DistroKid vs TuneCore vs Amuse vs CD Baby: Which Music Distributor Is Right for You in 2026

Picking a music distributor feels like a small decision until the day your first single hits and you realize royalties are stuck behind a paywall, or the metadata is wrong on Spotify, or your ISRC belongs to somebody else. The four names that come up in every producer group chat — DistroKid, TuneCore, Amuse, and CD Baby — are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one for how you actually release music will cost you either money or leverage.

This is a working framework for choosing one, built around three things that actually matter: how often you release, what you plan to do with your catalog, and whether you need publishing administration on top of streaming distribution.

What a distributor actually does (and doesn’t)

A distributor uploads your song and its metadata to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon, Tidal, TikTok’s music library, and a long tail of smaller stores. It collects the recording royalties those stores pay out and forwards them to you, minus its cut (a percentage, a flat annual fee, or both). That is the entire baseline service.

What a distributor does not automatically do: pitch playlists on your behalf, register your compositions with a PRO, collect your publishing royalties, clear samples, or fix incorrect metadata after release. Some add those as paid add-ons. Confusing “distribution” with “promotion” is the most common expensive mistake independent artists make.

The four contenders at a glance

Pricing and tier structures change every year or two, so treat these as sketches and confirm the current number on each company’s own pricing page before you commit.

DistroKid

Flat annual fee, unlimited uploads at the standard tier, and DistroKid keeps none of your streaming royalties. Best-fit artist: someone who releases often (monthly singles, remixes, live cuts) and wants the marginal cost of every extra release to be zero. Add-ons for legacy label services (custom label name, YouTube Content ID monetization, Shazam registration) are sold à la carte, which keeps the base tier cheap but means the “real” price crosses over $50 to $80 per year quickly if you want everything. Full pricing: distrokid.com/pricing.

TuneCore

Historically per-release pricing, more recently a subscription for unlimited uploads. TuneCore keeps none of your streaming royalties on the subscription tiers. Its long-standing draw is a genuine publishing administration arm that collects worldwide mechanicals and performance royalties for an additional cut — useful if your song gets covered, sync-licensed, or streamed heavily internationally. Best-fit artist: writer-producers who want one company to handle both recording distribution and publishing admin. Full pricing: tunecore.com/plans.

Amuse

Runs a free tier (“Boost” or similar naming, depending on the year) plus paid tiers with faster delivery and label services. Amuse’s paid Pro tier passes 100% of streaming royalties, and the free tier does too but with slower store delivery and fewer distribution partners. Best-fit artist: brand-new act on a zero-dollar budget who wants to get a first single up on Spotify without a credit card commitment, then upgrade later. Sign-up is app-first, which some artists love and some hate. Full pricing: amuse.io.

CD Baby

The oldest player of the four. Charges a one-time upload fee per single or album, then keeps a percentage of your streaming royalties in perpetuity. That percentage sounds small until you multiply it across a catalog that streams well for years. Where CD Baby genuinely earns its cut: it bundles publishing administration and sync licensing pitching into the same account, and it still has strong distribution relationships in physical formats (CDs and vinyl through its store). Best-fit artist: someone releasing one album, not planning to release much else soon, who wants “everything handled” in one flat one-time payment. Full pricing: cdbaby.com/pricing.

Match a distributor to your release plan

You release singles constantly (12+ per year)

DistroKid or TuneCore’s subscription tier. Amortized across a year of releases, the flat annual fee is the cheapest per-song option and neither takes a cut of royalties. Between the two, DistroKid tends to be a few dollars cheaper at the base tier and TuneCore has the publishing admin option if you need it.

You release one album and go quiet for a year

CD Baby. One-time payment, no recurring fee, and its royalty percentage on a single album is often less painful than paying an annual subscription every year for the rest of the catalog’s life.

You have no budget yet

Amuse Boost. Get the song up, prove it moves, then upgrade to Pro or migrate to a paid tier on another distributor when the revenue justifies it. Migrating catalog between distributors is annoying but doable — you keep your ISRCs, and the new distributor re-delivers your existing releases.

You write songs that other people record, or you get synced

TuneCore or CD Baby for the publishing admin bundle. Neither is a substitute for a real publisher on a serious sync deal, but for the “someone TikTok’d a snippet in Germany and I want the mechanical royalties” case, either one collects money you would otherwise leave on the table.

What none of them do well

• Playlist pitching at scale. They all offer a Spotify editorial pitch form, and some sell “playlist plugging” packages that are worth avoiding. Real playlist work is a marketing job, not a distribution one — see the free music promotion checklist for a walk-through, and Poseidon’s music marketing service if you want it handled.
• PR, press, and blog placements. None of them do this. Budget for it separately.
• Fixing broken metadata. Every distributor has a slow, painful workflow for fixing typos, wrong composer credits, or bad genre tagging after release. Get it right the first time.
• Meaningful analytics. Their dashboards are a level below Spotify for Artists. Trust the source, not the middleman.

The one thing all four get wrong for growing artists

All four distributors will happily deliver a track that is technically fine but sonically unfinished — wrong loudness, wrong sample rate, mixed at bedroom-monitor volume. Streaming platforms apply loudness normalization, which means a poorly mastered track literally sounds quieter than the songs playing before and after it in a playlist. That translates to skips, and skips translate to the algorithm choosing not to recommend you.

Get the mix and master right before you upload. Then use a streaming royalty calculator to project what your first 10,000 streams are actually worth so the distributor fee is in perspective.

Next steps

1. Count the releases you are planning in the next 12 months. If it is one, go one-time (CD Baby). If it is many, go subscription (DistroKid or TuneCore).
2. Decide whether you need publishing administration bundled in. If yes, TuneCore or CD Baby. If no, DistroKid or Amuse.
3. Read the fine print on royalty pass-through and on what happens to your releases if you stop paying the subscription. Some distributors take your music down. Others leave it up but stop paying you.
4. Get the master and metadata right before you press upload. Fixing either after release is measured in weeks.
5. Once your first release is live, focus on the promotion work the distributor does not do. Start with the free artist marketing blueprint or talk to Poseidon’s distribution team if you would rather hand the whole workflow off.