Model -
As music distributor our model is to provide a low cost service to producers and labels who can do most of the marketing and preparation work themselves, utilising our experience and contacts and systems to get their music to the different markets.
Digital/Physical
We offer a full digital distribution service for a flat percentage of all revenue we manage to be part of securing. Here are the basics.
1 - No fixed costs on each release, no storage costs, no encoding or metadata management costs as well as a free full data service for your royalty accounting and trend data for marketing use.
2 - No long term contracts on repertoire with fixed term licenses on individual songs. However we reserve a limited option to one new song in the case of a new act from producers.
3 - If you don't have a publisher we offer music publishing through our sister firm Songwrights Publishers, with no upfront publishing cost. There are no costs for the mechanical license admin, whether you use third party music or your own repertoire.
4 - We use aggregation partners and physical fulfilment partners with whom we have the best deals and over 20 years partnership.
5 - As an Indie at heart, we offer guidance and advice if you are prepared to do the work of label management yourself. We can even offer you shell label services with one of our in house labels should you not have a registered label.
If your productions that we have in digital distribution are also available as physical product we can provide automatic third party distribution in Western Europe though stock held in our warehouse in Hamburg, Germany. This is an option which you are not obliged to utilise.
Like low cost flying, you get there with no (un-necessary) frills, what we offer is the music distribution equivalent. Our customers have music that has only hundreds of streams to songs with millions of plays.
History -
With the lapse of restraints of the trade arrangements, Patrick decided to utilise The Orchard for certain digital services in 1997. To begin with it was only the Mountain and Sea Records labels as they charted new waters with Scott Cohen and his colleagues in their newly founded firm. Physical distribution had already been switched to Newmusic Distribution, the company started by Patrick in 1996.
By 2006 LTE was running a distribution business offering services to selected Indie labels from France, Benelux, Germany, Portugal, the UK, as well as taking care of the six in-house labels of Songwrights Publishers. We were exporting finished product to these same countries. This export has largely ended with the drastic reduction in demand for physical product, though we do have an online shop presence in the EU and service selected wholesalers. We concentrate on the German market for physical product now.
LTE Distribution still represents different chosen labels and even single artists for digital distribution based on the slimmed down model shown above. The continuing association with the successor of Newmusic Distribution, NMD Distribution (now owned by Membran Entertainment) and the association with The Orchard (now a owned SONY satellite), means the firm is still a full service distributor with over 25 years experience.
LTE was started in Cape Town, South Africa in the mid-1970s, with a distribution alliance with EMI. That endured some 30 years until taken over by Universal Music, through whom the African CD catalogue is still available.
Today LTE provides management, agency, publishing and distribution services to indie producers, labels and artists in different territories, in some cases on a world-wide basis from the base in Hamburg, Germany.
All inquiries for LTE -
email - leethorpentertianment@gmail.com
post - Postfach 762334, 22070 Hamburg, Deutschland
twitter - if you insist @DistributionLte
Link to some physical distribution history - - https://newmusicpublishing.blogspot.com/2020/01/newmusic-distribution.html
Producers and Artists be advised, aggregators are not distributors. You still need the skills of a distributor to fully exploit the potential of your music. And if possible a distributor with some experience of both the analogue and digital world. LTE Distribution, is one such music distributor.
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