Why AND?

Hello!

Glad you could stop by AND HQ! This was built from the ground up by Nick and Aaron, absolutely amazing people who are on a mission to change the music industry for the better.

I'm Dave, I make things happen in AND, such as this great blog site you're looking at now. I have also made music under the alias DavZ for several years now, and by far the most frustrating problem I've had is dealing with the unholy clusterf**k that is music distribution.

You want to make your listeners' lives easier by putting your work on the platform they prefer. Hypothetically, you sign up with some distributor to upload your work either for a large fixed amount per month / year or an exorbitant fee on your royalties statement.

Oh look! You get a nice feature from a Youtube channel, potentially providing revenue that unfortunately could barely pay off an extra water bill. But the distributor either can't do Content ID or adds extra fees and makes it harder.

Ooh there's another service who is good exclusively for Content ID. So now, not only do you have to publish your music to Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Audius and this new distributor, but you also need to manage Content ID under a different system who pays everything out to different payment methods? Their conversion rates are also wildly dynamic and not easy to find information for, so if you're in Europe or overseas (like me in Australia), then you're losing even more money and you can't keep track of it all.

Oh, and you can't release collaborations unless you pay even more? Oh, your collaborator wants to use another service that you don't have an account for?

Turns out some person used your music in their intro without permission, or your work was distributed with the wrong name, but you couldn't figure out how to contact customer support, and when you did it took several months to respond to you?

By that time, I would have lost my energy to push forward with my own releases, considering that I have to make visuals, promotional material, release schedule, figure out physicals, merchandise. Since when did one singular aspect of this entire process get so complicated?

I've burned out several times due to coordinating this exact problem. Music distribution is as much of a roadblock as data entry is (it pretty much is, let's be honest).

So, where does AND fit in?

This is why AND is a very special distribution platform. We want to make it easier for artists to get easy to access payouts, collaborations, Content ID integration (with hopefully video and channel level whitelisting), and access to customer support that will knock your socks off in this day and age.

We are fundamentally non-profit, your hard work's worth goes to you, we pay the expenses we need to pay to keep this ship and ourselves afloat. Every single pothole we can find is filled, every link is strengthened.

As artists and creatives, we understand the struggle and we're working very hard to make this easier for everybody. With our closed beta group we are figuring out how to provide value with the tools that we have before we scale with the large user base. Aaron and Nick have been coordinating some absolutely crazy stuff so that we can cut our fees and unnecessary fat out of this process.

If you're excited to see what we are working on, sign up to our waiting list, and we will let you know when we're ready.