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Royalties

What Royalties Does DistroKid Collect? My Two Exports, Same Songs

By Boboy Watson·Last verified September 4, 2026·Royalties

Most answers to this question are a list of what a distributor says it does. Mine is a receipt.

I have two complete royalty exports covering the same catalog of songs. One is from DistroKid: 45,894 rows, June 2019 through July 2026, 677,639 verified plays, $3,081.30, across 48 stores and 178 countries. The other is from my publishing administrator: 5,030 royalty lines across 73 songs, usage from June 2019 to March 2026, $261.39 collected and $222.76 paid to me after commission.

Same songs. Same years. Same streams generating both. Not one dollar appears in both files. That gap is the answer to what DistroKid collects, measured rather than asserted.

What royalties does DistroKid collect?

DistroKid collects sound recording royalties — the money paid for use of the specific master you uploaded — from the stores and streaming services it delivers your release to. That is the whole scope of base distribution.

One stream of one song can touch the first three rows simultaneously. DistroKid reports on row one. Everything below it arrives, if it arrives at all, from somewhere else.

If you want the structural version of this argument rather than the receipts version, that is does DistroKid collect all of your royalties. This page is the proof.

What did DistroKid actually collect for me?

Across seven years and 48 stores, DistroKid reported and paid $3,081.30 on 677,639 verified plays. The per-play rates in that export vary by more than three orders of magnitude:

Those are my numbers, not a rate card. No platform pays a fixed per-stream rate, and mine reflect my geography, my listener mix and the years my releases came out. The full 48-platform breakdown is in what streaming platforms actually pay per play.

The relevant point for this page is that this is complete for what it covers. DistroKid did its job on the recording side across 178 countries without me touching anything. The problem was never that DistroKid underperformed. It is that I believed the recording side was the whole song.

What did DistroKid not collect? Here is the second export.

The same 73 songs, the same plays, generated a composition royalty every time they were streamed. DistroKid's base distribution never saw that money. My publishing administrator did.

Two hundred and sixty-one dollars is not life-changing money. That is not the point. The point is that it is money DistroKid's base distribution structurally cannot pay you, on songs DistroKid was already paying me for, and if I had never registered on the composition side it would have gone nowhere near me.

The ratio is the number I would tell my past self: across the same catalog, my recording money was roughly twelve times my composition money. So the composition side is not where an independent artist gets rich. It is where an independent artist stops leaking.

Does DistroKid collect mechanical royalties?

Not on the Musician, Musician Plus or Ultimate distribution plans.

In my publishing export, 96.2% of everything collected was mechanical and only 3.8% was performance. And most of that mechanical money came through one pipe: $189.12 through The MLC, the US collective created under the Music Modernization Act to administer the blanket licence for on-demand streaming.

The MLC is free to join. It pays roughly 75 days after the end of each monthly usage period, and for US members the payout minimums are $5 by ACH, $100 by check and $250 by wire — pick ACH, that twenty-fold difference is the most consequential setting in the account. Which means the largest single component of what my paid administrator collected is money I could have registered for directly, for nothing. How to register with The MLC is a one-afternoon job.

DistroKid does sell a separate paid product, DistroKid Publishing, which per DistroKid's own help documentation collects global digital mechanicals, US offline mechanicals, global digital public performance, US offline public performance, worldwide sync on a non-exclusive basis, and settlement payments. DistroKid describes that income as "different from your usual streaming royalties, which DistroKid already collects for all members" — which is the clearest confirmation available, in DistroKid's own words, that base distribution is recording-side only.

Does DistroKid collect performance royalties?

No, and no distributor does. Performance royalties on the composition are collected in the US by ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR, split into a writer share and a publisher share, and paid only to registered claimants.

Here is where my data is useful as a reality check rather than as a warning. In my export, performance royalties were 3.8% of everything collected on the composition side. The widely repeated fear of "losing half your performance royalties" without a publisher entity was, at my streaming volume, a fear about single-digit dollars.

