Too Lost Music Distribution Assessment 

Too Lost may not be a new music distribution company, but it’s new to me. It’s establishing itself in the market by throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at artists by giving access to everything you’d want to know about your release. For someone like myself who’s very demanding with the level of information I want at my disposal, Too Lost completely shuts me up. It provides everything I would ask for and more. I am an analyst/journalist/researcher who loves to dissect and have deep conversations about every aspect of the process. I can admit that the information has almost no bearing on the success or failure of a release. No one is asking for this level of information and that’s the reason you don’t find it available with other distributors at this price.  No one is asking for this information, because it doesn’t impact their bottom line. You only need a distribution company to do three things: deliver your music to stores without errors or delays, collect and distribute on-time payments, and quickly address and resolve any problems with doing those jobs. Too Lost distribution isn’t offering to drive the discovery of your music. It isn’t offering a dedicated support representative, white-glove treatment, or even quality customer service. Tunecore, CD Baby, and Distrokid are like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. They’ve been around forever providing distribution at a high level with a massive client base proving sustainability and scalability. Does Too Lost’s offer make it worth it to risk venturing into the unknown? Let’s explore. 

Scale. Scaling a business means growing a company in a way that allows it to handle more business without increasing costs. I have no direct insight into Too Lost Distribution’s financials, but I’ve seen this story before. We have a distribution market where artists want to pay as close to nothing as they possibly can and digital distribution companies are trying to meet that demand. The standard rate is now in the range of $20 for unlimited distribution across the board. The two biggest pain points in the market are discovery and customer support, but it isn’t scalable for a distributor to try to solve those problems. In attempts to break in and establish a name, we’ve seen service providers try to undercut the market entirely by offering distribution with no upfront and only a revenue split or no cost at all. We’ve seen STEM, Amuse, United Masters, and ONERPM. One after the other, we’ve also seen STEM show the majority of their client base the door due to scaling issues, Amuse restructure its pricing and offers, United Masters restructure its pricing and offers, and ONErpm become Invite only. None of their changes were to the benefit of their client base, they became more expensive and removed features from the plans artists signed up for to force them to upgrade. 

What stops this from happening with Too Lost Distribution? According to my chat with its owner, It hasn’t taken any outside money so it doesn’t have investors pressuring it to generate large profits for R.O.I. He also stated that they have distribution deals with semi-established and established artists where they have revenue splits that drive significant revenue. Note, that was also a claim used by Amuse. Advances were another revenue-generating tool that was thrown out there because they charge interest on every advance. Time will tell how this plays out, but as an artist considering the service you should be aware of the risk. 

According to its owner, the company has been around for 5 years but what’s key is in what form? Take a local restaurant for example. It might be accustomed to serving a max of 20 - 30 customers. You flood the restaurant with 1,000 customers and the result would be a severe decline in the level of service. Too Lost distribution hasn’t been around in its current form of being open to all and having to deliver to a massive client base for years in the way Tunecore, CD Baby, and Distrokid have. When you read through their reviews on TrustPilot, you see cracks from the weight with complaints around their release tracker saying releases are live when they aren’t, releases not showing up in stores on time, customer support being completely unresponsive, and things related to performance. We give every company grace with reviews because we know how it is when people have an axe to grind, but things are normally relegated to streaming fraud accusations and not delivery or performance. 

Things to Note

KYC(Know your customer) may or may not be a deal breaker for you but Too Lost requires you to take a picture of your State ID and submit it to distribute music using their service. According to its owner, this is a measure aimed at curbing streaming fraud but that implies that streaming fraud is intentional. Artists are getting caught up by companies pretending to provide legitimate playlisting and marketing services. I don’t know how KYC remedies that. Protection for artists would be in the response where artists could plead their case and be given a second chance. Too Lost seems to take the same zero-tolerance policy as all other distributors at this price point. During our conversation, the owner said something that stuck with me. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, if an artist was accused of streaming fraud, KYC effectively positioned his company to hand over their identifying information to Spotify for whatever action it decided to take. That didn’t strike me as something being in the artist’s favor. There was a convincing argument made for it that had me ok with it, but when I sat with my thoughts, as I tend to do, it wasn’t adding up. Distribution companies do not ask for this information. The only one that does is SoundOn but there’s a major divide in incentive between Too Lost and SoundOn. 

