Domingo talks Media Famous unlimited global digital distribution

If you want to get your music onto online distribution platforms like iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, etc. you have to go through an aggregator aka a digital distributor. There are no shortage of distributors. From one of the first, CD Baby, to some popular offerings like Tunecore and Distrokid, to the more recent UnitedMasters. They all offer a variety of different pricing structures, distribute to various outlets, and provide varying services to their clients.

Industry veteran and producer Domingo, who has produced for some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, has recently launched his offering in the digital distribution landscape. Domingo comes from the same background as the artists who are seeking distribution for their music. Perhaps this is what prompted Domingo to provide another option for artists to get their music to the masses with his new Media Famous global digital distribution platform.

Media Famous boasts unlimited digital distribution for an unheard of price of only $9.95 per year and they don’t take a cut of your royalties. Domingo breaks it down about Media Famous, gives some background, and talks about what that price includes.

 

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Well first, I appreciate you taking the time.

Domingo: It’s all love bruh.

I know you stay busy. Stay on the move.

Domingo: Yeah. Try to, I mean if you don’t, you fall stagnant in this game.

That’s for sure. So, you’ve got a lot of things that you’re always into. You used to do the beat sites where you were selling beats online and providing a platform for other people to sell beats online. So, the latest thing is Media Famous, this unlimited music distribution site. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Domingo: Yeah mediafamous.com is global digital distribution. And I did the platform for artists that don’t have a fair shake. I don’t want to mention competition names or whatever, but the others were charging per release or there’s hidden fees and I felt like making a platform, that’s just cut and dry $9.95 unlimited for a year. That’s it. And we give you resources to register your music and to also make sure that, you’ve got your business straight. Because a lot of indie artists and up and coming artists, they really don’t know the business of the game. So, we try to give that all to you for nine $9.95, which is very affordable. I understand the economics of music where the money isn’t the same that it used to be and nobody’s trying to spend money like that, you know a lot of artists don’t invest in themselves.  But $9.95…if you can’t invest $9.95 in yourself, then maybe you’re in the wrong game. You know what I’m saying? So, we built it with those artists in mind and we launched it and it went pretty good in the launch. We’ve got a lot of work to do to climb up the rankings and we’re doing it daily and, we’re definitely here to stay. And, you know, I’m not trying to knock everybody’s door down, you know the competition or whatever. But we definitely try and to compete in our lane.

Right.  There is a lot of competition in this space, this music distribution space. There’re some that’s been around for a long time. Then you’ve got some that have just recently popped up within the last year or two and they’re going really hard on social media and they’ve got a lot of backing from music industry vets. So what services do you provide that’s different from what’s already out there?

Domingo: Well, first off, the one you’re talking about, I know exactly what you’re talking about. The beauty of it is, when I announced that I was making my own platform, a lot of industry vets, especially high-level executives hit me up and gave me tips on what to do what not to do that place is doing and we kind of implemented it into what we do. Whereas how can I say, you don’t get in my way and I won’t get in your way. You know what I’m saying? Because the highway for music is very huge. It’s not a one lane highway. You know what I’m saying? So, you know, like they offer things that no matter what the artist has to use them. You know what I’m saying? We offer things where it shows the artists to do it yourself. Because everything with those companies you do, there’s a fee involved. Whether you know it or not, there is a fee involved, you know what I’m saying? So, for instance, collecting Content ID. You can do it yourself. And that part on the site is, it should be finished by next week. Like where you can learn how to collect your own Content ID. We’re not there to, we’re not there to, how can I say, be a warden where we collect everything, and we guard you. We’re there to teach you how to do it within that platform. Because if you don’t learn it or you don’t do it yourself, nobody’s going to do for you or you’re going to pay these people to do it. I mean, even with me, I have a distribution deal with Ingrooves and that’s for the That’s Hip Hop and the Deranged Music and all that. So, they collect my Content ID, right? They collect every Content ID you could think of. From Facebook to YouTube. But they charge a 20% commission for doing it. But if I have an issue, let’s say like I have issues with Spotify about not paying us on time and not paying us at all, and they won’t fight for you. You know what I’m saying? So, who’s going to fight for you if you don’t fight for yourself? So, where we make a difference, we try to teach you how to do it all yourself. Because nobody’s going to be more pushing you to success than yourself. These companies are just there to make the money, make the commission. And then if you have an issue, they’re not going to help you. You know what I’m saying? Like we’re there to give you tips. Like how do you collect Content ID? Well this is how you do it, you know, or connect you to the right way to do it.

Okay. So, you guys would provide the information on how to do it. Like if an artist for example with Content ID, if they wanted Media Famous to collect that Content ID, do you guys provide that service?

