You do not need to spend a dollar to get a song onto Spotify and Apple Music. That is the first thing to know, because almost every article about distributors starts by comparing prices, and the price is not the interesting part. What you are really choosing between is speed, patience, and what happens to your catalogue the day you stop paying.
The zero-dollar route, first
RouteNote runs a no-cost tier. You upload as much as you like, it goes to the same stores as everybody else's, and you keep 85% of what your music earns. RouteNote keeps 15%. There is no subscription and nothing to cancel.
What you pay instead is patience. The review queue on the no-cost tier is slow — artists routinely report waits of several weeks, sometimes longer than a month, before a release goes live. If you are sitting on a finished song and a date you have already told people about, that is a real cost. If you are putting out your first song and nobody is waiting, it is not a cost at all.
What you are actually buying when you pay
Every paid distributor is selling you the same three things: a faster, more predictable release date; 100% of your streaming royalties instead of 85%; and a support desk that answers you. That is the whole product. None of them get you playlisted, none of them promote you, and any that imply otherwise are selling something else.
The 85% versus 100% difference only starts to matter once there is money moving. At a thousand streams a month, by the per-stream range on this site, the 15% you are giving up is worth about fifty to seventy-five cents. At a hundred thousand, it is worth switching over.
The three paid names, and what they cost
DistroKid is a yearly subscription — $24.99 a year for one artist name, $44.99 for two, $89.99 for up to a hundred. You keep everything your music earns. Releases go up in days, not weeks.
TuneCore is also yearly, starting at $24.99 for its entry plan and rising through $44.99 and $54.99 tiers. You keep 100% of sales, but note that it takes a cut — around 20% — of social monetisation and publishing royalties, which is a different arrangement than it first appears.
CD Baby is not a subscription. You pay once per release — $9.99 for a single, $14.99 for an album — and it stays up with nothing to renew. In exchange it keeps 9% of your streaming royalties for as long as the release lives.
These are the numbers as of September 2026. Distributors change pricing and ownership more often than you would think — CD Baby changed hands in early 2026 — so check the page before you commit.
The question nobody asks until it is too late
What happens to your music when you stop paying?
On a subscription, your catalogue comes down. Not immediately, and there are usually grace periods and ways to keep old releases up for an extra charge, but the structure is a rental. Miss a year during a bad stretch — and broke musicians have bad stretches — and the discography you spent three years building is gone from every store at once, along with its playlist placements and its stream counts.
On CD Baby's one-time model, it stays. That is what the 9% is buying. For someone whose income is unpredictable, that is not a small thing, and it is the single factor most comparisons leave out.
The recommendation
Put your first release out on the no-cost tier. Learn the process on a release where a three-week wait costs you nothing. You will find out what a UPC is, what an ISRC is, how long the stores take, and what you got wrong — and you will find it out without having paid for the privilege.
Then move once you know how you actually work. If you are releasing more than twice a year and you want dates you can plan around, a yearly subscription is the cheaper and saner choice. If you release rarely and want each record to sit there quietly forever without an annual bill hanging over it, pay once.
One thing that is true of all of them: none of these companies take ownership of your recordings or your songs. They are a delivery service. If a distributor's terms say otherwise, that is not a distributor.
The distributor is the least important decision in your release. It is a truck. Pick the one whose payment schedule matches your life and spend the saved afternoon on the song.
Three pages on this site that carry it further: the full list of distribution options, how getting on Spotify actually works, and the real release timeline.
Before You Upload Anything
There is an order to a release, and doing it out of order is what costs people money. The release checklist walks every step from finished master to the day it goes live.