DistroKid seemingly offer a standard yearly plan to get your music to stores and streaming services, but basic features offered by RouteNote are hidden behind extra fees.

For $22.99/year, DistroKid will send your music to stores and streaming services such as Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Tidal and YouTube.

They offer features such as ‘splits’ to share percentages of revenue, distribution of cover songs, Spotify and Apple Music verified artist pages, YouTube artist channel and Spotify pre-saves. All of these features and more are offered by RouteNote at no extra cost.

DistroKid Accounts

Musician

  • 1 band/artist, $22.99/year
  • Upload unlimited songs
  • Spotify verified checkmark

Musician Plus

  • 2 bands/artists, $39.99/year
  • All above, plus:
  • Customizable label name
  • Customizable release date
  • Customizable preorder date
  • Customizable iTunes pricing

Ultimate

  • 5 bands/artists, $89.99/year
  • 10 bands/artists, $157.99/year
  • 20 bands/artists, $269.99/year
  • 50 bands/artists, $674.99/year
  • 100 bands/artists, $1349.99/year
  • All above

Before even visiting the site, DistroKid require a yearly payment be set up, with no free trial available. Because of this, additional feature pricing info is limited.

Hidden Fees

As stated in a previous article, many basic DistroKid features are priced on top of the base subscription.


RouteNote

All of these features and many more are offered by RouteNote for free, with no hidden fees or recurring cost. Artists keep 85% of revenue, or choose Premium Distribution to keep 100% of the revenue.

Asking for $22.99 upfront without clearly laying out the features and limitation is an unfair business model for small artists and labels.

Many labels manage upwards of one hundred artists. $1350 per year for this benefit is unsustainable for independent labels.


Click here to sign up to RouteNote today for free.