What to Look for in a Music Distributor Beyond the Pricing Page

What's the most important feature people skip when choosing a distributor?

The catalog-retention policy. It decides what happens to your live releases when your subscription lapses, and it's the difference between music that stays up and music that vanishes from every store. Subscription distributors pull your catalog on lapse unless you've paid a per-release retention fee. One-time-fee distributors leave it up.

This is the one I'd check first, before genre support, before analytics, before anything. DistroKid runs on an annual subscription. If you stop paying, your music comes down from all stores unless you've bought their Leave a Legacy add-on, which is $29 per single or $49 per album, one-time, per release (ALERA). So a cheap $24.99 a year plan has a hidden condition. You're renting your catalog's place in the stores, and the rent never stops.

CD Baby works the other way. You pay once ($9.99 per single, $14.99 per album), take a 9% royalty cut, and the music stays live permanently. RouteNote's free tier also leaves catalog up without a recurring fee.

There's no universally right model here. If you release constantly and want unlimited uploads, a subscription can be cheaper per release. If you have a back catalog you want to forget about and leave streaming for a decade, a one-time fee removes the renewal risk entirely. The mistake is not knowing which model you're on until the renewal email gets buried.

The hard numbers to keep in mind: $24.99/yr for DistroKid Musician, $29 single or $49 album for its Leave a Legacy retention add-on, $9.99 single or $14.99 album one-time for CD Baby, and a 9% CD Baby royalty cut. All from the distributors' own pricing pages and ALERA's 2026 pricing analysis.

Is YouTube Content ID included or is it an extra charge?

It depends on the distributor, and the difference is real money if your music shows up in other people's videos. Content ID is the system that finds your recording inside user-uploaded YouTube videos and claims the ad revenue. Some distributors bundle it free, some include it but take a cut, and some charge a per-song fee on top.

Here's how the big three handle it, from the facts I verified:

Sources: CD Baby's pricing page, Chartlex's 2026 comparison, ALERA's DistroKid pricing breakdown.

Why does this matter beyond the line item? Content ID runs at enormous scale, matching audio against a giant reference library and processing billions of claims a year, mostly by automated detection. The sibling breakage guide carries the exact figures. The point isn't the count. It's that this is the machinery deciding whether you get paid when your song ends up in someone's vlog, and whether you opted into it through your distributor changes the answer.

If your music never appears in user-generated content, Content ID barely matters. If it does, an included plan with a 20% cut can still beat a cheap plan where you're paying per song and giving up the same 20%. Do that math against your actual catalog, not against a feature checkbox.

How often does each distributor actually pay you?

Payout frequency varies, and it sits underneath a delay you can't avoid no matter who you pick. The DSP-to-distributor delay is industry-standard, roughly 2 to 4 months from when a stream happens to when the money is reportable. Spotify reports around 45 days after month-end, Apple Music up to 60 days, then your distributor adds its own processing window (Dynamoi).

What the distributor controls is the cadence once that money lands. DistroKid processes withdrawal requests twice weekly, with earnings becoming available roughly monthly, reflecting streams from about three months prior. TuneCore's distribution royalties follow the same DSP-reporting cadence, but its publishing royalties are paid quarterly: 45 days after each calendar quarter ends, so a Q1 payout lands mid-May, Q2 mid-August, Q3 mid-November, Q4 mid-February (Pro Musician Hub; Dynamoi).

That split matters more than the headline frequency. Your recording (master) royalties move on one schedule. Your publishing royalties, if your distributor handles them, often move on a slower quarterly one. So they pay monthly can be true for streaming and false for publishing inside the same account. Ask about both.

One thing that's the same everywhere: the first full royalty payment from a new distributor typically takes 9 to 12 months from release for the complete range of royalty types, including publishing and international. Streaming distribution royalties alone usually arrive within 2 to 3 months (aNote Music; audiobulbmusic). If you're switching distributors mid-catalog, that lag is why you keep the old account open until the pipeline clears. The transfer mechanics live in a sibling guide, linked at the bottom.

Does the distributor register my publishing and The MLC?

Only some do, and if yours doesn't, that money sits uncollected unless you register it yourself somewhere else. A distributor's core job is the recording (master) side: delivering tracks, assigning ISRC and UPC codes, collecting the master share of streaming royalties (Spotify for Artists). The composition (songwriting) side is a separate world, and most base plans don't touch it.

