I know this is sounding like an infomercial right now. Oh and did I mention you keep 100% of your royalties. I don’t get how they’re going to compete with this, cause pretty websites ain’t going to cut it. With CDBaby and Tunecore, they usually charge about $10 per song. Let’s start with the biggest benefit: pricing.Īnd this is something you better be sitting down for.įor only $20 a year, you can upload UNLIMITED songs to Spotify, Apple Music and the whole streaming services cartel. While the design of the site makes me feel like they don’t give a hoot about me, the actual services Distrokid offers tells me they are legit and 100% for independent musicians. This is why I recommend every artist, from major to mini, drop a song once a month (at the very least) and you’ll see in the next paragraph how Distrokid makes this economical. You see there is reason to believe that Spotify’s algorithm rewards musicians who release music on a consistent and frequent basis. This isn’t a bad thing but could be a bad thing if you make it a bad thing: why are you making it a bad thing?įor artists who release one song every 10 years, paying an annual fee is not a good idea (obviously) and you’ll want to stick with CDBaby.īut for the rest of us who churn out songs weekly, Distrokid’s interests align not only with our interests but also with Spotify’s.
It’s free to use and looks much better than the one Distrokid provides. It’s the one with the link which will usually start with fanlink.to. This is a useless distraction as it takes away from the users flow (to listen to the song!).įor independent artists, the song landing page, I like the most is the one from ToneDen. There’s also a little button at the top that says “Talk to me”, which fans are supposed to use to message the artist. In fact, anytime I find a new artist and see their link in bio is to Distrokid, I brace myself. It’s nice that they provide this feature and if you don’t know what it is, it’s just a landing page that has links to all the streaming services your song is on (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Deezer, etc).īut it looks so ugly, there’s no way any artist should be sharing that with their fans. This doesn’t make my feel more human! Can’t you just include this for free? And what happens when Distrokid dies? Song Landing Page I mean, every song we make is trying to bring some god damn humanity into this cold wired world, and you’re doing this to me: I know trying to upsell your customers is the snazzy thing to do in ecommerce, but it’s not cool and doesn’t feel human.Įspecially when all your customers are musicians: our whole thing is trying to feel more human! This half-ass job, makes me feel like they’re going to run to the Cayman’s with my $48 in streaming revenue! Upselling Me into Oblivion I wish DistroKid either doubles down on bad design or just does the web 2.0 style that’s been in-vogue for the last 10 years (*cough* just copy Tunecore). It’s so bad, I almost didn’t want to sign up but then I saw that Derrik Sivers the founder of CD Baby, is recommending the site.Īnd since I appreciate Derrik’s way of thinking, I was like “ah what the heck! Let’s give this a shot!”. Yikes! Now here’s what happens when you click “Team”.Īre you still alive? I know, I know, everything is just plain bad. The vibe I get from the site, is it it’s a one man operation and that one man is either purposefully making the site look bad (to make us think he’s passing on the savings to us) or just completely ignoring basic design principles. There really ain’t another way to put it: It’s definitely the ugliest of the bunch. Will DistroKid knock CD Baby off it’s music distribution throne? Let’s get into the good, bad and ugly.
I finally got around to testing out Distrokid and have been using it for the last three months (on three releases) and in this post will share with you the pros and cons of Distrokid. As you guys know, I’ve tested all the music streaming distribution sites and have consistently ranked CDBaby as the best one, specifically for up and coming artists.