What music distribution actually costs you
Getting your song onto Spotify is the easy part. Every distributor does it, most for a similar price, and none of them can make anyone listen. The part nobody explains clearly is what happens to the money and the rights once it is up there.
Distribution is a delivery service, not a career
A distributor takes your finished track and delivers it to the stores. That is the whole job. It is genuinely useful and it is genuinely commodity — the file that lands at Spotify is identical whichever company sends it.
So when you compare distributors, ignore the store count in the marketing. Everyone reaches the big platforms. Compare three things instead:
- What they take. A flat annual fee, a per-release fee, or a percentage of your royalties forever. The third one is the expensive one, and it is often the one advertised as free.
- What happens if you leave. Can you take your catalogue and your existing streaming numbers with you, or do you restart from zero?
- Who owns the master. If the answer is anyone other than you, that is not distribution. That is a deal.
“Free” usually means a percentage
Free distribution is rarely free. It is normally paid for with a permanent cut of your royalties, and unlike a fee, a percentage never stops. A track that does nothing costs you nothing either way. A track that unexpectedly takes off five years from now is where the difference becomes real money.
Read the exit clause before you read the price.
Where the money actually comes from
Per-stream rates are low enough that streaming alone rarely pays for the recording. Most working artists we talk to make far more from the things around the music than from the music files themselves — live shows, sync placements, commissions, merch, teaching, session work.
That is not a defeatist point. It is a planning point: if you treat distribution as the goal, the numbers will disappoint you. If you treat it as one channel among several, it does its job.
The questions worth asking before you sign anything
- Do I keep 100% of my master rights?
- Is the fee flat, or a percentage of royalties in perpetuity?
- If I leave, do my streams and playlist placements survive?
- How quickly do I actually get paid, and what is the minimum payout?
- Who do I contact when a release is wrong, and do they answer?
If a company cannot answer those in plain language on a public page, that itself is the answer.
Why we are building Song Sprouts
Because delivery is solved and everything else is not. Artists do not mainly need another pipe to Spotify — they need paid work, and they need to keep what they make.
Song Sprouts is a marketplace built around that: commissions from people who want original music, distribution to 480+ stores, and gigs — with you keeping 100% of your rights. Human-made, by artists, for the people who hire them.