That does not make it worthless. It makes it cheap to fix and pointless to panic about. A songwriter account is free at both ASCAP and BMI, and at ASCAP the publisher side is free too when you apply for writer and publisher together. What ASCAP and BMI actually collect is a narrower thing than most artists assume, and worth understanding before you pay anyone to do it for you.

Does DistroKid collect SoundExchange royalties?

No. SoundExchange collects the digital performance royalty on the sound recording from non-interactive services — Pandora's radio mode, SiriusXM — and pays the featured artist directly. It is on the same side of the fence as DistroKid, and DistroKid still does not collect it, because it comes from a different licence.

SoundExchange is free to join, and its payout thresholds are published: monthly direct deposit at $100 accrued, quarterly direct deposit at $10, and quarterly check at $10, rising to $100 for a paper check.

Does DistroKid collect YouTube Content ID money?

Only if you buy the add-on. DistroKid delivers your recording to YouTube Music and pays that recording royalty on every plan. Content ID — the fingerprinting system that finds your audio inside other people's uploads — is sold separately, with an annual per-release fee plus a share of what it collects. Check current pricing at checkout rather than from any blog, this one included.

Content ID is also recording-side. It does not touch the composition at all. I explain the mechanism, and why it claims your own uploads, in what is YouTube Content ID.

How long does the money DistroKid does not collect take to arrive?

Longer than you expect, and this is the part that convinces people nothing is working.

In my publishing export, the median gap between the month a song was streamed and the date I was paid for it was about 290 days. A quarter of the lines cleared in under about three and a half months. Another quarter took over 2.7 years, most of it marked as reprocessing, historical or adjustment.

The reason is the number of hands. A recording royalty goes DSP → distributor → you. A composition royalty goes DSP → collecting society → administrator → you, sometimes with a foreign society inserted in the middle. My biggest non-US collector was APRA / AMCOS at $22.60, ahead of anything European, and money like that is arriving from the other side of the world through two intermediaries.

If you register today, plan on the composition money describing last year rather than last month.

How do I check this on my own catalog?

You do not have to take my exports on faith. You can run the same check on yours in an hour, and it is the fastest way to find out which pots are actually connected to your name.

1. Export everything from your distributor. In DistroKid, that is the full earnings download rather than the summary screen. Note the date range and the number of stores. That file is your entire recording-side picture, and if it is the only file you have, it is your entire picture full stop.
2. Search it for the words that should not be there. Mechanical. Performance. MLC. ASCAP. BMI. SoundExchange. If none of them appear as a royalty type, that is not a reporting bug — those rights are not being collected on your behalf.
3. Log into The MLC and search your own song titles. If a work of yours has no registered writer or publisher attached, the mechanical royalty on every US stream of it currently has no claimant.
4. Log into your PRO and check the works list, not just the account. An active affiliation with zero registered works collects nothing, and it is a surprisingly common state to be in.
5. Compare the periods. My composition statement lags my distributor statement by months. If you registered recently, absence of money is not evidence of absence of money — it is usually evidence that the pipeline has not filled yet.

Doing this once tells you which of the five rows in the first table on this page are switched on for you personally, which is a more useful thing to know than any general article about what distributors do.

What does it cost to cover everything DistroKid does not?

Less than the distribution subscription itself.

A paid publishing administrator is a fifth, optional line. Mine cost $100 up front plus commission and returned $222.76 — so it cleared its cost, slowly, and the honest read is that most of what it collected was MLC money I could have registered for free. What it genuinely added was the foreign slice and the paperwork. The full accounting is in I paid Songtrust $100 to collect my publishing.

What I would tell myself in 2019

DistroKid collects the recording side, completely and reliably, in 178 countries, and it is worth the subscription. That is a good product doing exactly what it says.

But if DistroKid is the only account you hold, then on every stream you generate, you are collecting one right and leaving the other one on the table. I did that for years. It cost me a few hundred dollars, which at my scale is survivable and at somebody else's scale is not — and the fix, for the three free registrations, is an afternoon.

I am an artist reporting my own royalty exports, not a lawyer or an accountant. My per-play rates are one catalog's results in one genre with a US-weighted audience, not a forecast of yours, and distributor pricing and add-on terms change — verify current terms with DistroKid before acting on anything here.