Artist friendly platforms: digital distribution

UPDATE: after DistroKid laid off many of their newly-formed union employees an hour ahead of contract negotiations in favor of outsourcing their work to cheap overseas labor, it’s difficult to continue to recommend this service as an artist-friendly platform.

Original article follows:

There’s a lot of tech platforms to choose from, when it comes to releasing your musical work independently. Do you need to be on all of them, none of them, or just a few?

Last time, we went over general talking points about how to evaluate platforms. Remember, the ability to own your audience is a defining feature of an artist friendly platform.

Today, let’s dig deeper into two current digital distribution platforms to see how this concept plays out in practice.

What is a digital distribution platform?

A refresher: small independent artists can’t deal directly with many of the largest streaming music providers. Instead, they need to use an intermediary digital distribution platform that places their music onto services like Spotify, Apple Music, etc for them.

Yep, this is yet another middleman. But, luckily, this service is a lot cheaper nowadays than it used to be.

Usually, it’ll make sense to pay for this digital distribution service, and that will cover the releasing of your music on all of the major streaming music platforms. Many distributors also allow you to pick and choose exactly which streamers you’d like your music to appear on, as well.

Distrokid pros

• Quite affordable for individual artists: plans currently start at under $2/month for unlimited uploads of songs to every major music streaming platform.

• Handles high quality, master-level uploads, at no additional cost.

• Here’s the current (at time of writing) list of features and prices from behind the account wall:

The Distrokid pricing page

Distrokid cons

• Not scalable: if you’re operating a label with large numbers of artists on it, your distribution costs will quickly become prohibitive. Don’t be fooled by that $7.50/mo for 5-100 artists thing. You’ll find that the monthly price increases so rapidly for every additional artist you want to add to your account, that it gets to the point where it’s not really affordable if you’re a small indie label. The “starts at” qualifier placed there before the pricing gives it away.

• This distributor is really for the small independent who wants to release music directly by themselves-label distribution is a whole other thing.

• After DistroKid laid off many of their newly-formed union employees an hour ahead of contract negotiations in favor of outsourcing their work to cheap overseas labor, it’s difficult to continue to recommend this service as an artist-friendly platform.

Tunecore pros

• I wish I could find some! This is a tough one to recommend. Here’s why: take a close look at their marketing (current at time of writing):

The Tunecore pricing page

Tunecore cons

• Old-school, overpriced, and dying.

• This marketing is super disingenuous. Read the fine print for their plans: it says you get “unlimited releases” but with the qualifier “to all social platforms”. That means you get unlimited “distribution” on Instagram, Facebook, etc. But, that’s obviously something that you already get for free, just by having an account on these social platforms.

• When you try to figure out exactly how many releases you get onto the actual real streaming music platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, etc, their pricing becomes much more opaque. To the point where I couldn’t find an answer to this in my research, because they don’t define what “Unlimited Releases to all Digital Stores” actually means, anywhere.

• If a business can’t be perfectly clear, transparent, and upfront about their pricing with you, it’s gonna be a hard pass from me every time. It should be for you too.