Music distribution | Jeff McNeill

Distributors

The main music distributors are fairly well known. Probably all of them have some kind of problem with them. Many are dealbreakers. The biggest issue is (as is the case with most online services) response time and response quality for support issues. Of course, the system has to actually work, but beyond that, answering questions and taking action in a timely way is sadly a lost art.

Bad distributors

Routenote - Support requests take a week, as does any review of any track or album.
Bandcamp - Support requests never get answered, or in the rare case they do, it can take 5-6 weeks or more.
Kinjari - My response to their email, which was frankly rude (their email, not my response) ended up in their spam box (odd since they sent me the email first, and I simply replied). There was an apology, but they don't have their act together yet. They claimed that my song follows a pattern for AI spam but indeed, that means they are using AI to do pattern recognition, so who is at fault here?

Good distributor

So far, I've only found one, though of course not everything is perfect.

Distrokid - Chat response bot wasn't helpful but I requested help from a human and they came online in 20 minutes. Some confusion about my question and dumping of pre-selected text answers, but after I got through that, they quickly and helpfully answered three different questions I had. Also, their service is quite fast.

Distrokid features and non-features

They don't deal with PROs at all, and stick with pure distribution for a single yearly fee (three options), as well as have add-ons/up-sells available. The main thing is getting stuff into the main streamers:

Apple
iTunes
Spotify
Instagram
YouTube Music
TikTok

Distrokid upgrades

Master track (Mixea) $99/year
Add a merch store (with album art) $70/year
YouTube Content ID, TikTok music ID, Instagram and Facebook Meta Rights Manager monetization costs $4.95/yr + 20% of ad platform (called Social Media Pack)
Store maximizer adds single or album to new stores as they are added to Distrokid distribution
Discovery pack 0.99/year per track - song recognition in Gracenote, SoundScan, Jaxta, ACRCloud
Legacy adds protection from cancelling Distrokid subscriptions $29 one-time fee

Additional features

Change album artwork after upload
Note, can even swap out audio, with the top subscription

Notes

There are a lot of royalties for music outside of a streaming service. For more info see article on music royalties.