my limited experience.

option 1 is that you could go directly through apple. this process basically involves you filling out an application on apple’s site to be considered by them as a “content provider”, a term that seems to apply to record labels, artists, and distributors alike. if accepted, one assumes that you are then free to upload your stuff. the caveat is the timeframe; i’m sure they gets hundreds of billions of these applications all the time and that they’re hard to go through, so they basically say something like this right on the application:

“thanks for submitting an application! we’ll get back to you….sometime.”

no timeline. no promises. not a very inspiring way to go.

option 2, however, is a little more promising — a service called Tunecore. it’s a 3rd party type of service that will basically charge you a one-time fee to upload your stuff, and then like $10 per year per album, and they will do it all for you. they’ll upload it to itunes here, itunes europe, u.k., australia, wherever — not to mention amazon, napster, and a bunch of other services that people use. you can choose whatever you want and the one-time price goes up like a dollar per store i think.

most everything i found online when i was researching how to get a record on itunes led me back to tunecore, so i signed up. it’s been pretty easy so far. but i’m adding a complication: the digital version of the liner notes. i’ve downloaded plenty of records off itunes that include them, and i wanted to make a point to include mine, mostly so anyone buying online would still have access to the lyrics should there be a word they don’t understand or something. but it’s a little more complicated — i’ve had to email back and forth with a rep from tunecore who’s sent me specs for how itunes needs the .pdfs to be — filesizes, dimensions, etc. so it’s taken a bit longer and i had to kind of rebuild the insert from the original graphic files. but it’s done and sent to the guy as of today for approval.

tunecore claims 4-6 weeks before your music will show up in the store. but i’m almost ready to start counting down that number as soon as my booklet gets approved.

so there you have it, in case you ever wanted to know.