Domingo: We can. Now I’m encouraging them to do it themselves, because see if we do it, no matter how you go, right, you’ve got to go through an aggregator. You have to. So, like I have an account with YouTube, right. So, we’d rather you go get your Content ID account with YouTube and get it done yourself. Because if we collect it, then yeah, there’s got to be a fee. And I’m trying to stay away from that. And that’s where I’m trying to be different. I mean, Yo, listen, nothing in this world is free but at the same time and the reason why we charging for distribution is because, like a site has to be run, it’s a business, you know what I’m saying? But I felt like $9.95 for the year, nobody messing with that. The top two is you know, Tunecore and Distrokid. Those are the top two everybody always talks about. There are plenty out there.

Yeah, there are tons that’ve been around for a long time.

Domingo: Yeah. And the top two though, like I said, they do the per release and whatever. I’ve used Tunecore before and like I said, I’m not there to bash them. I’m here in my own lane. Artists, if they want to fuck with us. They fuck with us. If they feel comfortable with them, so be it, but they are not touching that price and they’re not touching that unlimited releases for a year. They’re not doing that and that provides more options for the artists because some artists can’t afford $30 per album, you know? And then after a year, right, yeah, it’s for a year. So, after a year, it’s $9.95 but if you don’t want to pay it, we are not like the others where they take your music down. At that point. Yeah, they take it down.

Yeah. That’s a big point I was going to ask about.

Domingo: Yeah, no we don’t take it down. Now truth be told at that point, and I’m being straight up honest with you, we haven’t figured out at this point what we’ll be doing then. Will we charge a commission to keep it up or do we just keep it up and see if there is some way for them to maybe pay the $9.95 a different way or somehow. I’m not going to lie to you on that. That part we didn’t come to yet because I want to be fair to the artist. I don’t want to be like, well you pay this, or we are taking it down, because I think that’s unfair. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah. I believe that a couple of sites do that, that model where it’s like they give you this cheaper price, but if you’re not paying that yearly membership fee, then the music will come down.

Domingo: Yeah. And I’m trying to avoid that. You know, because I think it’s…I’m trying to make a fair playing field, you know what I’m saying? Where okay, the artist will pay $9.95 for the year…and dude like I said, man, just being straight up. If you can’t afford $10, then you’re in the wrong game, or you don’t believe in yourself.  You want to pay them $29.95 every album or $7.99 every single and then you have to do that again the next year then so be it, go do it. But $9.95 a year, unlimited amount, it can be an album, it can be a single, it could be an anthology. I don’t care., It’s $9.95 and you know, we’ve had a good…I don’t know from the gate, we probably had like 200 people sign up the same day that we launched. You know what I’m saying? And the crazy part is, a lot of them now, I don’t want to say a lot, but maybe about a quarter of them, people sending me messages on Instagram, and Facebook, like, yo, I left Tunecore, I left the Distrokid, what you offer is way better.  You know what I’m saying? So, and I got proof of those messages, not saying I gotta prove it, but I’ve got proof. You know what I’m saying? And it’s a good feeling to know, okay, they get it. So now we got to get it out to the masses. Oh, and then the other thing, those companies, and I’ve been told this, I can’t say, it’s 100% verified, but those companies don’t have distribution in Japan and China. Because I’ve heard that it’s hard to get in there. We do, we 100% distribute to Japan and China.

Yeah, I don’t know about Tunecore or Distrokid where they reach. That was another question I was going to ask, what’s the reach? I think one of the biggest and one of the first aggregators in this space for indies was CD Baby and they have a very extensive list of who they distribute to and they have some in Japan and China as well. Their prices are a little bit different, a little bit more.

Domingo: Well see CD Baby, CD Baby is Disc Makers and…I mean they got that side of the game locked. I mean I pay them to make CDs for me so they always offer me distribution. I’m like, Nah, I’m good. But I spoke with people in states in the industry and this was something we were planning for a while, but I had to make sure I had all my ducks in a row before even executing it, you know, before finding the web designer and then connecting the platforms. Like, the platform is not even located in the states. I had to literally search out the right company. I spoke with a lot of companies. Like Tunecore is located in Brooklyn, but their platform is not in Brooklyn. It’s all software based. So, you got to find the right company and a lot of this stuff, believe it or not, is oversees in Europe.  And it’s crazy how like none of the companies in the states wanted to see my vision or not that they didn’t, they just…I guess felt, nah we don’t really want to go against Tunecore or Distrokid. But like I said, I wasn’t going against nobody. I was creating a lane for artists, so you know, it all had to be done overseas…and the platform runs flawless. I’m trying to give the artist the best platform for the amount of money we’re asking. So, I mean this is really, is really something where when you join, you get it.

