I’m wicked excited to write this review for DistroKid. As someone who’s both an entrepreneur and musician, I love being able to do everything on my own and have full control over how my tracks are released. I’ve been using DistroKid for almost a year now, and it’s always been a reliable service for independent artists looking to release tracks to major distributors such as iTunes, Amazon, and more.
I’ll also say this: DistroKid didn’t ask me to write this article – I wanted to do it on my own. I wanted to write this review both to give an honest opinion of my experience with DistroKid, and to recommend it, because it’s made my life a lot easier as a musician.
Price
This is usually the biggest factor when it comes to independent distribution. Because you’re not releasing through a label, you have to do everything yourself, which can be costly overtime. DistroKid was made by the original founders of Tunecore and CD Baby, who left those companies and decided to join forces.
Now this post isn’t meant to be a comparison of DistroKid versus other distribution services, but I will say that if you plan to release a lot of tracks, DistroKid is the way to go. It’s only $19.99/year to release unlimited tracks – if you want to release a track a day, knock yourself out. In addition, you keep 100% of the profits – making it even better.
The only flipside is that CD Baby has a one time fee for a single and album – $9.95 for a single and $49 for an album (and thats for the standard package – their pro package is more expensive). There are no yearly fees with CD Baby, so once you upload something, it’s completely permanent (unlike DistroKid, where if you stop paying, your music gets taken down). They do take a 9% cut of the profits, however, so it all depends on what you’re shooting for.
Simplicity
When I was planning to release my debut album The Light Nearby I researched every distribution service out there. If you want a full comparison of all the major ones, check out Ari’s Take Post – it’s definitely the most intricate post out there about all the services. I personally was trying out different services to see what they offered, and what I noticed right away was that DistroKid was way easier.
With the other services you have to sign up and provide all this information. With DistroKid, it was as simple as singing up, uploading my music, selecting the places, and boom. Done. It was extremely surprising how quick and efficient it was, and my music was on iTunes within a matter of hours (some services take longer though).
In addition, if you’re looking to start a music label, DistroKid is a great place to start releasing music under your name. It’s a bit more pricy ($35.99/year), but it’s completely worth it. When I started my label MetaMusic Records, I released all of my works under that name, and it was just as simple as typing in my name under the Label Name section. Pretty simple.
