Music Distribution: Level Music - thumbs up

When looking for a suitable outlet for publishing my own new music release, I found "Level Music", never heard from them before, but their offers looked reasonable. So I decided to use it for my new release "Slow Emotions Alive".

Quite negative reviews

I found out that LevelMusic does have quite many bad reviews, e.g. here on TrustPilot. But I still decided to try them, to find out for myself if they live up to their own claims:

  • "Easily distribute your music globally on Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, TikTok, and more."
  • "Own 100% of your rights and royalties, and easily withdraw your earnings."
  • "Stay ahead of the curve with user-friendly tools like smart release pages, release analytics, and sales data."
  • "Level is non-exclusive and non-committal. Explore and release whenever you're ready."

Cost

The cost is a flat fee of $20 per year - this sounds affordable. I hope that I can recoup this amount within a year from the licence fees or my music recordings.

Uploading Music

The upload/release process is quite easy and straight-forward. 

The required upload quality of the tracks is CD-quality: 44.1kHz, 16 bit. I did not try to use my higher-quality files (48kHz, 24bit), but did stay with this CD quality.

One of my files was longer than 10 minutes, and I was not able to upload it: could not upload it as a single file, and when trying to upload it together with a batch of other files, this one was missing. When trying then to create a release, I got an error. So I started a new release and left out this long file - then everything went OK,

Cover Image

The release cover image must only have the title and artist name. No additional text is allowed. After I had uploaded my first version with an additional text line, the release was rejected. So I changed it, then it was OK.

Music Stores

The music is being uploaded to more than 170 sites. This is quite impressive.

Release Time

The music was relatively quick online, already after a few days.

First the music appeared on Napster and Deezer, the next day on Apple Music, iTunes store (download), Tidal). On the 3rd day the music was on Spotify.

Since then no more music stores are shown. 10 days after submitting the release, only 6 stores appear in the list where the music can be accessed:



Conclusion

I think so far my experience with LevelMusic is positive. I will keep reporting about my further experience with this music distribution service.








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