DistroKid ‘distributes 30-40% of new music globally’

The company made the claim in an announcement of a new version of its Splits royalty distribution tool.

“It is estimated that 30-40% of all new music in the world is distributed by DistroKid, with the company ingesting and processing more than 35 000 new tracks every day, significantly more than any other distributor,” the company said. “DistroKid’s catalogue holds nearly 20 million tracks from more than 2 million artists.”

DistroKid did not share further data about the number of streams its catalogue is generating.

The digital distributor has achieved significant growth since it was launched in 2013. In October 2018, the platform had more than 250 000 artists. More recently, it signed deals with new platforms, including TikTok, Twitch and Snapchat. In February, the company launched a feature called Upstream, which matches artists to suitable labels.

Distrokid’s update on its royalty distribution tool includes a new service called Recoupment, a feature that gives artists more control over how their royalties are distributed to collaborators. Recoupment allows artists on the platform to choose which collaborators should get their share of royalties first.

The company says the feature is useful to pay collaborators like producers, session artists and photographers, who can be reimbursed for money that they might have fronted for their services before actual royalty splits kick in. Musicians will still be able to add or remove unlimited collaborators and change split percentages at any time. The company will also document a record of the royalty splits over time.

Recoupment follows a number of requests by artists on the platform. DistroKid founder Philip Kaplan said artists had been “asking if we could add a tool that enables them to reimburse a collaborator who fronted money for a video or studio time, or provided some other service on an individual track. We’re excited to roll out Recoupments, which give artists even more control over how their earnings are distributed”.

Splits was first introduced in 2017 to automatically divide and pay royalties between a track’s collaborators. The tool has already been used on more than 1.5 million tracks.