Right. It looks Media Famous distributes to all the major players. Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, Pandora.
Domingo: We distribute to Tencent. I don’t know if you know who that is, but they are the Chinese and Japan connect. They are our distributor for Japan and China. I would say it’s probably a little more than 50 outlets. There’re a lot of outlets out there, but the major ones are the ones you want to hit. Because there’re little ones out there that they don’t pay nothing. So, what’s the point? Even with me dealing with Ingrooves, I see we deliver to Nokia. Does Nokia even sell phones anymore? You know what I’m saying? Like for what, what are we distributing Nokia for? They’re not doing nothing for us, you know, but again man, it’s an outlet to give a level playing field to artist to make it affordable for them to use. Give them the analytics on how the music’s going, and give them that platform where they don’t feel like, I spent so much money and I’m not getting any results. Because it’s $9.95 man. It’s really not that expensive at all.

Yeah. $9.95 for the year. There are actually, there are cords in the studio that cost more than that.

Domingo: Right, exactly. Shit there is groceries that cost more than that. You can’t buy a pack of steak for $9.95; you know what I’m saying? Whole pack of steak. But you can distribute your music for $9.95…unlimited.

Do they get to choose who they want the music to be distributed to?

Domingo: Absolutely. Yeah. Like if you don’t want Spotify to have it, they don’t have to have it. You tell us who you want, you want all of them, then feel free, have all of them. The only thing, the only thing that I will say is if you sign up as an artist, then let’s say you sign up as Timid, right? The programming on the site knows if you go in and distribute somebody other than your music. You’re paying $9.95 a year for you as an artist. You can’t, sub-license your thing. You know what I’m saying? You can’t go in and make money off of the fact that you have distribution for the year.

It’s an individual distribution account. It’s not more like if you want to be a label and then you pay $9.95 and you take your whole, your whole roster and just start blasting records out.

Domingo: If you indicate that you are a label, all good. But that’s my point. If you indicate “I’m just a solo artist”, we can tell when they sign up if you’re putting in solo or you’re putting it as a label. So, it’s just to, it’s just not to police it because, you know it’s not about watching what you’re doing, it’s just to be fair to everybody. Because, we let everybody do it, it’s fair game. We try to keep it where if you’re an artist, keep that for you, you know? And because, truth be told we had an instance, going through my Ingrooves deal where, I’m basically the parent company to Ingrooves but I’m also an aggregator through Ingrooves where I could have sub labels. And we had an instance where there was some dude that was down with a sub label under me that…he was selling service to people and people were hitting up the label that. Like, yo, why am I not getting paid and why is Doming not paying us? I’m like, who are they talking about? And they’re like, oh well we paid dude to get on. I mean well you got ripped. Because we don’t charge. You might’ve seen me post about that. I said, we don’t charge. Yeah. So, dude was undermining my friend and charging people at the studio.  Because my friend owns a studio, and the dude was the engineer and he’s like, yo, I can get you distribution for $250 and people were paying it and he was pocketing the money and then people come in to my man like, yo what’s up, where is my shit. I am like shit, you better talk to that dude.

Yeah. That doesn’t even make sense though. Even before Media Famous, like we talked, there’re a ton of different distribution places out there and none of them would charge $250.

Domingo: Yeah. If you heard $250 and you didn’t do your homework, that’s your fault.  Cause there is nobody that charges $250.

Right. Yeah. The fact that there’s still people out there that would fall for that is evidence that some kind of platform is definitely necessary that opens up a lane for artists to, get in at a better price point or even just get some education on it.

Domingo: Right. Absolutely. I mean there’re still people paying for meetings at Dev Jam. Def Jam doesn’t charge from meetings. Why would you pay that? Unfortunately, we’re in the era of no knowledge. All these people want to get on but have no knowledge of the business.  Have no knowledge of the game, have no knowledge of how to go about things. So, we’re trying to give you the knowledge with Media Famous, give you the platform, give you the knowledge.

So, speaking on that…you also mentioned resources and that you want to empower the artists. So what kinds of things would an artist expect on that front, for signing up with Media Famous.

Domingo: Well we direct you, like I can’t force them to sign up to ASCAP, BMI, or Sound Exchange. But we do direct you to that. Like when you sign up it says…like the resources, here are resources, you should, register here, register here, register here and we give you the links to go register, not where you got to do your search…let me Google it. No, no the links are right on the site. You need to register this, you had this, song split sheets, all that stuff. If you need contracts, all you got to do is email support and, be like hey, do you have a contract for such and such and we’ll get it to you, all within your membership. We ain’t giving it to you if you’re just on the site looking.

Okay. That’s definitely a difference from other places. You’re actually giving some music business tools with contracts and stuff.

