DistroKid vs TuneCore, this is an honest opinion of mine because I do have
my music on distrokid and I also have some music on tunecore as well so I'm
going to give you a non sponsored honest comparison to both these
platforms to see which one might be right for you if you want to sign up for
distrokid I do have a referral link that's just one of their strengths if
you do sign up for distrokid as well you can get your own referral link and
if you do sign up for that one below it's about a 7% discount we're going to
go over the biggest things that you need in a music distributor which are the
pricing how much they actually charge you to get your music up there the
features and the specific things that are differentiated between each platform
and also payments how much each platform pays you in return of the streaming that
you deserve let's get into the first one which is pricing and that's a big
differentiator between TuneCore and distrokid. So with distrokid there
is three-tier planned options and then they do also have some add-ons that you
can add later on in the process of uploading a song but the pillars are
three-tier plans that's very simple to understand so we have the musician plan
this one ice-cream cone which is $20 a year and with that you can get unlimited
amount of uploads so keep in mind you can be releasing hundreds of songs but
every year you have to pay another $20 $20 $20 for the rest of the time that
you want that song to be live the next plant is a musician plus plan and this
is the plan I'm on it's two artists or more and the same thing with a musician
plan unlimited amount of songs that you can upload but also this plan is really
valuable because you can set customizable label name and release
dates pre-orders into iTunes pricing these are really great features
especially the release date because if you have fans and you want to tell them
that your song is going to be out on June 15th or for whatever for example
you want to be able to set that on upload with the musician plan you can't
do that the next plan label is basically like the musician plus plan but you are
allowed to have five up to a hundred artists
that's the tiered pricing plan for distrokid some of the add-ons can be
YouTube's Content ID monetization where you can add on for about $5 a year but
distrokid will take 20% of that ad revenue there's a store Maximizer which
just says like if distrokid adds any more stores than your music will
automatically be added to all those Shazam and iPhone you want your song to
show up on says Shazam if you do want that it's about 99 cents or a buck a
year and then they have this leave a legacy option so if you want to leave
distrokid but you want to make sure that your songs will be there you can
pay the 30 one-time fee non-recurring and that will leave your legacy on the
streaming services so district it offers this high recurring annual fee at 20
bucks a month but gives you these unlimited uploads and return so really
valuable if you're uploading tons of music and you only want to pay 20 bucks
a year tune core doesn't have as high a recurring fee but they don't give you
unlimited uploads so for example on TuneCore
it's 10 bucks per year if you want to release one single and that is recurring
so if you already know you only want to release one single per year then it is
cheaper to go with tune core vs distrokid but as soon as you start
releasing more than two singles a year then it's cheaper with distrokid, let's
say you want to release an album and you're not just releasing songs so with
distrokid you can release unlimited songs so you can release 10 albums if
you want and it's still only 20 bucks a year with tunecore they do have this
album price which is 30 bucks $29.99 for your first year and then it's 50 bucks
the following year so right off the bat it's already cheaper to go distrokid
because it's basically distributed saying 20 bucks for an album tune
quarters 30 bucks for your first year and then it gets to 50 bucks every year
after that to car also offers YouTube con
and monetization at 10 bucks one-time fee 80% of that you keep of your ad
revenue so they're taking out 20% which is the same as distrokid today take 20% -
so five dollars cheaper on distrokid to get YouTube monetization similar to
the distrokid add-on features TuneCore takes that even further and
they go as far to adding admission service to your music so if you want to
collect all those royalties worldwide if your song is broadcast somewhere and
you're gonna collect those royalties with tunecore admin publishing
service it's valuable to you as well if you think your songs will be broadcast
worldwide and you want to collect those royalties you don't need to use your
music distributor to collect those royalties you can use other services
like song trust for example that can do that admin publishing for you on top of
the tune core publishing if you go into the tune core publishing music
publishing section of the tune core website you'll see that they do pitch
saying that they will give you sync licensing opportunities that is great if
your music is great for movies for example or ads and you could have an
opportunity to get paid a significant sum of money to have your music in an ad
or in a movie and two core suggests that they actually will give you
opportunities for this sync potentially a really great opportunity if your music
is great for sync however you don't have to use like two core publishing to get
in sync as well you could in sync you could go to another music publishing
service and use your own music supervisor to pitch your songs to sync
tunecore has again just decided to make this a big feature inside their platform
so for specifically talking about price if you're an artist that wants to
release lots of music distrokid would probably be the better option for you
now let's talk about features and the specific features that distrokid offers vs the specific features that TuneCore offers but my favorite features
the distrokid offers one is this hyper follow link which is great if you're
promoting your music to your fans for example when your song comes out you
usually share a link to your fans and one way is to just share the Spotify
link and then you miss out on all the people in your audience that don't use
Spotify so what a hyper follow link is a custom link which just has all the
buttons to the music streaming services out there so when a fan lands on this
custom link they can choose their preferred music streaming service to
court doesn't have this service you can go with other services and pay for this
service an example one is Shoko and you can use that for a month and then cancel
it but with distrokid it comes within the package another feature and I
already touched on at the beginning is the link in the description where you
can get a discount if you sign up for distrokid well if you sign up for
distrokid as well you get your own referral link and you can share it with
your friends your fans your network whoever that they sign up you get a bit
of money in return as well so it's a win-win for both something also that
TuneCore doesn't have so another one would be the wheel playlist the star the
wheel of playlist which is if you spin the wheel to get on you have a chance to
get on their spotify playlist which is another way to be potentially discovered
as an artist let's go on to TuneCore now and if we talk about the features in
TuneCore you'll notice quite a differentiation between district it so
I'm in my tune core a dashboard here and you'll already see like there's way more
things going on then distrokid not to mention there's a bit of ads and things
like that but there's just more things packed into tune core and if you like
that then you're gonna like tune core more the biggest feature sets that tune
core has over distrokid are the music publishing administration there are
artist services and the money reports section I'm not to mention they have a
lot of resources like guides and their their blog is quite extensive on how
to's and more than distro kid so yeah music publishing we've already kind of
covered that's a big thing that TuneCore does offer
their artist services are they claim to promote and help artist services so if
we click on this link we're going to be opened a new page which tries to bring
you through some type of linear path so like prepare your music get ready
promote your music and so they tried to bring you through and give you different
resources to help you like if you're just preparing your music and you need
your music mixed or mastered they're gonna point you in the right direction
in different areas it's really just they have a database of contacts and networks
that they can point you in the right direction if you do need help in those
areas which is beneficial if you don't have a network or if you don't know
where to get started the other thing is there are money in reports section and
this is a big thing that they have over destructed TuneCore is a much more
robust reporting system it just looks nicer in my opinion too so if you're
really into getting into the analytics of your streams then maybe TuneCore is a
bit better for you I found distrokid stats and analytics were just basic very
very elementary and if you're just interested in the stream count at the
last months or a year or whatever it's going to give you the right numbers and
that you won't have to worry about a tunecore just gives you the
opportunity to dig down a bit more let's move on to the section of how you get
paid for the streams and how each platform pays you out it's the same you
get a hundred percent of the music royalties on tune car and you also get a
hundred percent of your music royalties on district it and they pay you out more
or less the same the streams come in there is usually a two or three month
delay on streaming and can take a listen to any of my music it's all available
online as well and please feel free to stick around subscribe if you want that
seven percent discount on distrokid the link is in the description so I hope
to see you in the next video.