Marketing Traditional Music Digitally

The digital era like today allows every individual to market their products, including art products. Traditional music is one of those who get this convenience.

Nowadays, traditional music can be marketed digitally to digital music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Joox, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube Music and so on.

There are several ways that musicians and songwriters can do to market their work through digital platforms, namely through aggregators. A music aggregator or distributor is a company that distributes music to various platforms that sell music works, both downloaded and streamed.

Distributors distribute masterpiece audio recordings to various outlets such as Spotify, iTunes, JOOX, Deezer, TikTok and others. After a certain period of time aggregators collect royalties and remit to the owner of the work. Some well-known aggregators include Believe Music and Tunecore.

Aggregators are one of the favorites for musicians and songwriters to publish their works on digital music platforms because there is no need to market music one by one to these digital platforms, it's just that the distribution of music costs money. This can be done free of charge but the aggregator will collect profits from each musician's work.

Tukang Tabuh is a traditional music community that has also marketed its music digitally. There have been ten singles that have been marketed on digital platforms.

Since the beginning Tukang Tabuh has used the services of a local aggregator company based in Badung, Bali called Werdimedia. This aggregator has sufficient distribution procedures, including filling out forms, uploading artworks (a type of album cover), and uploading recordings in WAV format. All of these things can be done online.

After all the requirements are submitted it usually takes one to two weeks for the work to be published. There is an administration fee of US$4 for a single that is charged to artists when using their services, and from views on these platforms will be divided by a percentage of the profits, which is 70% for musicians and 30% for aggregators.

Werdi Media is connected to an international aggregator company, Believe Music, so that musicians or artists get a backstage belive account automatically. This makes it easier for musicians or artists to directly monitor how their work is shown on digital platforms and can also see how much royalties they get.

The emergence of these aggregators makes it easier for music creators to be able to distribute their work regardless of which genre the music is from. For traditional music, marketing music digitally is very, very meaningful. They get the opportunity to reach a wider market and gain access to be appreciated by the music lovers community.