Thoughts On Music Distributors
In a recent post I referenced the experience of getting my music distributed. I believe it is worth delving further into the subject of distribution vendors for new and aspiring artists and perhaps for general awareness.
The good news is that almost anyone who can record halfway decent music can get that music “out there” - on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Tidal, etc. - for public listening and purchasing. Gone are the days when you absolutely had to know someone and network into a record label that served as gatekeeper for what was made available for public consumption. The sometimes bad news is that in order to get your music out, you need to go through a distributor/aggregator (hereafter “Distro”). These Distro houses not only get your music onto digital service providers (DSPs) like the above mentioned streaming and download outlets, but they also normally collect and relay your royalties when your music is consumed via the DSPs. Some of them get a cut of your royalties in addition to subscription fees.
As with most industries, the Distro space is populated with some larger and established players, such as CDBaby, DistroKid, TuneCore, Too Lost, Landr, and Ditto, among others. Let me first state that there are people who claim to have done very well with each of the larger providers. With the volume of aspiring artists entering the music distribution space, a Reddit day doesn’t go by where someone doesn’t ask about these Distro vendors. However, the volume of musicians claiming negative experience with these vendors is staggering (search the Reddit archive to see for yourself - it’s really bad). There are admittedly trolls who spend the day in Mom’s basement criticizing, insulting and slandering everything online, but the volume, proportion, and detail of most of the Reddit Distro complaints point to a real problem. Criticisms repeatedly tend to fall into four categories:
The Distro doesn’t answer customer inquiries on services issues, or doesn’t answer in a reasonably timely manner. (The worst of all, IMO).
The Distro doesn’t properly relay royalties due to artists, or doesn’t do so in a reasonably timely manner.
The Distro over-scrutinizes and refuses song submissions by artists, claiming issues like copyright or AI infringement when such infringement isn’t necessarily true. To be fair, Distros, DSPs and artists can get into a world of hurt if they aid and abet such infringement, and the big record companies are going after Distros as we speak, but there is at least one obsessive Distro company called out once a week on bogus, over-the-top, “white glove” song rejections.
The Distro takes down songs on the DSPs and playlists for alleged artificial stream inflation by bots when the artists has not initiated it. To be fair, again, the nature of the digital music distribution system, the state of IT, and the staggering volume of new digital music makes such bot activity by third parties (including some sleazy “marketing” vendors) fairly easy. It’s not super unusual for artists to be surprised by sudden massive stream number spikes on their songs. But the Distros can probably do better on this on behalf of musicians by putting more resources behind it..
There are additional criticisms of the Distros, and one clear cause of all this has been a tendency among the bigger houses to grow fat while downsizing or not growing support staff accordingly, disregarding control of customer care and quality. There was one Reddit inquiry about recommended Distro vendors and some of the vendors “screwing people.” Someone posted that it’s not really screwing people given the nature of the industry. I would argue that taking money from a customer and then not providing timely or ANY customer service response - perhaps the most frequent criticism of the big Distro houses among others - is screwing people. If the Distro board members and/or CEOs are too stingy to provide an adequate supportive platform and staffing to subscribing artists, this is simply bad faith business practice. A notably sad aspect of this problem is that it has remained status quo for several years (again, search the Reddit archive for yourself). And not a peep from the big Distros as they cash in.
I engaged a smaller, boutique Distro house and have enjoyed a very smooth (and responsive) ride so far. Not naming them here so that this doesn’t come across as flagrant promotion, but I would recommend that aspiring artists look beyond the big Distro orgs and maybe give some of the smaller and fresher offerings a try. Worked for me.