Soundrop, a distribution company specializing in tools for social video creators, has announced new pricing for its cover music service. At 99 cents per track, Soundrop will allow creators to upload fully licensed cover songs to sites like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, as well as other major music services, worldwide.
Along with the distribution service, the 99 cent deal from will allow for an unlimited number of royalty splits for tracks uploaded, no extra cost required.
Unlike other distributors designed for independent talent, Soundrop specializes in a fairly unfilled niche: cover artists. While fellow Downtown Music Holdings-owned distributor CD Baby has mastered the independent singer-songwriter market, Soundrop aims to fill in the gaps for these largely-ignored social media cover stars.
“Creators who make music as part of their work want and need different things than a musician who’s recording albums and booking tours,” Soundrop president Joel Andrew explains.
For Soundrop’s market, logging splits and cover licenses at a low cost are main priorities, hence their movement toward the 99 cent model.
“The new music economy will be built and maintained by services that recognize that creators and independent artists have career paths and fan platforms that are as diverse as the music they create,” says Andrew.
To keep the price low, Andrew notes that the company “rebalanced the cost of distributing music” by offering creators just the essentials. “We can offer licensing for covers at a better price while still maintaining the level of quality for our general distribution service,” he says.
The cover music distributor has resided under the Downtown Music Holdings umbrella since its former parent organization, AVL Digital (CD Baby, Soundrop, AdRev, and DashGo), sold to DMH in March 2019. Since then, AVL Digital’s former portfolio of companies, which controls the largest independent sound recording catalog in the music industry, according to the company, operates as a separate subsidiary of Downtown.