Top Reason to Choose Too Lost Distribution

Music stays in stores. If you cancel or discontinue payment to Too Lost distribution, your music won’t be removed from stores. Instead, Too Lost will take 15% of the revenue it generates allowing you to continue to earn and keep it available to fans everywhere.

Too Lost Distribution vs. CD Baby vs. Distrokid for keeping music in stores 

CD Baby charges a $10 one-time fee per release. After that, you pay 9% of revenue to keep your music in stores vs. 15% to Too Lost. Now, Tool Lost gives you unlimited distribution for $20 annually so you don’t have to pay per release like you would with CD Baby, but it comes down to how often you release. Some artists I’ve worked with may drop a single or album a year which means they’d come out cheaper with CD Baby. Others drop singles every month or so and doing that, they’d come out way better with Too Lost distribution.

Distrokid charges $29/per single and $49 per album for Leave-a-Legacy to keep music in-stores, but allows you to keep 100% of your royalties. Effectively, an annual fee is like a sliding percentage. Paying $20 annually and earning $100 would have you paying 20% of your royalties, while earning $20 annually would have you paying 100%. What Distrokid offers vs Too Lost is the ability to buy out 100% of the royalties, period. It’s a great option if the royalties are worth the cost. What Too Lost offers over Distrokid is security, because you don’t have to do anything to keep your releases in stores. With Distrokid, if you don’t pay for Leave-a-Legacy at some point, and you can’t afford to pay, your releases will come down. That’s not an issue you’ll have with Too Lost.

Ditto keeps your music in stores without requiring any per-release fees or taking a percentage of your revenue, essentially it requires you to reactivate your subscription to collect. A big caveat here is that it isn’t disclosed whether reactivating your subscription allows you to collect royalties retroactively or if it will only allow you to collect for the months after you’ve reactivated. It could claim 100% of your royalties until you reactivate so with it being unknown, Too Lost is the better option.

Top Features 

Too Lost Distribution is very feature-rich so let’s dive into the key features, their value, and whether they’re things you need to get from Too Lost Distribution.

Usage Discovery

This feature informs you of user-generated content containing your music. You get to see the TikTok videos, Instagram stories, and YouTube videos that feature your tracks which can open the door to other opportunities like influencer partnerships, cross-promotion, and more. Chartmetric provides this information to artists for free and it’s likely being sourced from them through an API. Being that it’s free to sign up and view this information on Chartmetric, it’s an unnecessary Too Lost feature. It’s pretty much a matter of convenience where you wouldn’t have to check two separate platforms to get the information, but Too Lost delivers far less information than you’d get from the source.

YouTube Channel Monetization

Too Lost doesn’t exclusively monetize through Content ID like most other distributors. Maybe they realized that artists are only trying to monetize their uploads through the program and not those of third parties. The way Too Lost monetizes YouTube is better set up for artists looking to monetize their direct uploads. What Too Lost offers is a multi-channel network. This is like a record label for YouTube. Your channel becomes a subsidiary of their MCN. All your uploads get monetized, not just the ones containing claimed music. The downside is that all of the revenue generated by your channel would flow through Too Lost distribution and they’ll have control over what you can see in your dashboard, as well as whether videos are or aren’t monetized. MCNs require a contractual agreement because, again, it’s like signing a label deal so you need to be clear on the terms, particularly whether you’re allowed to leave.

Team Members

This feature allows you to give someone like me access to your account to view things like your sales performance, release info, etc. but not be able to change anything or withdraw your funds. You can invite individual users and restrict who has access to what. It’s a great feature if you’re working with people that need access to your account.

Other Too Lost Features

Delivery logs inform you of where your release is in the process: Live, Pending, etc. It’s cool, but could be completely inaccurate. There’s only one way to know if your release is live in a store and that’s checking to make sure it’s there. This could give you a false sense of security. At the end of the day, you set a release date, either your release is in stores on that date or the distributor dropped the ball. They offer Cloud Storage but it doesn’t compare to iCloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive so it doesn’t work as a substitute. I’m not sure of the value there. Release links you have companies that specialize in providing these links as a service and you’d be best served to use one of them. Distributors do not provide you with the full array of features that come with these links. Publishing Administration is another service they offer, but it is never a good idea to bundle with a distribution service because you may decide to leave and use another distributor and it makes for a messy breakup.

Too Lost for Labels & Distribution Companies

Too Lost invites users to build on top of its service by offering unlimited distribution for an unlimited number of artists for just $35 annually. You can’t beat the offer if you’re a label or looking to create a distribution service. The issue, again, is scale! 

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