Tunefire Digital Music Distribution

• We are a Global Music Distribution service that places your tracks in the major download stores. We are not a record label. You keep the rights to your Music and the money you make from your track sales.

• Our service is open to anyone aged 18+ with original material they want to sell in the download stores.

• We are completely open about everything we do. We don’t make “hidden” additional charges that a lot of distributors make. All the money we receive from your sales are passed back to you.

• The best way to describe the Aggregator is as a gatekeeper for the stores. The stores use Aggregators as centralised entities to input new content. In turn the Aggregator works with us (the Distributor) and we, with you (the Client).

• A lot of services provided a “free” upload service. The payment you make is usually 10% on each sale. That’s great until you become the next Beyonce and sell a million tracks over a weekend. We don’t see why we should benefit from your success. We are providing a service and we feel that deserves a simple one off payment leaving you to collect all the money you make from your hard promotional work.

• The time it takes can vary depending on the queue that each of the stores have for new material. Current lead time is advised to be 2-6 weeks. This can be shorter, again it depends on the queue. Beware of services which offer a guaranteed lead time! We don’t know of anybody other than major labels able to dictate to the likes of iTunes when a particular track goes on sale (effectively jumping the queue!). It’s important to plan your release so please bear the lead time in mind when your’re at the planning stage.

• Unfortunately this is not possible. So many stores and content providers have so much new material to process, making enquiries about where a particular track is will not get a definitive answer, if at all.

• This depends on where the samples came from. If they are from a sample CD you own, purposely released for use without a license (or where ownership of the CD constitutes the license) there is no problem. If it is a sample from somebody else’s copyrighted work then you need to obtain permission from the person or company that holds the publishing rights to that work. Failure to do so can lead to serious legal problems. For more information contact PRS via http://www.prsformusic.com (UK only).
• Please bear in mind, if you use Tunefire’s services, that it is expressly stated in our Terms & Conditions that you will not use material copyrighted and owned by somebody else without the written authorisation of themselves or their representatives. This is to protect your interests as much as anybody else’s.

• This is a grey area. The official line seems to be that unless you have changed the arrangement, you don’t need permission. That begs the question “what constitutes a change of the arrangement?”. As usual we would recommend getting in contact with PRS via http://www.prsformusic.com (UK only) who can help with licensing matters.
• Please bear in mind, if you use Tunefire’s services, that it is expressly stated in our Terms & Conditions that you will not use material copyrighted and owned by somebody else without the written authorisation of themselves or their representatives. This is to protect your interests as much as anybody else’s.

• You can expect the majority of stores to deduct a percentage from each track sale. In addition the stores work with an Aggregation partner who takes 10%.

• Each store has it’s own queue of new material to process. You can imagine somebody like iTunes have a permanent mountain of new material to process. Your track(s) may well move through a queue quicker in one store than others, patience is the key. Also bear in mind that the contents of some of our stores are only available for sale & viewing in certain countries.

• The technical term for this is “Take Down”. It’s really easy, you just need to email us and let us know which tracks you would like us to take down. We will only accept instructions for this from the person who originally put the tracks on sale. We do not charge for take down’s provided the tracks have been for sale on the stores, through Tunefire for at least six months. Otherwise there is a direct charge made to us for this. If you would still like your tracks removed sooner, we are happy to do it but will require you to pay a small charge to cover the cost.

• Yes, but it's still on tests so iTunes can't guarantee that requests will be successful. Let us know the pre-order date when submitting a new release and we will try and make this happen. Please remember though; no guarantees!

• iTunes will accept Album Only tracks unless their track length is more than 10mins or you can provide proof that you don't own the rights to sell that track individually (that's for some compilations and soundtracks, and contracts need to be provided by the label as proof).

• Yes you can. Please allow at least 6 weeks from your release package purchase to ensure success in all stores. To do this, simply send us an email, quoting your Release serial number. There is no additional charge for this service.

• Yes you can. If you prefer to bundle all of your tracks together in one Zip/RAR file for uploading rather than sending each track individually, that's not a problem. We recommend 7Zip and WinRAR as two excellent utilities to help you with this.

• At the moment, no. We are hoping to implement this functionality during 2011 allowing artists the ability to log-in and see a snapshot of their sales data from around the world.

Due to the accounting periods of the various outlets, there is an offset of several months from sale to payment. To help you understand this, we have created the table below.

We deliver your sales data to your Inbox monthly. This is not the "trending data" that many offer and that is subject to revision. This is "accounting data" that is 100% accurate. It gives you a breakdown of which tracks have sold in which stores, how much you've earned and a whole load of other key information.

No. Actually, there is no such thing as "live" data. Many services claim to offer it even though it doesn't actually exist! What iTunes offer are daily "trending" reports which, by their own admission are not 100% accurate. Therefore we do not publish this data as it is misleading to the client. The data we publish is "Accounting" data and this is 100% accurate. iTunes publish sales figures around 1.5 months after the month of sale. Therefore your sales data will always be retrospective. It will also be accurate!