Layer 06 · The fine print
Three questions decide a distributor (the service that puts your song on Spotify, Apple Music and the rest), and the yearly price is not one of them. What does it really cost once the money reaches an Australian bank account? What is the commission behind the "keep 100%" claim? And what happens to your catalogue the day you stop paying?
Twenty services, read from their own pricing pages and terms in the last week of August 2026. Prices converted at A$1 = US$0.7162, 30 August 2026. Where something could not be confirmed from a company's own pages it wears a reported tag. Corrections are welcome and get published.
Start here
Almost every service says you keep 100% of your royalties. Most of them are telling the truth about one line of income and staying quiet about the others. The model matters more than the price.
The table
Sorted by what an Australian actually pays. The two at the top charge in Australian dollars, which means no card conversion on the way in and no processor conversion on the way home.
| Service | Yearly cost | Model | Their cut | If you stop paying |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| G.Y.R.O.Brisbane · owned by Too Lost (US) since Jul 2026 | A$9.99 | Subscription + commission | 8% + GST | Not published |
| MusiblePerth | A$29.97 unlimited or A$9.99 a release |
Subscription + commission | 8% | Not published |
| Ditto MusicLiverpool · founder-owned | A$26.53 (US$19) | Subscription | 0% streaming 15% publishing & sync |
Not published |
| Too LostNew York · GoldState & TA Associates | A$27.91 (US$19.99) | Subscription | 0% while paying | Stays live, they take 15% reported |
| UnitedMastersNew York · Alphabet, Apple, a16z | A$27.91 (US$19.99) | Subscription | 0% streaming 20% YouTube Content ID |
Comes down. Data deleted after a year |
| Unchained MusicUnited States | A$27.91 (US$19.99) | Subscription | 0% | Not published |
| AmuseSweden · Bridford Group (UK) majority | A$33.49 (US$23.99) | Subscription | 0% while subscribed 25% if you stop 15% Content ID stacks on top |
Their help pages say it stays live at 75% of royalties. Their contract reserves the right to remove it anyway. See below |
| DistroKidUS · CVC Capital signed Jul 2026; Insight retains a stake | A$34.89 (US$24.99) | Subscription | 0% streaming 20% Content ID |
Comes down. A per-release purchase prevents it: A$40.50 a single, A$68.40 an album, each release separately |
| TuneCoreBelieve (EQT & TCV, private since Jul 2025) | A$34.89 (US$24.99) | Subscription | 0% streaming 20% social platforms 20% publishing + A$105 a writer |
Not published |
| LANDRCanada · Warner and Sony hold minority stakes | A$36 | Subscription | 0% while paying 20–30% Content ID |
Stays live, and a 15% commission begins |
| SymphonicTampa · founder-led, minority investors | A$41.87 (US$29.99) | Subscription | 0% streaming 30% video undisclosed % on social |
Not published |
| SoundCloudBerlin/New York | A$47.88 | Subscription | 0% since Nov 2025 | Comes down and is demonetised after 30 days |
| iMusicianSwitzerland | Not published | Subscription or per release | 0% subscribed, 10% on entry tier 20% social |
Stays online indefinitely |
| Horus MusicLeicester UK | £20 (not converted) | Subscription or per release | 0% distribution 10% publishing |
Not published |
| EmuBandsGlasgow | £90 (not converted) | Subscription or per release | 0% | Stays live for a one-off fee, amount not published |
| Venice MusicLos Angeles | A$753.79 (US$539.88) | Subscription | 0% | Not published |
| CD BabyUniversal Music Group since 20 Feb 2026 | No yearly fee A$13.95 a single A$20.93 an album |
Per release + commission | 9%, for the life of the release | Nothing to lapse. Either side can end it on 24 hours' notice |
| iGrooveSwitzerland | No yearly fee US$20 a single |
Per release + commission | 8% | They keep distribution rights, exclusively, for 12 months after you leave |
| ONErpmBrooklyn · founder-owned, Brisbane office | No fee | Commission | 20% digital 30% YouTube 50% video |
Two-year term, 90 days' notice to leave |
| RouteNoteCornwall UK · bootstrapped | Free, or US$10 a release then US$9.99 a year each |
Free, at a price | 15% on the free tier 0% on paid |
Not published |
| Spinnupwas Universal Music Group | Closed. The site carries three sentences of thanks and an email address. It does not say what happened to the catalogues. | |||
Converted at A$1 = US$0.7162, mid-market, 30 August 2026. A card issuer will add its own margin on top of any figure not shown in Australian dollars. Pound prices are left unconverted because no dated rate was gathered for them.
The question that matters
This is the field with the widest spread, and the one nobody puts on the pricing page. Every one of these is a choice the company made, because their competitors made a different one.
iMusician states releases stay online indefinitely regardless of plan. RouteNote simply drops you back to its free tier, which takes 15%, and says your music is "safe here, forever if you like".
LANDR keeps it live and starts taking 15%. Too Lost is reported to do the same. The music survives; a commission arrives that was not there while you were paying.
EmuBands converts releases to permanent for a one-off charge. DistroKid sells the same thing per release: their help pages state it "is not a one-time payment for all of your releases". Twenty singles is about A$810.
DistroKid without that purchase, UnitedMasters (which then deletes the data after a year), SoundCloud after 30 days. Your release date, your play counts and your playlist history go with it.
