🎶 Submitting music

[resonatecoop]

Music submission form

To use the form, you need to be logged in with an artist account on our main site: Log In • Resonate ID, not this Community Forum site. If you wish to post at the Community Forum, you’ll need to create a new forum account.

Whether you are an artist, label, or artist manager, please submit releases while logged in via the Artist Account corresponding to the release. If you are a label, the New Release Submission Form will have a place to note your label.

Before submitting a release:

1. Did you complete your artist profile?
2. Do you own the rights to this release worldwide?
3. Are 100% of the tracks written by you or your band?
4. Do you authorize Resonate to use your profile images in social media promotion?

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Submission guidelines

Creating a submission

Your submission should be a folder containing the following files, hosted on either Google Drive, Dropbox, or another service which hosts links that do not expire. If you send a private link, one of our Upload Volunteers will request access.

• All audio track files in either FLAC, WAV, or AIFF format. Both 16-bit and 24-bit work for us.
• Square album artwork in JPEG, JPG, or PNG format with minimum dimensions of 1400x1400 pixels. Maximum dimensions are 3000x3000 pixels. Maximum file size is 5 MB.
• Metadata information for your release and for your tracks (see below)

Metadata

Your metadata must be presented using a spreadsheet and included in your submission folder. We have created a spreadsheet template for you to use – please note that the template has multiple tabs. If you have a metadata spreadsheet which includes all the required information, you may use it instead of our template.

Accepted file types: ODS, XLSX, XLS

Required Release-level metadata

• Release Artist
• Release Title
• Release Date - Year is required; Month and Day are optional. Write out the full date: “19th August, 2013”
• Release Composer(s) - List the writers who should be credited for this release
• The number of tracks on the release
• Release Type - Single, EP, or Album

Required Track-Level Metadata

• Each track name
• The filename of each track
• The sequence number of each track

Optional Release Metadata

• Performer(s) - List additional performers on the release by their artist names
• Tags(s) - Searchable on the Resonate Player. Format tags as compound words with no special characters or spaces. Example: hiphop, not hip-hop or hip hop
• Description - Maximum 10,000 characters long, including spaces

Schedule

Current wait time for an upload is 1-3 weeks from submission. We will email you when your release has been uploaded to the Resonate Player.

If your submission was reviewed and found incomplete, we will email you for corrections. If necessary, your corrected submission will be delayed to to fit our schedule.

If you have an upcoming release date, please send us an email about it at upload@resonate.coop. We’ll do our best to accommodate it. Please give us two weeks notice.

[theuniverse0101]

Maybe a dumb question but I’m pretty new to this. How long does it take to receive the submission form after sending an email to request one? I’m very excited to start submitting!
Thank you!

[Hakanto]

Hey, welcome! Takes a week at the very most. Generally no more than a couple days.

And if you feel you’re waiting a while, just send a follow up email poking us being like “psst hey form please”.

[theuniverse0101]

Thank you so much for the quick reply! I actually just received my link right now! I’m excited to upload!

[theargentgrub]

Hello I already have a copy of the spreadsheet template from a previous submission
(resonate-metadata-template_2021-jun-15_v8-1.xlsx) - but the link in the post above to ‘spreadsheet template’ https://resonate.is/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/resonate-metadata-template_2021-jun-15_v8-1.xlsx is failing for me - takes me to an Ooops page.

Not sure if it needs fixing,or if I’m in the wrong place etc - I came to this post via Artist Dashboard - Resonate
Thanks

[remst8]

Hi, @theargentgrub - Thank you for reporting your problems with the metadata spreadsheet download link.

I just tried that link with Safari and Chrome, and they both downloaded the .xlsx file immediately. Maybe there was a temporary problem with the Resonate site? Which browser are you using?

[theargentgrub]

Hello @remst8

Got your message and just retried the link and it works fine now.
For reference I was/am using Firefox 96.0, on Ubunto 20.04 from the UK

At the time reported it I was seeing some but not all the images on the site - I thought that might just be bandwidth problems my end, so carried on. Might or might not be related (wp-content?)

Anyway, all good with the for, and I even think my submission has been published - fast, good work, people!
Thanks

[KallieMarie]

Weird question over here, and not sure if its come up yet. I have a separate music catalogue with a different name. I would like to put them up on Resonate, but I wanted to first find out, apart from setting up a whole separate profile, which I dont necessarily want to do cause (separate email?, double me in the forum etc) is there a way of linking all to one main account? (Bandcamp is set up this way so that I can have multiple projects, DistroKid too.) Just wondering if there is a way to do this, so that I dont have to pester everyone half way through the process. I have two EPs of music for my band Explosives For Her Majesty, that I would like to upload, and there will be a new EP in the future going up for that project.

