Music distributors, compared

The real tradeoff

Flat subscription (DistroKid). One yearly fee, unlimited uploads, keep ~100%. Cheapest per release if you put music out regularly, but stop paying and your catalog can come down.

Per-release fee (TuneCore). Pay for each release, wide store reach. Predictable if you release rarely; newer percentage plans give a lower-upfront option.

One-time fee + a cut (CD Baby). Pay once per release with no annual renewal, but historically a ~9% slice of streaming revenue, plus publishing administration if you want it. Convenient for release-and-forget; the % cut grows with your success.

Free + paid Pro (Amuse, RouteNote, UnitedMasters). A real free tier to get on stores at zero cost, paid for through a royalty share or lighter features, with a paid tier for faster payouts and more control. Lowest barrier to entry; upgrade as you grow.

Bundled toolkit (LANDR, Too Lost, Soundrop). Distribution as one piece of a wider product: mastering and plugins at LANDR, label accounts at Too Lost, cover-song licensing at Soundrop. Worth it when you already need the rest of the bundle.

Label services by application (AWAL, Symphonic, ONErpm, Stem, Believe, EMPIRE, The Orchard). A negotiated revenue share in exchange for actual humans doing marketing, playlisting, and sometimes funding. The tradeoff is access: they choose you, not the other way round, and the muscle goes to priority releases.

In short: flat fees reward volume and success, a % cut costs little until you grow, free lowers the barrier to start, and the selective tier trades a share for muscle you cannot buy at the DIY level. None of them, though, gets anyone to actually press play.

How distribution got this cheap

It helps to remember what these companies replaced. For most of the recorded music era, distribution meant pressing plants, wholesalers, and fights for record-store rack space, all controlled by labels, while radio decided what got heard. Getting distributed was the gatekeeping. That wall came down in stages: CD Baby opened DIY digital distribution in 1998, TuneCore brought flat-fee uploads to the download stores in 2006, and DistroKid collapsed the price again in 2013 with one cheap subscription for unlimited releases.

Two decades later the result is a firehose: industry estimates put uploads to the major streaming services above one hundred thousand new tracks every single day, and even the DIY tier is consolidating into bigger hands. Believe owns TuneCore, Sony owns both AWAL and The Orchard, and CD Baby has changed corporate owners more than once. Distribution went from the industry’s moat to a commodity you can buy for the price of a pizza, which moved the real bottleneck one step down the funnel: getting anyone to listen. On streaming platforms, playlists inherited the discovery role radio used to play.

We trace the full story in our history of music distribution disruption and explain the mechanics in music distribution explained.

What about playlist pitching?

Here is the part distributor marketing pages blur: every distributor in both tables gives you the exact same editorial front door, the pitch form inside Spotify for Artists, and no distributor has a side entrance into Spotify’s editorial or algorithmic playlists. What is left is the independent curator layer, the one playlist family you can actually reach out to, and no distributor ships a real research engine for it. DistroKid’s Playlister comes closest and still caps you at 20 contacts a day with no vetting; we compare it to a dedicated tool in PlaylistSupply vs DistroKid Playlister.

PlaylistSupply covers exactly that layer, with unlimited searches, playlist quality vetting, and verified curator contacts where one is available, and because it never touches distribution it works alongside every company on this page. You can preview the territory in our free playlist curator directory.