Top Reason to Choose CD Baby

Music stays in stores. Unlimited distribution for a flat annual fee sounds great, but you’re renting distribution. If the day ever comes where you can’t afford to pay rent, your music gets evicted from all stores. That threat is always there as long as your distribution is on a subscription. The pricing makes it seem like an afterthought. $20 or $30 annually isn’t much and I’m sure most people don’t envision a time where they wouldn’t be able to pay such a small amount, but as the saying goes “ish happens”. I chatted with an artist whose music was removed while he was in a coma fighting for his life because his debit card couldn’t be charged. Peace-of-mind goes a long way. The way CD Baby secures distribution is to take 9% of the revenue generated by your releases in perpetuity after you pay a $10 one-time-fee for each release. How does it stack up in that offer?

CD Baby vs. Distrokid vs. Ditto vs. Too Lost Distribution

You pay $10 one-time than 9% of your revenue and that gets punitive the more you earn. $10K in royalties would have you paying $900 annually. Compare that to Too Lost distribution and its 15% that would have you paying $1,500 annually. With Ditto, you’re effectively coerced back into a subscription by being prevented from accessing your royalties until you pay the subscription fee which, if you were earning $10K annually would cost you less because you’d only pay $35 to get $9965. Distrokid would cost you $29 per single and/or $49 per album and allow you to keep 100% of your revenue so the cost there is front loaded. You’d pay upfront for each release at a rate exceeding that of CD Baby’s $10 but get to keep 100% of what you earn. What’s good about Distrokid’s offer is you have the ability to let releases pay for their permanent spot over time, whereas with CD Baby, you have to pay upfront and hope the releases recoup the cost. CD Baby is clearly a better option to keep your music in stores than Too Lost Distribution but Ditto and Distrokid… Though Distrokid’s costs are front loaded, it’s not an initial fee. You can distribute a release and if and when that release earns $29 pay for Leave-a-Legacy. You wouldn’t have to pay $2.9K to distribute 100 releases, but you would be required to pay $1,000 to CD Baby to distribute that number of releases. Ditto beats CD Baby as the option here because it’s effectively a $35 charge to withdraw your funds.

Top Features

Stages

As I’ve previously stated, percentages become punitive the more you earn where distributors must justify the growing cost for artists to make sense of continuing to use their service. CD Baby addresses that with their Stages program which offers more expansive services the more an artist grows. At the Plus Stage artists are no longer required to pay upfront fees per release and are only subject to their 9% royalty split. At the Label Services Stage they open up actual editorial playlist pitching, fast tracked approval for Pandora radio, and video delivery to Apple Music. Whether that makes it worth it, comes down to how much you value those features.

Transaction fees

CD Baby allows you to avoid all transaction fees by using ACH and having your funds sent directly to your bank account. PayPal is provided as an option but comes with an uncapped transaction fee of 2.9%. Most distributors cap transaction fees but do not eliminate them.

Tunecore - capped at $0.25

Distrokid - capped at $1

Ditto - No transaction fees and only sends funds directly to your bank account

Trending Reports

Daily updates on the performance of your releases are provided through Trending Reports on CD Baby. This is a feature common with other distributors but CD Baby provides more information than they do showing the sources of your streaming activity where you can see if it’s coming from searches, radio, etc. This is information you’re not even allowed to see in Spotify for artists. The value of the information comes down to what you can do with it, so what can you do with this info? Things like a notable performance, a mention by an influencer, usage of your music in an influencer’s content, tv show, or movie could all spike activity from search. If you have those things happen and no spike happens from that source, it informs you of the value of the influencer, tv show, or movie. Paying for sponsored posts from an influencer that doesn’t move the needle isn’t the smartest thing to do so the information can save you a lot of money there.

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