Music distribution compared: TuneCore, DistroKid, and CD Baby
The comparison worth making is not which is cheapest this month. It is which payment model you are agreeing to, and what each service’s current terms say happens to your catalogue over time.
Contents
Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and the rest do not accept uploads from artists directly. Something has to sit between you and them: a distributor that delivers the release, registers it, collects what it earns and pays you. TuneCore, DistroKid and CD Baby are the three names independent artists compare most often.
Most comparisons of them are price tables. Price tables are the least durable and least important part of the decision, so this one is built differently.
What a distributor actually does
The mechanics are broadly the same everywhere. You upload finished audio, attach metadata — titles, credits, genre, release date, identifiers — and artwork. The distributor delivers to the stores you select, and once the release starts earning, collects and forwards the money on its own reporting cycle.
Where services genuinely differ:
- How you pay — the structure of the fee, and whether it recurs.
- What share you keep — some models take a percentage of royalties, others take none and charge more up front.
- Reach — the set of stores and territories included, which is not identical between services.
- Payout mechanics — reporting frequency, minimum withdrawal thresholds, and the lag between a stream and your money.
- Publishing administration — whether the service will also chase mechanical and performance royalties, which are a separate income stream from the one your distributor collects by default.
- Terms over time — what the agreement says about your catalogue for as long as it is live.
The three pricing shapes
No figures appear below, deliberately. Distribution pricing and commission structures change with product updates, and a number printed here would mislead someone reading it a year from now. What does not change quickly is the shape of each model, and the shape is what actually determines whether a service suits you.
| Service | Shape of the fee | Notable in the feature set |
|---|---|---|
| TuneCore | Tiered plans, with a recurring fee associated with releases, and at least one entry option that trades a lower fee for a share of royalties | Publishing administration offered directly, which many artists otherwise leave uncollected |
| DistroKid | A recurring subscription covering unlimited releases rather than being priced per release | Fast delivery, and built-in royalty splits that pay collaborators automatically |
| CD Baby | A one-time fee per release combined with an ongoing revenue share, rather than a recurring subscription | Physical distribution and a sync licensing programme alongside digital delivery |
Check each service's current pricing page before you commit. All three publish their rates; none of them owes an article the courtesy of keeping them stable.
The arithmetic that follows from the shapes is straightforward. If you release very frequently, an unlimited subscription amortises well and a per-release fee does not. If you release rarely, the reverse holds, and a one-time fee with a revenue share may cost less over a catalogue's life than years of subscription — or more, if the release earns well, since a revenue share scales with success and a flat fee does not.
Others worth knowing about
The three above are not the whole market. Several services bundle distribution with mastering tools, offer a free entry tier in exchange for slower delivery or a reduced feature set, or pair distribution with brand-partnership and sync opportunities in return for a share of revenue. If none of the three main options fits your release cadence, the alternatives are worth a look — evaluate them on exactly the same terms as below.
The clause that matters most, and why we are not summarising it
The single most consequential difference between distribution services is what the agreement says about your catalogue over time — how long a release stays live, under what conditions, and what obligations continue after you stop actively using the service.
This article does not tell you what each company's answer is. That is a deliberate editorial decision, and it is worth explaining.
Retention and takedown terms are governed by each company's current terms of service. They differ between services, they are revised, and a summary written at one moment can quietly become wrong. An artist who picks a distributor on the strength of a stale summary and discovers later that the terms were different is not inconvenienced — they have a real business problem, potentially involving a catalogue they built over years.
What we can describe is the structural reason the answers differ at all. Where a service is funded by recurring payment, its terms have to address what happens when payment stops, because that is a state the model can enter. Where a service is funded by a one-time payment plus an ongoing revenue share, the relationship is not maintained by recurring payment in the same way, so its terms address continuity differently. Those are different problems with different natural answers, which is precisely why you cannot assume any two services resolve them the same way.
So do this before you sign up, for whichever service you are considering:
- Open the service's own current terms of service — not a comparison article, not a forum thread, not this page.
- Find the sections covering cancellation, account closure, and how long a release remains distributed.
- Note the date on the document. If it is not dated, treat that as information too.
- Save a copy for your records at the moment you sign up. If terms change later, you will want to know what you actually agreed to.
- If anything is ambiguous, ask their support in writing and keep the reply.
Ten minutes of reading against a decision that governs your catalogue is a good trade. It is also the only advice on this subject that does not go stale.
Audio file requirements for distribution
Here the ground is much firmer. Delivery specifications are industry norms rather than commercial policy, and they move slowly.
Major distributors require lossless source audio. WAV at 16-bit and 44.1 kHz is the baseline, with higher bit depths and sample rates generally accepted. FLAC is widely supported as an alternative — it is lossless by design, compressing the file without discarding any of the signal.[1] MP3 is not accepted as a master by the major distributors, and the reason is worth understanding rather than just complying with.
The file you upload becomes the source from which every platform generates its own encoded version. Each store applies its own compression to what you gave it. If what you gave it was already lossy, the platform is compressing a compressed file, and the artefacts from the first encode get carried through and emphasised by the second. The result is a release that sounds less clear than material delivered as WAV, for reasons no amount of promotion will fix. Our WAV versus MP3 guide covers what the first encode actually removes.
| Property | Expected value |
|---|---|
| Container | WAV (.wav), with FLAC (.flac) commonly accepted |
| Bit depth | 16-bit minimum, 24-bit preferred |
| Sample rate | 44.1 kHz minimum; higher rates generally accepted |
| Channels | Stereo |
| Peak level | Must not exceed full scale — no clipping |
Confirm the exact specification against your chosen distributor's current help documentation before you upload. The table above reflects the common denominator, not any one service's requirements.
If your masters somehow exist only as MP3 — exported wrongly, or received that way from a collaborator — converting them to WAV puts them in the container distributors accept. It does not restore anything; the loss from the first encode is permanent, as our three-format comparison explains. The right answer is always to export WAV directly from the session. Where you have a whole record to prepare, batch conversion saves real time.
How to decide
Work in this order:
- Estimate your release cadence honestly. Frequency is what makes one fee shape cheap and another expensive, and it is the only input you fully control.
- Decide whether you want publishing administration. This is a separate royalty stream from the one distribution collects, and not every service offers to chase it.
- Read the terms. Cancellation, retention, and what continues after you stop. Every time, for every service, before you sign.
- Check current pricing on the vendor's own page. Then do the arithmetic against your own cadence rather than against a hypothetical artist.
- Get the masters right first. The distributor is a delivery mechanism. It cannot improve what you hand it.
There is no single correct distributor, and anyone who tells you otherwise is describing their own release schedule rather than yours.
Sources & method
No price, plan tier or commission percentage appears in this article. Distribution pricing changes with product updates and any figure printed here would mislead a later reader, so each model is described by its shape and you are directed to the vendor’s own current pricing page. No claim is made about what any named service does with a catalogue when payment stops: that is governed by each company’s current terms of service, which the reader must consult directly. The delivery-format guidance reflects long-standing industry norms rather than any single service’s policy.
- FLAC — Free Lossless Audio Codec, Xiph.Org Foundation. xiph.org Accessed 2026-08-29