DistroKid vs TuneCore vs CD Baby: The Real Math for 2026

Ask five artists which distributor to use and you'll get five confident, contradictory answers. That's because they're all right — for their own release rate. Distribution pricing comes in three shapes, and which one wins depends almost entirely on how much music you put out.

The three pricing shapes

• Annual fee, unlimited releases (the DistroKid model): a flat yearly subscription covers everything you upload. Cheap per-release if you're prolific; a recurring bill even in years you release nothing — and with some plans, music can come down if you stop paying.

• Per-release fees (the classic TuneCore model): you pay per single or album, sometimes annually. Predictable for occasional releasers; expensive for someone shipping a single every six weeks.

• One-time fee plus a percentage (the CD Baby model): pay once per release, keep it up forever, and the distributor takes a cut of ongoing royalties. No recurring bill, but the percentage never stops.

Pricing specifics shift every year — which is exactly why we maintain a live distributor comparison instead of printing numbers here that would be stale by spring. It asks how often you release and what you earn, then shows the actual cost of each model for *your* situation.

The questions that matter more than price

• Do you keep 100% of royalties, or a percentage? A "free" distributor taking 15% costs a growing artist more than any subscription.

• What happens when you leave? Can you transfer releases with their ISRCs intact? A distributor you can't exit cleanly owns you.

• Does it pass through everything? Some handle only streaming royalties, leaving publishing and neighboring rights uncollected — a leak the royalty audit will catch.

• Payout threshold and speed — small thresholds and monthly payouts matter when the numbers are small.

Whatever you pick, plan the release properly

The distributor is one step in a release, not the release. Editorial playlist pitching closes at least 7 days before release day, assets have lead times, and pre-save links need somewhere to live. Musavise's release planner generates the full working-backwards timeline from your release date, and smart links give every release one link for every platform — free.

Everything above lives in one free Musavise account — no credit card, no trial clock, and your data exports any time you want it. Create your free account and it's yours in about two minutes.