RELEASING AN OC ON SPOTIFY

The Song-making part

Recently, I wrote a song, when the Lockdown period for COVID-19 began, inspired by the story of a friend of mine, around 2 months back. I had written and composed songs before (you can check them out on my SoundCloud), but none of them were properly arranged.
So, I thought, since I had time now, why not make a proper arrangement for this song? Like make a proper track with guitar and all, mix it properly and then release it somewhere?!
Thankfully, I have some amazing friends who play mind-blowing guitar and know how to mix and master tracks.
Gourab is a friend of mine from high-school. He has been recently growing into a better guitarist each and every day (trust me when I say this) and I wanted him to prepare this track for the song. Always thirsty for new music as any passionate musician, he never denied for even once.

So I started penning down the lyrics as it came to me, gradually, doing corrections and rewriting them every night and asking Gourab and a few other close friends for feedback about how it was going.
It took me a long time, tbh, about 3 weeks straight, to take the song from lucid-scratch to something that seemed relatively more solid.

After that, was the hard part - Recording.
We had no proper studio, no professional microphones, or editing softwares, and our budget was LITERALLY $ 0.
Anyhow, I made a DIY pop-filter with some spare cloth, and recorded the song in our garage with a BOYA BY-M1 Lavalier Mic, inside our car (someone suggested me that a small space enclosed by closed glasses can be soundproof, i.e., that's the principle they use in studios).

After that, Pinka dada, a close relative of mine, mastered the track in his own personal home-studio using Nuendo.

There were a lot of issues, honestly. We could not mix the individual guitar layers as Nuendo could not support Gourab's rendered WAV files for some reason, so we had to render an overall mixed mp3 of the guitar and overlayer voice on it. We were fucked.
There were issues with the reverb and equilizing the guitar and the vocals as well, but honestly, this is the best we could do in a ZERO BUDGET project and with no professional equipments or hardwares at hand.

The Release

Now was the time for the real part of the entire process, where you serve the food on the plate.
I met a really talented person, online, during this time, Dipayan Sarkar. He helped me with the YouTube poster for the first launch of the song.

Amrita also made me a really artistic poster complying with the Spotify aesthetics around this time, after spending days on it <3.
That was used for both Spotify and SoundCloud release.

RouteNote

Now, releasing a song on Spotify isn't as straight as releasing it on YouTube or SoundCloud. There's a system of Distributors in Spotify, and you can release a song only under some distributor.
What are distributors? Well they are basically companies whom you have to pay, and they will take care of distributing your song to the top platforms online, like Spotify, iTunes, etc.
And for Spotify, releasing through a distributor is compulsory.

This is a headache.
Some of the most famous distributors are DistroKid, TuneCore, etc. I searched them up a lot, but none of them were free.
DistroKid takes about 1500 Indian Rupees, for one year, in advance. It's good if you've given up everything in life, and trying to make your career as a singer/songwriter and need to release 4 albums per year. But for me, it wasn't worth for just one song.

So, after a lot of browsing, I found this distributor called RouteNote.
They help you release your song for free, but, what it costs is a lot of time!

So if you don't have a problem with your song getting released after about 1 month you send your song for Moderation, then RouteNote is the best thing for you!

And there my song was, on Spotify, almost 3.5 weeks after I submitted it for Moderation! I sent it on around 2^nd May for approval, along with the necessary Copyrights and Cover Arts, and it got released on the platform on around 25^th May.

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