Choosing a music distributor used to be a fairly short list: a handful of companies, roughly similar pricing, pick one and move on. That's not really true anymore. There are more distributors than ever, most of them advertise nearly identical headline claims, and the real differences between them show up in places that don't make it onto a comparison chart. Here are the seven things actually worth checking before you commit a catalog to one.
1. What Happens to Your Royalties, Exactly
Every distributor either takes a percentage of your royalties or doesn't, and this single detail matters more over time than almost anything else on the list. A commission-based model (CD Baby's ongoing 9%, for instance, or RouteNote's free tier) costs you nothing upfront but keeps taking a cut for as long as a release earns money. A flat-fee model, the kind Distrovibe, DistroKid, and most subscription distributors use, costs a fixed amount regardless of how well a release performs, and you keep everything on top of it.
Neither model is a scam, but they produce very different outcomes depending on how a release actually does. A quiet catalog with modest, steady earnings might genuinely cost less under a commission model. A track that breaks out and earns real money for years is almost always cheaper under a flat annual fee, since the fee stays fixed while a commission keeps growing with the revenue. Work out which pattern actually describes your catalog before assuming one model is automatically better.
2. Whether the Pricing Fits How Often You Actually Release
A distributor's headline price is built around an assumption about your release frequency, and it's worth checking whether that assumption matches you. Per-release pricing (TuneCore's model, for example) is often cheaper for someone releasing once or twice a year, but it compounds fast for an artist putting out several tracks annually, since each one carries its own fee and its own renewal. A flat annual subscription with unlimited uploads, which is what Distrovibe's Artist plan offers, works the other direction: the price stays the same whether you release once or twenty times that year.
There's no universally cheaper model here, only a better or worse fit for your actual release habits. Anyone comparing distributors purely by the number on the homepage, without factoring in how many releases a year that number covers, is comparing the wrong thing.
3. What Happens If You Stop Paying
This is the detail buried furthest from the pricing page, and it's one of the more consequential ones. With most flat-fee, unlimited-upload distributors, your catalog stays live only as long as your subscription is active. Cancel, and your music generally comes down from every platform within a set window, sometimes with a separate one-time fee available to keep specific releases up permanently after cancellation.
Per-release, one-time-fee models like CD Baby work differently here: once paid, hosting is typically permanent regardless of whether you ever pay that platform again. If long-term catalog permanence without any ongoing commitment matters more to you than flexibility or unlimited uploads, this distinction is worth weighing seriously, not treating as fine print.
4. Whether It Reaches the Specific Platforms You Actually Care About
Every major distributor reaches Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Where they start to diverge is in the platforms that matter to a specific artist's actual audience or genre: TikTok delivery and Commercial Music Library eligibility, Beatport for electronic and DJ-focused releases, regional platforms strong in specific markets (Deezer's reach in France and Brazil, for example, or JioSaavn and Gaana for South Asian audiences), and whether YouTube delivery arrives as a proper Art Track eligible for an Official Artist Channel rather than a bare-bones listing.
If a meaningful share of your audience or promotional strategy depends on a specific platform, confirm that platform is included by default rather than assuming "150+ platforms" automatically covers the one you actually need.
5. How Collaborator Payments Actually Work
Any release with more than one contributor, a producer, a featured artist, a co-writer, needs a way to split royalties correctly without manual accounting after the fact. Some distributors handle this natively as part of the standard upload flow; Distrovibe includes split payments as a built-in feature, so collaborators get paid automatically and correctly from the first stream. Others require a separate manual process, third-party tool, or don't support it cleanly at all, which becomes a real problem the first time a collaborative release actually starts earning and nobody has documentation of who gets what.
Check this specifically if you collaborate regularly, since it's exactly the kind of feature that seems unimportant until a track takes off and a split dispute turns a good problem (a hit song) into an unpleasant one.
6. What's Included vs. What's a Paid Add-On
Distributor pricing pages tend to lead with a low headline number and then list a series of extras: Content ID registration, lyrics distribution, playlist pitching, sync licensing access, each sometimes bundled and sometimes billed separately depending on the platform. DistroKid's "Leave a Legacy" fee to keep a catalog live after cancellation is one example of this; TuneCore's tiered plans, where sync pitching and faster delivery live behind a higher subscription level, are another.
The real cost of a distributor is the headline price plus whatever add-ons you'd realistically end up paying for, not the headline price alone. Before comparing two platforms by their base plan cost, check what each one bundles by default versus what shows up as an extra charge once you actually start using the service.
7. How the Company Actually Supports You When Something Breaks
This is the hardest one to check before you've actually used a service, but it's worth doing some homework on anyway: response time on support tickets, whether there's a real human behind metadata correction requests, and how disputes (a wrongly rejected release, a delayed payout, a metadata error that needs fixing across multiple platforms) actually get resolved in practice. Review platforms like Trustpilot are a reasonable starting point, not because every review is perfectly representative, but because a pattern across dozens of reviews, consistent complaints about slow support or unresolved payout issues, tells you something a pricing page never will.
A distributor that's cheap and fast when everything goes right but unresponsive the one time something goes wrong is a worse deal than a slightly more expensive one that actually answers.
Putting It Together
None of these seven factors matters equally for every artist. A hobbyist releasing once a year cares much more about factor three (catalog permanence) than factor one (royalty commission on a modest earner). An artist collaborating constantly cares enormously about factor five and comparatively little about factor four's regional platform reach. The point isn't that every distributor needs to win on every axis, it's that comparing platforms purely by headline price, without checking which of these seven actually apply to your specific situation, is how artists end up locked into a service that fit someone else's release pattern rather than their own.
If you're weighing a flat-fee model with 100% royalty retention, split payments included by default, and no separate charge for lyrics distribution or playlist pitching, you can see the full Distrovibe pricing breakdown or compare it directly against specific competitors before deciding.