How do you choose between a yearly plan and a fee per release?
Start from how many releases you put out in a year. A yearly plan charges for the artist account and lets the number of releases float: Amuse asks €21.99 for one artist profile with unlimited releases, Horus Music £20 for its Artist plan and Ditto Music $19 for Starter. The more you release, the lower the price of each release becomes, and a prolific artist is the person these plans are written for.
A per-release fee works the other way round. RecordJet prices a single at €19, an EP at €29 and an album at €39 once, or €9, €19 and €29 per year, and EmuBands asks £15 for a single and £30 for a bundle of 2 to 20 tracks. Feiyr is cheaper still at €3.82 per release after a €9.90 activation. If you publish one single a year, a fee per release costs less than any subscription in the list.
The third shape is revenue share instead of cash. RecordJet Basic pays out 90%, iMusician Starter takes a 10% commission, RouteNote Free pays 85% of net revenue and Feiyr keeps 20%. A catalogue that earns little loses almost nothing this way, and a release that earns a lot is cheaper on a fixed fee, so it is worth recalculating after a year of real earnings.
What happens to your releases when you stop paying?
This differs between the tools, and the pricing page rarely says it plainly. Amuse states that music stays live after a downgrade. EmuBands states that a single or bundle paid once stays on stores permanently, while a lapsed Premium subscription needs a fee to keep releases up. RouteNote returns a Premium release to the Free plan when you cancel its renewal, so it carries on at an 85% share instead of disappearing.
Ditto Music is the one to read twice: its comparison table says long-term store presence is free only on selected plans, so what happens to a Starter release at lapse is a question for its support team before you sign. Horus Music has a pay-per-release alternative that is set up through customer support, and RecordJet says its contracts are non-exclusive and can be cancelled with notice.
The question matters because the incumbent behaves differently. DistroKid's Distribution Agreement renews the one-year term automatically and tells the stores to remove recordings after the term ends. Anyone leaving it should pick a distributor with a clear answer on lapsed plans.
Does a European distributor mean EU law applies to the contract?
Only for three of the ten. Amuseio AB is a Swedish company whose terms apply Swedish law with the Stockholm District Court as venue, Record Union's terms name DFP Group AB in Stockholm, and DANCE ALL DAY Musicvertriebs GmbH, which trades as Feiyr, is entered in the Traunstein commercial register as HRB 13330. These are EU companies.
RecordJet AG (Lucerne) and iMusician Digital AG (Zurich) are Swiss, and the EU has an adequacy decision for Switzerland. EmuBands Ltd (Glasgow), Horus Music Limited (Leicester), RouteNote Limited (Truro), Ditto Ltd (Liverpool) and Label Worx Limited (Hull) are UK companies, and UK data protection law applies to them. The EU also treats the UK as adequate, but they sit outside the EEA.
None of the ten pages we checked states where the data is hosted. LabelWorx refers to UK data protection law without naming a location. If hosting country matters for your contract, ask each vendor in writing, because the tool pages cannot answer it.
How do you move a catalogue away from DistroKid, TuneCore or CD Baby?
Build the new catalogue before you cancel the old one. Upload the same audio and artwork to the new distributor, reuse the existing ISRC and UPC codes where the tool lets you, and wait until the releases are live before you end the previous contract. Amuse offers a release importer, and RecordJet publishes a switching guide for artists who arrive from another distributor.
Codes are the detail that decides whether stream counts carry over. Horus Music lists free UPCs and ISRCs, and Feiyr sells optional ISRC and EAN codes for €0.85 and €0.95, so check how a given distributor treats codes you bring along. The same applies to your Spotify artist profile: EmuBands lists instant Spotify verification on all packages.
Expect to rebuild extras by hand. Royalty splits, pre-save pages and smartlinks are set per release, and they exist at Record Union, Horus Music, Ditto Music, iMusician and Amuse in their own form. Count an afternoon per release for a catalogue that uses them heavily.
When is it better not to switch distributor at all?
If you release often, your plan is cheap and your catalogue sits on a US distributor with all the splits and codes set up, the move costs time and the saving can be small. A €23.99 yearly plan at DistroKid, for example, is close to Amuse at €21.99, so the price alone does not justify the effort.
Switching earns its keep in four cases: you want a European or Swiss counterparty, you release rarely enough that a fee per release is cheaper, you need a free start (RouteNote), or you need something the incumbent does not centre on, such as the label accounting at LabelWorx, the UK Charts registration at Horus Music or the publishing and sync pitching at Ditto Music.
A move also makes less sense when a particular store matters to you and the new distributor does not state its list. RecordJet, Feiyr and LabelWorx do not publish store counts on the pages we checked, and Record Union's 20+ is the smallest figure stated.
Which tools go beyond delivery to stores?
iMusician surrounds delivery with Instant Mastering through JP Masters, editorial playlist pitching to teams at services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Beatport, music analytics and an Artist Hub for pre-save and release pages. Feiyr adds AI mastering, Link-it landing pages and promotion for radio, YouTube and Beatport, and it also distributes eBooks and audiobooks.
Ditto Music Pro adds sync pitching for TV and film, publishing royalty collection and YouTube Content ID. Horus Music offers publishing administration, sync licensing and podcast distribution, and RouteNote offers publishing, Content ID and the PUSH.fm marketing tools. LabelWorx lists monetised user-generated content on Instagram, TikTok and Twitch and a YouTube specialist service.
Most of these extras are paid items or sit in higher tiers, so compare what is included in the plan you would actually buy. Amuse itemises its add-ons: music video distribution at €29.99 per video per year, cover song licensing at €12.99 per track, store sync at €8.99 per release and mastering at €5.49 per audio file.
