MBW has previously written about the frighteningly small odds that indie artists face in their bid to release a hit record in the modern music business.
Now, a new stat revealed by independent music distributor DistroKid drills the point home.
DistroKid says that it is currently ingesting and processing more than 35,000 new tracks every day – a number it suggests is “significantly more than any other distributor”.
Playing around with that figure, it works out to around 24 tracks a minute… or more than a million new tracks every month.
The new figure was published in a press release on Friday (May 7) announcing the launch of an update to DistroKid’s automatic royalty distribution service, Splits.
DistroKid has previously said that it distributes around one third of all new music released around the world. On Friday, the company shed more light on this number.
DistroKid now estimates that it’s distributing “30-40% of all new music in the world”, and that its catalog holds nearly 20 million tracks, from more than 2 million artists.
In February, Spotify boss Daniel Ek revealed that more than 60,000 new tracks are being ingested by his platform every day.
DistroKid’s Splits, which was first unveiled in 2017, allows artists who use DistroKid to automatically split any percentage of royalties, from any track, with anyone who worked on said track such as producers, beat-makers, guest performers, featured artists, photographers, friends, investors, etc.
DistroKid says that 300,000 collaborators have now been added to Splits on more than 1.5 million songs.
As part of the expansion announced on Friday, DistroKid members will now be able to specify Recoupments for each track, designating collaborators who should receive payments first—before anyone else gets paid.
With Recoupments, collaborators can be automatically reimbursed for their out-of-pocket expenses before royalty splits kick in.
Artists will continue to be able to add or remove unlimited collaborators at any time, and change splits percentages at any time. Splits also makes it possible for artists to view the history of their royalty splits over time, so that if any changes are made, they have a record of all previous percentage designations.
“Artists love DistroKid’s Splits feature, and have 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.”
Philip Kaplan, DistroKid
DistroKid Founder, Philip Kaplan, said: “Artists love DistroKid’s Splits feature, and have 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.”
In March, music streaming and discovery platform Audiomack secured a partnership with DistroKid. This marked the first time Audiomack has formed an integrated partnership with a direct-to-artist music distributor like DistroKid.
DistroKid also recently teamed up with Snapchat to let its artists distribute their music to the social platform, which has 265 million daily active users.Music Business Worldwide