DistroKid is thriving as a discount flat fee digital music distribution platform. Offering $19.99 a year for unlimited uploads has attracted a significant user base; and somehow the low price hasn’t stopped the startup from iterating.
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700,000 songs • 90,000 artists
$1 million paid out monthly
Flat fee discount music distributor DistroKid is launching the DistroKid Payment Network later today. The new service can automatically route any percentage of earnings to others, and offers transparency. It covers payments from the 150+ music services that the company serves including iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and YouTube.
Most releases have multiple stakeholders – collaborators, band members, songwriters, producers, manager, label, etc. – and manually dividing earnings is time consuming. There are also royalty reports, taxes and payments. Additionally, collaborators often have no transparency and can become understandably dubious about earnings, since they have no access to stats from the source. DistroKid is changing all that, at no cost, for users of its distribution platform.
“A 15-track hip-hop album could have 15 different producers and 20 different ‘featured’ rappers,” DistroKid founder Phil Kaplan told Hypebot in a pre-launch interview “But many of the requests for this came from YouTube Creators,” said Kaplan. “Creators often do collaborations with other creators, and want an automated way to make sure everyone involved gets paid. DistroKid not only routes money from music (iTunes, Spotify, etc) but also routes money from ads on YouTube videos, via our ContentID integration.”
YouTube ContentID.