[Hakanto]

@KallieMarie

is there a way of linking all to one main account?

Not yet, but serious progress has been made toward this. For now, here’s the process:

Managing multiple artist profiles as a label or manager

We are building new account management and uploading tools for artists and labels. In the future you will be able to manage multiple artist personas from an Artist Account or Label Account. For now, there are limitations when getting set up as a label or artist manager on Resonate. If you are managing more than a few artists, it would be better to email us at members@resonate.is and request to get on the label waiting list. We’ll let you know when we’re ready for you. If you don’t mind some ex…

[thehouseorgan]

Forgive me if I’m wrong… and @Hakanto is definitely correct above… but on upload you can enter a different artist name.

Such an upload would still be added to your Kallie Marie account, profile etc. (they’d show up here - Resonate) the album and track ownership would still be your existing account but they’d display the different artist name in the player etc.

If you needed account/profile separation this wouldn’t be any use. But if the other artist name was happy as a pseudonym under Kallie Marie, it should work.

Now there might be other reasons I’m not thinking of as to why we don’t want to encourage this though.

[Hakanto]

Yes absolutely. For an example, see how @CPacaud’s solo releases appear with his name, yet are on the artist page for Contemplator.

That’s one solution. But if folks want multiple artist profiles/pages, they should use the process linked above.

[KallieMarie]

Ok, in that case I will just have to hold off on uploading more because its going to get insane having duplicate resonate emails and different accounts. Its too much. Please keep us updated when this feature roles out. Cant wait for it!

[KallieMarie]

I wouldn’t encourage this because if there were splits on the royalties then that could be confusing. I assume the royalties would all go to one place? In my case it wouldn’t really matter for now, the last two EPs for my band are all credit back to me as I’ve worked out arrangements with my collaborators. However I cant speak to what the next EP would be like, and by doing so I would have painted myself into a corner for future releases. Aka prob bad look. This should definitely be high up there on the list, I would think, as I imagine its a similar infrastructure for say… labels? But I am not sure…

[Hakanto]

@Uploaders Let’s no longer accept FLAC files in submissions, starting Feb 14.

I’ve updated:

• the Submitting music guide
• the Updated audio needed email template

After conversations with @auggod, it seems that accepting only WAV and AIFF will put us in a better position to offer downloads in the future. If anyone else has thoughts on this, feel free to jump in.

[thehouseorgan]

I hear this!!! I have 5 artist accounts, one label account, and an uploader account. It’s madness.

[thehouseorgan]

I like uploading flac’s. They’re smaller files so upload quicker (nice when it’s a full album). They tend to come with embedded track metadata so track titles etc. are correct automatically. I can think of one specific example where they come from a label and so I wonder if metadata’d flacs are common within the industry or not? Might be worth thinking about in terms of working with more label catalogues in the future.

Having said all of that though, I think downloads are more important so if this helps it sounds good to me.

[remst8]

@Hakanto

accepting only WAV and AIFF will put us in a better position to offer downloads in the future

Are there technical challenges with transcoding FLACs to other formats? The ‘L’ in FLAC stands for “Lossless”, so transcoding to MP3 for download should have no impact on sound quality versus using a WAV or AIFF file as a source.

If that isn’t the problem, I’d like to learn why WAV and AIFF have been determined to be better than FLAC for downloads in the future.

@thehouseorgan

I like uploading flac’s. They’re smaller files so upload quicker (nice when it’s a full album). They tend to come with embedded track metadata so track titles etc. are correct automatically.

100% agree with all this.

[auggod]

I’d like we postpone this decision to stop accepting FLAC.

[Hakanto]

Sounds good to me.

@Uploaders, let’s keep accepting FLAC. I’ve updated the guide and email template.

[CPacaud]

My late two cents (sorry) -

I’m assuming this is related to eventually providing downloads in multiple formats, hence requiring an uncompressed source file from which other formats would be encoded/generated automatically (à la Bandcamp).

FLAC is a lossless format, so theoretically identical in terms of sound produced to an uncompressed WAV file, meaning there is no quality loss in producing WAV files from them “after the fact” if we want to provide the option for listeners to download WAV files for their music.

For me, it’s more of an ethcial question: is it okay to say: here, you can download this in uncompressed WAV, when in some cases the files would be converted from a FLAC source (even though again, theoretically, no quality loss occurs)?

Also, I realize this imposes some more work on the backend of things to support all the additional transcoding cases, so that might be a factor to consider as well.

And I’m re-reading what @remst8 wrote, and I pretty much wrote the exact same thing in a lot more words… Weee