How to choose a music distributor

Which distributor should I use? It is one of the first questions I get asked by anyone about to put their first record out, and I have spent years giving a longer answer than it deserves.

Here is the shorter one. There are around twenty credible distributors and they all do the same core job. Your music gets onto Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok and everywhere else. That part was solved years ago and nobody is meaningfully better at it than anyone else.

What separates them is what happens to your money afterwards. That is the bit buried under comparison tables running to sixty rows, when perhaps five of those rows will change anything for you. So here are the five, and then a tool that does the filtering.

What actually decides it

Subscription or commission. You either pay a yearly fee and keep 100% of your royalties, or you pay nothing upfront and hand over 9% to 15% forever. If you release regularly, the yearly fee wins comfortably. If you put out one single that earns forty quid, the commission model wins and you have lost nothing. There is a third model, paying once per release and keeping it live permanently, which suits anyone with a slow release schedule and a back catalogue they want to keep online without paying rent on it every year.

Paying your collaborators. This is the cost nobody factors in, so let me show you the maths.

Say you put out six tracks this year and cut four people into each one. Producer, co-writer, a couple of players. On DistroKid, splitting royalties costs £10 per collaborator per year. If those are twenty different people across the year, that is £200 on top of your £23 subscription. The same splits on Too Lost, OFFstep, LANDR, SoundCloud or Symphonic cost you nothing at all.

That is not a small feature difference. That is a tenfold difference in what the year actually costs you, hiding behind two headline prices that look near enough identical.

If you pay anyone a share of your master royalties, free payment splitting is worth more than every other line on the comparison charts put together. Doing that accounting by hand is miserable and you will get it wrong.

Customer support. Invisible until it isn't. Nobody thinks about it when they sign up, and everybody thinks about it when a release is stuck four days before launch and there is no human on the other end. Several of the cheapest options are almost entirely automated. A couple of the well-reviewed ones have backlogs they admit to.

Credits and lyrics. Amazon Music, Tidal and Pandora display full credits in the app now. If you want the person who played the horn line to be named on the record, check your distributor allows it, because plenty will only credit songwriters and producers. It costs you nothing and it means something to the people who played on it.

The things you probably do not need yet. Sync pitching, playlist plugging, advances, label services. Being on a platform that offers these is not the same as being given them. They go to the artists already showing traction, which is the opposite of how they get marketed at you.

The exception is being able to talk to an actual person, and I think that is badly undervalued. I have had an act picked up for Spotify editorial playlists off the back of a conversation with a human being at EmuBands. No automated support system was ever going to do that. Ditto, RouteNote and AWAL are all reachable in the same way, and you tend to meet the people behind them at industry events, which is usually how any of this starts. If two options look identical on price, pick the one that answers the phone.

Find your shortlist

Answer the first three questions. The last two are optional and just sharpen the result.

On reviews, and on getting this wrong

I nearly left Ditto Music out of this entirely, on the strength of a well-known comparison piece that puts them in a do-not-use category. Then I remembered I have used them myself and had no problems at all, and that the harshest write-up of them comes from a writer whose own article mentions that Ditto's co-CEO threatened him with legal action. That is not nothing, but it is not neutral either.

So I put them back in. Every distributor at this price point has a pile of furious reviews, and a good chunk of that comes from artists who signed up to a self-serve service and thought they were signing to a label. Nobody is pitching your song for you unless you are specifically paying for that.

Judge them on what you can actually check. What it costs. What it takes out of your royalties. What happens to your music if you stop paying. Whether you can reach a human when something breaks.

You are not locked in

Two things worth knowing before you agonise over this.

You can use different distributors for different releases. There is no exclusivity here. The only rule is one distributor per release, because two would put the same track on Spotify twice.

You can also move an existing release from one distributor to another. Reuse the original ISRC code when you do, or you will lose your stream counts and any playlist placements that track has picked up. That one detail catches out more people than anything else on this page.

Which means the stakes here are lower than the length of this article suggests. Pick the closest fit, and if you get it wrong you have lost about thirty quid and an afternoon.

What your subscription actually buys

Every one of these companies is a service, not a label. None of them take ownership of your music, which is the good news. It also means that getting your record delivered and getting your record heard are two separate purchases.

Distribution is delivery. Distribution is delivery. Worth reading twice, because the idea that picking the right distributor will grow your audience is bullshit and it gets sold hard.

To be fair to them, plenty will push your music and some are properly good at it. Kycker, Symphonic, ONErpm, UnitedMasters, AWAL, Stem and Identity Music all have people who pitch playlists, chase radio and work sync, and the EmuBands conversation I mentioned earlier is exactly that in action. But every bit of it is either a bolt-on you pay for on top, or a commission deal you have to be accepted onto first. None of it is what your twenty quid a year buys, and none of them will promise you an outcome, because nobody honestly can.

So if you want someone working your release, budget for it as its own line rather than expecting it to arrive bundled. And if you cannot budget for it yet, that work does not stop being necessary. It just falls to you.

A note on sources

Most articles comparing distributors, including the best one, earn affiliate commission on sign-ups. That shapes which companies get the warm write-ups and which get quietly left out. Nothing on this page is an affiliate link and I earn nothing whichever one you pick.

One thing I should declare, though. I have worked with Kycker for years across a stack of releases and I have an ongoing working relationship with them, so I am not a neutral party on that one. It is flagged on their card in the tool as well. Read what I say about them knowing that, and go and form your own view.

Much of the research behind this comes from Ari Herstand's distribution comparison, which is the most thorough public source on the subject and worth reading in full if you want the detail behind any of these. Prices move constantly, so check the current price on the distributor's own site before you sign up. If you find something here that is out of date or just wrong, tell me and I will fix it.