How to Self-Release a Schranz Track: The Turn Up The Bass Workflow

All right, so now the next thing we're gonna talk about is releasing your music. So full transparency, most of the releases that I do are released through a label. But if you're just starting and you wanna get your music out there and you wanna start building a following, the best thing you can do is just start self-releasing your music. You don't wanna just be sitting on a ton of music because you're waiting for some label to magically come in and save the day and release all your music and make you

a superstar. So you definitely want to get in the habit of just making tracks, putting them out, and self-releasing. And there's a lot of artists that very successfully self-release their music and they've built a following and built a career off that. So there's tons of different websites you can use like Tunecore, DistroKid. I'm not even sure of the rest because I really don't do this that often, but I have released using DistroKid. So that is the one I'm gonna demonstrate with today. So there's two paths that you take when you're

releasing music. You want to go to something like DistroKid, which is a distributor, and you're going to upload a track to distribute it to streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, whatever streaming platform you like to listen to. And then you're gonna upload it to SoundCloud. That is not distributed through DistroKid. That is its own separate process, and I'll show you how to do that as well. So we're on DistroKid now. What we wanna do is you're gonna wanna make an account. I already have an account and I'm logged

in. I've only released one song on DistroKid. We're gonna go to Upload Music, and then you can see the services here that you want. There's Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Beatport. That's a good one too. You definitely want your stuff on Beatport. Instagram and Facebook. This is good because then people can use your song in Reels. Same with TikTok, YouTube Music, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal, iHeartReel, like all these ones. You can do Snapchat, Roblox. That's pretty crazy. I didn't even know that. I just leave all of these checked, and then I

do not add any of their upsells. I just don't even really need it. Has this single been previously released? I'm gonna say no. Artist band name. I'm doing Hellbound. That is my artist name. You can put in whatever artist name that you want. Artist already in Spotify. I don't even remember how I did this. I probably had to link my Spotify and Apple Music. If you haven't done this, you're gonna have to do this for the first time, and I'm sure there's YouTube videos out there that explain how to do

this and can walk you through it. So then we have Release Date. Set your release date at least one week in advance to improve your chances of playlist placement. This is definitely recommended. I know some people do up to a month in advance because it helps with playlisting, but you can set it to whatever you want. I just don't overthink it, but for me, I'm just gonna do it a month in advance. So now we're at July 18th, and I'm like, okay, cool. Release time, Spotify only. I'll set it to

midnight. Synchronize release based on listener's time zone. I do that for default. Pre-order, don't even need that. Record label, do whatever record label you want. This is your own independent release. So if you wanna start a record label, you can use this opportunity to start distributing all of your songs through your own record label that you created. I just did this one called Who Cares, because at the time I was like, who fucking cares? I don't care. I'm not starting a record label. I just wanna put this song out, and

I wanna put it out quick. So I put the record labels, who cares? Language, English, primary genre. For me, let's see if they have hard techno. They definitely don't have Schranz in here, but they probably have techno. Do they not have techno? Let's see. I guess just electronic. Electronic subgenre. There we go. Hardcore, hard techno. That's great. Secondary genre. We could put maybe electronic and see if there's a subgenre again. We don't need it. We don't need a secondary genre, so I'm just gonna go back, select another genre. Album cover.

It says recommended images are 3000 by 3000. This is just a recommendation though. We accept most image sizes. So I'm going to select an image. I'm gonna go back into our artist folder, and I have this artwork here. This is just our triptych, Schron's Essentials artwork. I'm just gonna use that, and there we go. We have our artwork, woo hoo. Now, song title, Turn Up the Bass, and then add featured artists to the song title. No, because this is just me. If you wanted to, I could probably do something like

Graveyard or something, Graveyard Sounds. So now we can see at the bottom, it says Turn Up the Bass featuring Graveyard Sounds, but I'm gonna just do no. Add version info to song title. No, this is the normal version. This is if you had like an extended mix or a radio mix. Now we're gonna upload our audio file. This is the master that we selected. Hit upload, master your track. Nope, we're not doing that. Add Dolby Atmos Spatial Audio. Nope. Songwriter slash cover song. I wrote this song. So songwriter's real name.

You can put your real name if you want. I'm not going to. I'm just gonna leave it as hellbound. Explicit lyrics. No. No. Instrumental. This song contains lyrics. Does this song include AI generated music? No. Preview, clip, start time. So this is if you wanted to, like when somebody is previewing your track on like TikTok or Beatport, you could specify exactly where you wanted this to start. So if we went back into our track and we were like, ooh, I want people to listen to right leading up to the buildup.

Turn up the bass, turn up the bass So maybe 59 seconds would be an appropriate part to do it. So I'll scroll down, 59 seconds. Then we can set our price. I go $1.29. I think typically tracks are like above a dollar now. We don't need to do any of this. Don't need to do any of that. And then I just would check all of these, you know, maybe read them if you want to. But there we go. Looks good. Continue. Okay, problem with track one, missing songwriter name. Each track

must have at least one songwriter listed. Stores require real names for songwriter, not stage names. Add track credits to meet Apple requirements. All right, let's go back up and do that. So I guess performer. Okay, Banjo. Let me see. Do we just have music producer here? Ah, producer, singer and vocals. Let's see. What do we have here? Do we have producer, producer? Ah, man, I don't even know. Sampled artist, former. Turn table if I was the DJ. Ah, man, I don't know. I feel like I'm missing something. Let's just do

other instrument and I'll do my name, which is Vince Tassione. Oh wait, here we go. Producer, I'm an idiot. That satisfy that. I think up here, I probably have to do my name, Vince Tassione. And then now let's try it. It looks good. Continue. And I'm gonna have to cancel this. I hope this isn't permanent. See, let's see. Okay. No, I am not doing this at all. Use my originals. Continue. Hooray, your music is on the way. It's gonna be released July 18th, 2026. Okay, so I am going to then

go back to my music dashboard and try to delete this. But I just wanted to sort of demonstrate how you could distribute a song to Spotify, Apple Music and whatnot.

to Spotify, Apple Music and whatnot. Now the next thing you'd wanna do is you would wanna go to SoundCloud and you would wanna upload your track. So we're gonna go to upload track. I'm going to select our track. Then I'm going to select the artwork. So the next thing we're gonna do is we are going to schedule this release. And what we're gonna wanna do is set it to be the same date as our release in DistroKid. So we're gonna select July 18th, 2026. We can set it to be 12

a.m. that day. And then the next thing we're gonna wanna do is we're gonna wanna go down to Advanced Details. And this is where you can add a buy link. What you would wanna do is create like a download gate. What I would recommend is either linking this to like a link tree where you can host your Beatport sale link or your Bandcamp sale link if you wanna sell on Bandcamp. Or honestly, what I would do if you're self-releasing, I would allow people to download this for free because it's going

to have a better chance of becoming viral. And I think the virality of the track is more important than the small amount of money you may get from the purchases of the track. So then what you'd wanna do is go to like a download gate, like hype edit or something, upload your track there. And it's basically like a download gate type of thing. And then you would put that link in here. And then for the buy link title, you would do download. And you would do that like the day of

the track. And then you would go ahead and you would hit upload and that would then upload your track to SoundCloud. And it would schedule the release to match the Spotify release and the DistroKid distribution release. So that is pretty much it when it comes to releasing music. I definitely recommend you to finish tracks and release them and start networking with people that are sort of in the same stage as you are when it comes to songwriting and just being an artist. Because it's really, really important to start that early.