In the US, mechanical royalties on the songwriting side are collected by The MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which began operations January 1, 2021 under the Music Modernization Act (sources: The MLC, US Copyright Office). Non-interactive performance royalties on the recording side go through SoundExchange. Neither is automatic. Someone has to register your works.

A few distributors fold publishing registration into their offering. TuneCore handles publishing administration (and takes a 20% commission on those royalties). CD Baby's CDB Boost add-on ($39.99 per release, launched August 2023) covers MLC registration, SoundExchange label-share registration, and access to their sync program. Songtrust-partnered services do it too. If your distributor isn't on that short list, you register publishing yourself, and that's fine, just know it's on you.

That single fact reframes the whole pricing question, because a slightly pricier plan that registers your publishing can be collecting money the cheap plan leaves on the table.

If you're in Canada, the publishing side has its own bodies

This is worth getting exactly right, because the US org names don't apply north of the border. In Canada, your distributor still only handles the recording side. The composition and neighbouring-rights royalties run through Canadian collectives, and you join them directly.

Performance and communication rights (composition): SOCAN administers these for its members within Canada (SOCAN FAQ). Mechanical and reproduction rights (composition): CMRRA and SOCAN Reproduction Rights (SOCAN RR, formed after SOCAN's 2018 acquisition of SODRAC). You can work with either, but not both at once for the same rights (sources: CMRRA FAQ, SOCAN RR). Neighbouring rights (recording side): Re:Sound, through member organizations MROC, Artisti, and ACTRA RACS, collects public-performance royalties for performers and master owners. Entirely separate from your distributor (Re:Sound).

SOCAN also uses your ISRC codes as a core identifier to match streams to rights holders. Their own academy puts it plainly: without accurate ISRCs, your royalties risk getting lost along the way (SOCAN Academy). So the Canadian angle isn't just which body to join. The recording codes your distributor assigns feed the Canadian collection system too.

How deep do the analytics go, and can it get me a Spotify pitch in time?

These are two underrated features that hide below the price. Analytics depth ranges from a bare total stream count to demographic breakdowns, playlist tracking, and skip rates. The pitch question is sharper: can the distributor deliver your release into Spotify's system early enough to open the editorial pitch window?

On analytics: basic services show you total streams and not much else. Premium tiers, like Symphonic or DistroKid's Musician Plus and Ultimate, add demographic breakdowns, playlist tracking, and skip rates. One thing worth knowing before you lean on any distributor dashboard: that data never transfers when you switch providers. DSP-native dashboards keep your history independently, but the distributor's own analytics are gone the day you close the account (Absolute Label Services). Export anything you care about before you leave.

On the pitch window: Spotify's editorial pitch requires the release to be delivered and in their system at least 7 days before the release date. That's Spotify's stated minimum, confirmed on their support page. Industry consensus says aim for 3 to 4 weeks. Either way, your distributor has to have a live delivery sitting in Spotify before the window opens, so a distributor that's slow to deliver, or that you signed up with too late, can quietly cost you the editorial pitch entirely.

Support quality belongs in this same bucket of things that don't show on a pricing page. When a release has a metadata error during release week, the gap between a live agent and a bot-only help center is the gap between a fixed release and a blown launch. You won't see that until you need it, which is exactly why it's worth asking about up front.

Before you commit to any distributor, run the catalog migration checklist so you're evaluating on what matters instead of on the headline price. →

A note on the players, because ownership changed

One thing that's shifted recently and is worth knowing: CD Baby is now owned by Universal Music Group, following UMG's February 2026 acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings for $775 million (ALERA). That doesn't change CD Baby's pricing as I've described it, but if independent ownership is part of your decision, the ownership map isn't what it was a year ago. I'm flagging it as a fact to factor in, not steering you toward or away from anyone.

The framework holds regardless of who owns whom. Read the lapse policy, check whether Content ID is bundled or billed, look at both your master and publishing payout schedules, confirm publishing registration if you need it, judge the analytics against what you'll actually use, and make sure they can deliver in time to pitch. Price is the easy line to compare, which is exactly why it's the one everybody compares. The six features above are where the real differences live.