Domingo: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, pretty soon I’m going to implement the beat selling back into the business model. And expand the business model because when I did the beat selling, I was really successful at it. The reason why Beats for Tunes died was because…it wasn’t that I shut it down, GoDaddy did some kind of update on one of their servers back then and lost my whole site, lost all the files. So, then I went back to the web designer who did the site and he no longer was working on websites and he’s like, dude, I don’t have the files no more. So that was that, it was it. It was over and then I built, I built the thatshiphopmusic.com through Bandzoogle. And I sell beats on there. But I want to get back into beat selling period. So, I want to make, I want to make www.mediafamous.com the hub, like we even started to blog for it. The blog just went live yesterday. And, I want to get people involved to help with the social media on it. Like I want it to be a community of artists, not necessarily social media where there’s shit flying all over the place on there. But I want to bring a community and a network together, music and people and fans where it can be kind of a hub…like for instance, on the site we got what’s called the Media Famous hot list. Like for $9.95, that’s another charge though, for $9.95…we do it twice a month where we blast out your music to our hot list. Which is…we got like 10,000 DJs, blogs, magazines, websites and the DJs are not like Joe Schmoe from down the street. Me being in the music industry, I have a lot of people’s emails, like the Khaleds, the Funkmaster Flex, I have all their delivery emails for new music. So, we do what’s called the hot list. It’s almost kind of sort of like a newsletter that goes out, again only twice a month because I don’t want to…like if…let’s say 10 people signed up to the hot list, I don’t want to do 10 different emails. So, if you want to be on that hot list and to be honest with you, yes, we do vet some of them because at the same time Media Famous…if we’re co-signing these hot lists, we got to make sure it’s not garbage at the same time.  So, there is some kind of vetting before you even get on the hot list. We gotta hear it. And then, okay, cool, you’ve been approved to be a hot list, it’s $9.95, it goes out this day. So that’s another thing that’s different that they don’t have.

Now is that only for people distributed through Media Famous or is that a separate service that even if they’re not distributed through Media Famous that people can sign up for?

Domingo: It can be both, but we try to keep it for the people that sign up to Media Famous.  But I’m not ruling out that you can’t but we’d prefer it would be from Media Famous. You know, because mediafamous.com…I’ve owned it for about maybe almost eight years. And that’s what it was in the beginning, it was promotion and marketing. And we would blast out… kind of like you would pay like Diamond Media, it was started as promotional marketing. And then when we built the digital platform, the distribution platform, we were searching for a name and I told my web designer, well I own mediafamous.com. He was like, oh my God dude, that name right there. So, I was like, okay cool. Let’s just implement all of it together. That’s it. So again, we would love it to be just people that signed up. But if not, hey you’re still going to get vetted, even if you come along out of nowhere and say, hey, I want this…because we got to make it…that’s something that we got to make sure not just any ordinary person can blast it out. Because the people that we deal with on the other end who receive the music, they’ll definitely shut you out if you send them garbage. But again, that’s something that other distributors aren’t doing. They offer to…will collect your publishing and yeah, they’re going to collect your publishing, but are they going to push you to movies and push you there. I’m not offering that because you know why? I’m not here to bullshit the artist.  I’m not in the game to push your stuff. You as the artist got to push your stuff too. So, these people will collect your publishing. They’ll collect all that. Yeah. Not a problem, but at the end of the day, like I said, these are things you could be doing yourself.

Right. Okay. So, for that $9.95 a year, they get the distribution, the digital distribution. You’ve got a lot of different partners. They get analytics.  So, plays and spins reports like that sort of thing. Okay. And then even some music tools like contracts that they can use.

Domingo: Resources where to sign up for your music. And also…I’m almost finished with it…I don’t know if you remember, I was writing a book called Publishing the Real Estate in music. I’m almost finished with that. I actually had put a pre order up for sale months ago, but then I took it down because I felt I need to add more to it. But now when, once it is done, hopefully by mid-September. It is going to be up on the site, and it is going to be distributed to people who sign up, only people who sign up.

So, they’re going to get a free copy of this book or is it going to be sale?

Domingo: No. They get it for free. The ones that sign up. But you got to sign up to Media Famous to get it. I mean the book was $9.95, so it is no difference. You just have distribution and get a book. It is a bonus.

All right, so it sounds like there’s a complete package here. Now you guys, you just launched recently, so everything is up and running right now?

Domingo: What, Media Famous? Yeah, everything’s up. Yeah.

Okay. That sounds good.

Domingo: Media Famous launched like two weeks ago.

All right. So, is there anything else you want to add that people should know about Media Famous and the distribution?

Domingo: No, just that, it’s like I said, it’s trying to level the playing field for indie artists and the artist should definitely check us out and give us a shot and if at any time you want to cancel it and we can always cancel it and take your music down if you want to go back to, whoever you were using, but we’re just here to give the indie artists a fair shot at a cost effective rate, affordable and with resources that others can’t give you.

Right. All right sounds great.

Domingo: Yes, sir.

I appreciate the time.