The annual fee is the advertisement. The clauses are the business.
Five distributors within about ten dollars a year of each other, and terms underneath that differ by an order of magnitude for anyone whose music travels through other people's videos.
Distribution is close to a commodity at the headline price. Every service below is within roughly ten dollars a year of the next. The differences that matter are further down the page.
| Service | Entry price | What it takes underneath |
|---|---|---|
| CD Baby | $9.99 per single, one-off | 9% of digital distribution revenue, permanently |
| Amuse Artist | $23.99 / year | 15% on YouTube Content ID; removed on the $59.99 tier |
| DistroKid Musician | €23.99 / year | Stop paying and the catalogue comes down |
| TuneCore Rising Artist | $24.99 / year | 20% on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube social earnings |
| Symphonic Starter | $29.99 / year | A percentage on YouTube, Meta and TikTok user-generated content |
Two different businesses wearing the same coat
The annual services are subscriptions: cheap, and conditional. Stop paying and your releases come down. CD Baby is the opposite arrangement, a one-off fee per release with a permanent 9% share. For a catalogue that earns nothing, the subscription is cheaper. For a track still earning in a decade, the arithmetic reverses.
Where the real money moves
Look past "keep 100%" to the social and user-generated columns. If your music mostly travels through other people's videos, a 20% fee on social earnings will cost you multiples of the annual subscription, every year, forever. That clause is the product.
Music video distribution, which almost nobody prices publicly
Symphonic is the one service on this list publishing a music video rate: $25 per video for Spotify and Vevo, or $95 per video for a larger network, at 70% of royalties rather than 100%.
Two things we could not confirm
DistroKid's pricing page is geo-localised and served us euros; the dollar prices in circulation come from third-party blogs and we could not verify them on DistroKid's own page. TuneCore's exact distribution commission is documented only behind a login wall.
A figure here out of date? Send us the current source and we will update the page and date the change.
