Distributors to Avoid
Distributors to Avoid
[This is an excerpt from a chapter of The Human Guide to Doing Music Online by @kit]
Now that all the decent-to-good options are out of the way, there are two particular less-than-decent cases that I feel strongly enough about to name. These are just my own personal thoughts, though, formed purely through my own observations, so I encourage you to do your own research and form your own conclusions instead of just taking my word for it. These are not accusations or assertions of fact.
In my opinion, you should avoid DistroKid.
Even if you hadn’t heard of any of the other distributors mentioned so far, you’ve probably heard of this one. DistroKid is responsible for an absolutely monumental amount of the music on the market, and they are very good at marketing, which then snowballs even further due to their referral program giving its customers a financial incentive to recommend the platform to others. That program is so widely taken advantage of that there are YouTube videos dedicated exclusively to talking about making money through DistroKid referrals rather than from music.
Credit where it’s due, they are also responsible for popularizing the “pay us a flat subscription fee and keep 100% of your royalties” business model among distributors. Which may be a good thing, at least on some level. But now just about every other distributor does it better than they do. The fact that DistroKid did a relatively good thing once should not hold their reputation up as much as it seems to.
You know what else they’re responsible for? Having an automated system so intensely bad that tons of artists and labels have found themselves unceremoniously kicked off the platform “due to editorial discretion” without warning or explanation, because the over-reliance on automation with virtually zero human oversight allowed an algorithm to decide that their music wasn’t real, or was fraudulent, or was “poor quality”, and to take action without any human intervention. For most of these people, customer support offered no help, if they even managed to get in contact with a human at all.
And on that topic, DistroKid has some of the worst customer support I’ve ever seen in my life. Not just for a music distributor, I mean overall. It’s absurdly difficult to speak to a human if you have problems, to the point that the most reliable way to get an actual human to actually help you is the same as it is with YouTube. Make the issue public on social media – probably Reddit in this case – and either have a large enough audience or get a large enough response that you can’t be ignored.
Part of the reason for this is because the company is very small despite having an absolutely gargantuan number of clients, and since the whole platform is designed to be as hands-off as possible, automated in every possible way, you get a bot for support instead of a team of human beings. An interesting side effect of this is that unless your music is in the top 10% of earners, it may actually be more financially beneficial for DistroKid to simply kick you off the platform than it is for them to help you. I’m sure they don’t actually just boot people when they need support that the bot can’t offer… but they certainly seem to have more incentive to consider such an action than any other distributor mentioned here.
All of that and I haven’t even mentioned the ridiculous number of upsells and comical hidden fees, the fact that your music will all be taken down if your subscription lapses unless you pay an extravagant extra fee per release (which is still no guarantee, according to some!), the fact that many people have had their releases simply never come out for reasons unknown, or the fact that Spotify owns a significant stake in the company. And I could have left it at that, but on top of it all, they pulled a real slam dunk by aggressively union-busting while attempting to fire their support and QA teams.
Now, in my opinion, you should also avoid Ditto.
DistroKid should be avoided because it’s overly automated, full of extra fees, and support is abysmal. Ditto meanwhile, has all the same problems as DistroKid does, all to a worse degree, plus some extra (particularly bad) problems of its own like frequent metadata errors, without the extreme reliance on automation. At least DistroKid has a flimsy excuse for a lot of its shortcomings, but Ditto doesn’t even have that much.
I’ll give them credit for one thing, though. They’re even better at marketing than DistroKid. They’d have to be, what else could explain how they somehow still seem to have an almost positive reputation despite the glaring issues? Of course, that marketing only applies to the company, not the artists.
While there is definitely a mountain of issues I could talk about, most of them are the same as DistroKid, related to the behavior of certain individuals outside of the company context, or not actually worth enough to spell out individually here. There is only one specific, major issue I’m going to bring up, and that is the issue of missed payments. Many, many artists working with Ditto have talked about not getting paid all of what they’re owed, or simply not being paid at all, sometimes for months at a time, and these stories keep happening. Not a lot of them end well.
With those two out of the way, I have one more simple warning for you. Avoid any distributor that claims any ownership of any of your rights. That’s some shady business.
[Read The Human Guide to Doing Music Online in full]