My BRUTAL Take on Music Distribution in 2025.

Bots are ruining musicians careers

Jesse Cannon
October 23, 2025

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Why Most Music Distributors Are Failing Musicians Right Now

You may have seen the newsletter I put up the other week on the main channel about distribution. We've been talking about this a lot, and what I noticed is that no one is telling you what to actually do; they're just pointing out problems.

Here's what I said: if you have more than 500,000 streams on one song, you can try to get on an independent distributor and apply to a bunch of them. If you don't have that, you probably need to pay for something better than DistroKid and CD Baby at this point. The reality is, there are now so many attacks on your music that could potentially happen, it's unsafe to be with them because they have no customer service.

This is a massive problem you can see on Reddit or anywhere music is discussed. So many of my consulting calls have become emergencies where people just need a quick answer about what's happening to their music. A lot of times, what we have to tell them is that they need to switch distributors to someone who actually has customer service.

Every single distributor has tons of complaints. There is no perfect distributor. I can be more candid here on the member feed because this isn't public-facing—it's considered private. That's part of what you pay for. I'm gonna talk about what I actually see in distribution today.

Why I'm Warning Against DistroKid

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