Keeping a file on a server and leaving a link alive costs a company close to nothing, which is why several of them do it for free and say so in their marketing. Taking the music down is not a technical limit. It is what makes the renewal notice work.
Read the agreement, not the page
These come from the binding agreements rather than the marketing. In two cases the agreement and the help centre say different things, and where that happens the agreement is what a court reads.
Their help pages say your music stays online without a subscription, with a 25% commission applied instead. Their terms of use say something else: if the subscription ends, Amuse may "take down your Recordings and Materials from any and all Stores." Both statements are theirs. Only one of them is the contract.
Two further things in the same document. If your Content ID is also on the commission tier, that 15% stacks after the 25%, leaving about 64% of the money. And earnings you have not withdrawn within three years may be forfeited, which is the only clause of its kind found in this survey.
Their distribution terms provide that if a payment fails, the company may recoup the subscription fee "by any means necessary, including the right to keep your account active and collect any resulting royalties until the subscription fee is fully recouped."
There is also a timing quirk worth knowing: simply not paying gets you a 42-day grace period, while actively cancelling removes your music the day the plan expires. Cancelling properly is treated worse than lapsing. And their terms state you have "no right to inspect or audit" the company's books.
Ditto's help pages note that releases are at risk of removal but are not taken down automatically, which sounds generous. The catch is in the next line: "If your subscription is out of date, you won't be able to make a request to withdraw your royalties." The catalogue keeps earning and the earnings stay behind the subscription.
Credit where it is due, though: of the six agreements read closely, Ditto's distribution terms are the cleanest on what happens after you leave. The licence runs for the term and stops, with no collection tail and no sell-off period. Their publishing agreement is the opposite, and worth reading separately.
The initial term is three years, not one. And on leaving, the agreement lets RouteNote keep supplying your track to a partner "until RouteNote may withdraw the Track without being in breach of terms of the Partner agreement." Those partner agreements are not something you ever see, so the run-off has no outer limit you can read.
Your ISRC, the code identifying a recording, travels with you everywhere. The UPC, the code identifying the release, mostly does not. DistroKid and Ditto will not accept one you already own. TuneCore charges twenty-five dollars plus any revenue you made if you transfer or resell one of theirs, and will not let you reuse it after a takedown. CD Baby is the only service in the survey that says plainly the barcode is "entirely yours forever".
That matters because the barcode is what a store treats as the release. Lose it and the new upload is a new product, with a new date and a new link, whatever happened to the audio.
The money leaves in more places than one
Every figure below is from a company's own terms or fee page. None of them appear next to the price.
DistroKid's minimum payout is US$6.00 and a bank transfer outside the United States costs US$5.62. Withdraw the minimum and 93 cents in every dollar goes to the fee. You need about A$390 sitting in the account before that fee drops below 2%. LANDR's international transfer is US$7.74, and an international wire in US dollars is US$40.24. SoundCloud's is US$3.75 to Australia. iGroove will not pay out below 100 units of currency at all.
The Australian services publish the mechanism most plainly, so their words are worth quoting. Their terms convert your streaming income at whatever rate the company obtains, credit your account at the "Average Bank Retail Spot Rate", and then state that the company "may retain the Distributor's Margin" between the two, with the artist assigning any claim to it. The retail rate is the worse one. The gap is theirs, and its size is not published anywhere. DistroKid's fee page says a conversion charge of "up to 3%" may apply.
The same Australian terms pool artists' income in an interest-bearing account and assign that interest to the company. Your royalties earn something between the platform paying and you withdrawing. It is not yours.
United States withholding on royalties paid to foreigners runs at 30%. Australia's treaty with the United States brings copyright royalties to 5%. The form that claims it, a W-8BEN, is free and lasts three calendar years, and it does a second thing people miss: without it on file some services withhold from your entire payment, while with it they withhold only from the share earned in the United States. CD Baby will not pay you at all without one, which is not the imposition it looks like. The detail sits on the Rights Engine page.
The Australian services charge an Account Inactivity Fee equal to the income they are holding, up to $99, if you do not log in for two years. Money you earned, forfeited for not visiting.
One number to carry with you
Selling one album directly to one person, at A$15 on a platform taking 15%, puts about A$12 in your hands. Earning that same A$12 from Spotify takes roughly 3,000 plays.
And a track that gets fewer than 1,000 plays in a year earns nothing at all from Spotify, because it never enters the royalty pool. The research group MIDiA found the independent artist share of the market fell in 2025, and put it down to exactly that threshold.
Distribution is worth paying for when people are listening at scale. Before then, the door you own is worth more than the shelf you rent. The maker's path starts there for that reason.
Still being gathered
MGM Distribution (Sydney, trading since 1998), Community Music (Melbourne, part of UNIFIED), Xelon Digital (Melbourne), Rocket (Melbourne), Ordior (Moss Vale) and Gaan Baksho publish no prices, splits or exit terms; several take artists by approval only. Their terms will be added here as they are confirmed, and any of them is welcome to send the numbers. taking shape
Two facts to weigh alongside the table. G.Y.R.O. and Musible, the two services that charge in Australian dollars, both refuse music that is wholly or partly made with AI, so the cheapest local option is closed to a lot of people making music today. And APRA AMCOS, the body that collects songwriter royalties, publishes a warning worth repeating: be cautious if an aggregator asks you to waive performance or communication rights.