DistroKid is a great example of modern marketing. The service is simple – they get your music into Apple Music, Spotify, and a bunch of other places. And then they collect the money you make from all of the services and they give that money to you. In return, you pay them $23 a year. FOREVER.
Processing the payments doesn’t cost them $23 a year. No one knows how much it actually costs them, but it isn’t much. It’s mostly free money. But to be fair, they do give the option to pay a one-time cost and then if you stop paying them annually, they don’t yank your music down.
They market through YouTube personalities, who then get a commission for anyone they sign up. This motivates your fave YouTubers to pimp the product on their channel, usually without discussing any alternatives… like CDBaby.
For the longest time I’ve been devoted to CDBaby. The first big issue I had was when they decided to screw their loyal customers by emailing them and saying “Hey, you know how we warehouse your physical products (CDs) and take a cut when you sell one? Well, if they don’t sell in a set time, we’re going to throw them away. Or you can pay for postage to get them back.”
And then they decided to no longer sell any physical media. Handling physical sales was one of the things that made CDBaby better than DistroKid, but now that option is gone.
So the next reason to prefer CDBaby is that they charge you a one time fee to upload an album to all the services. Instead of paying every year, you pay once. And then they take a cut of your sales. For some people, that’s preferable. They still do that, at least.
The latest blunder is that on their website, they say they’re working on a new system and sales reports won’t be available… for up to a MONTH. I’m a professional web developer, and this is a massive failure on their part. A week would be too long. There’s no excuse for this.
But is that enough for me to go with DistroKid for my next album? And if I forget to pay the annual fee, they’ll yank my album? No, I guess I’ll stick with CDBaby. But it wouldn’t take much to move me to DistroKid.
