What is a Music Aggregator?

In every industry mastering the jargon is important when you’re trying to communicate with fellow colleagues and associates.  In the following blog post I will explain to you what a music aggregator is.

Maybe you have come across these two words before but weren’t sure of the meaning. Well that’s why you are reading this post so let’s get into it without any further delays.

A music aggregator is basically another word for a digital music distributer. Most aggregators are formal companies in the business of making sure that music distributed globally to online platforms such as Apple Music, Spotify, Dezeer, Tidal and so forth.

They use sophisticated software to ensure that digital files are stored and delivered in a neatly and timely fashion to the mentioned platforms above.

Since you now know and/or have an idea on how aggregators work, let’s move on the next question.

What does a music aggregator need from you?

In most cases music aggregators provide services to record labels and artists. If you are an unsigned artist and need a projected distributed then you might have to “sign yourself”. In simple English that means you will have to create your own record label before they can distribute your material.

The reason being is that most (if not all) online music stores list the name of label with the release details.

If you already have your own label or signed to one, a music aggregator might require but not limited to the following:

• Artist Name
• Social Media Accounts
• Information about your back catalogue (If you have)
• Your release schedule
• Artist roster
• ISRC Codes
• Barcodes

How to sign up with a music aggregator

It’s easy to sign up with an aggregator and there’s many ways you can approach this.

You can either sign up with a service provider like TuneCore, Landr or CD Baby. However you have to pay them a fee upfront for each release but you keep 100% of the royalties.

Another option is to sign up with a music aggregator which doesn’t charge any fees. Instead, they will take a small fee your sales (downloads and streams). In most cases it’s not much, a typical aggregator fee is anything between 10-20%.

Summary

An aggregator is just industry jargon for online music distributor. The term is often thrown around loosely but it means the same, even though it sounds fancy.