You retain 100% of your rights no matter who you use. These independent music distribution companies are just providing services. Even though some of them offer “label services” they don’t own anything. +How To Switch Distributors Without Losing Stream Counts or Playlists I also want to make SUPER clear that none of these independent music distribution companies OWN any of your rights, copyrights or music. You can, however, SWITCH distributors if you need to.

Make sense? You have to pick one for each release, which is why it’s so important to choose the best music distribution company for your needs. You can’t ask Symphonic and DistroKid to distribute the same song to all the stores, then that same song would be listed in Spotify, Apple Music and everywhere else TWICE. You can use multiple distributors for multiple releases HOWEVER you can only use 1 distributor for each release, of course. These music distribution companies do this for you. Some of these companies are closer than others to this reality, but no one is completely there yet.įor clarity, you need a distributor to get your music into Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, TikTok, Instagram Stories, Deezer, Tidal, etc.

Digital distribution companies are evolving into one-stop royalty collection shops for DIY musicians.Įventually, you will be able to use digital distribution with one of these services and they will collect 100% of all your sound recording and composition royalties from around the world and you won’t need to worry about registering or collecting all your money elsewhere. And Believe, a French company, owns TuneCore. The Orchard is owned by Sony and INgrooves is owned by Universal. Some work directly with artists and they take around a 20% commission for it.

INgrooves, The Orchard and Believe are all distributors in the space that primarily work with labels. It’s worth noting, that this comparison is for standalone music distribution services that primarily cater to independent musicians – not labels. Literally in the past 4 months from when we started the update to when we posted it, SoundCloud got out of distribution and migrated everything over to Repost Network. So for the past few months we at Ari’s Take have been learning everything we could about these 19 companies. I’m keeping this review updated and any time a company lets me know their changes or I hear from you that something has changed at one of these companies, I update the report.

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