If you’re an independent artist or band and want to share your music with the world, chances are you’ve heard of music distribution services. As you might know already, Artists cannot upload music to Spotify or Apple Music directly. Instead, music distributors work as the middleman between artists and popular streaming platforms.

DistroKid is one of the most popular music distributors that many artists work with. In another post, I’ve thoroughly reviewed DistroKid for artists and have laid out its biggest pros and cons. When distributing music through DistroKid, one of the most frequent questions that artists ask is whether or not the extras are worth paying for.

DistroKid offers all of these extras as optional. You can upload and distribute your music on Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and other platforms without choosing any of these options. However, depending on your goals and strategies as a musician or label, these extras might aid you on your jounrey to monetize your work. In this post, I’ll break down all the extra add-ons and tell you whether or not they are worthy investments.

Discovery Pack - $0.99/year

A few years ago, the Discovery Pack was an essential deal since it ensured your music was cataloged and recognized by Shazam. However, nowadays, Shazam will automatically have your song in its database once you upload your music on Apple Music.

DistroKid has tried to repackage the Discovery Pack by adding new features and including other global databases that help people discover music. Gracenote, for instance, is a service used in many cars and electric devices for song recognition. The Discovery Pack add-on ensures your music is included in Gracenote’s database.

Moreover, you’ll get audio fingerprinting for rights protection with ACRCloud, which is an automatic content recognition platform. You can use this to keep track of other individuals using your songs and potentially earn revenue from your implemented work.

Lastly, you’ll be registered with SoundScan when opting for the Discovery Pack, which is used for Billboard charts.

Overall, it offers some nice features for less than a dollar a year. However, you won’t be missing anything essential. I suggest opting for it since the cost is something you can neglect, but don’t expect crazy audience growth or relevance through it.

YouTube Content ID & YouTube Creator Music ($4.95/year + 20% of YouTube ad revenue from detected matches)

I highly suggest paying for this add-on to ensure you get paid for your work when it’s used on YouTube. For almost five bucks a year, DistroKid will add your music to YouTube’s Content ID database and continually scan for matches. If anyone is using your music in a monetized video, you’ll be notified and the ad revenue will automatically go to you. Moreover, with YouTube Creator Music, creators on YouTube can purchase a license to use your songs in their videos.

Although DistroKid takes 20% of the ad revenue from detected matches, this add-on is still valuable and a must-have for many artists.

Store Maximizer ($7.95/year)

DistroKid’s database is already huge and covers all the famous and relevant platforms for playing and streaming music, including Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, Tidal, TikTok, YouTube, and many more. DistroKid says that newer platforms are added every now and then and the Store Maximizer add-on ensures your music gets uploaded on these new platforms automatically.

It seems to be a convenient way to ensure your catalog is future-proof, but in reality, annually paying an extra eight dollars per single is not worth it since new platforms don’t pop up that regularly. Almost all of your streaming revenue will come from major platforms, which are already included when you use DistroKid. On the other hand, you can manually request your songs to be uploaded on other platforms at no extra cost.

In the end, I don’t suggest paying $7.95 per year for the Store Maximizer feature.

Social Phone Number ($12.99/month)

The Social Phone Number add-on gives you access to a real dedicated U.S. phone number that you can use to text with fans or use a database to stay connected with your audience. Although texts have a significantly higher open rate than Instagram, Twitter, or emails, it’s an old-school way of advertising and staying in touch with your fans.

Building a database of phone numbers of dedicated fans is no easy task. So, if you're an upcoming artist and don’t have a large fanbase yet, the Social Phone Number add-on is completely unnecessary. Moreover, you can always get a dedicated smartphone and handle this side of business yourself.

I don’t suggest paying $12.99 per month for DistroKid’s Social Phone Number add-on, especially if you’re a new artist without a large fanbase.

Loudness Normalization ($2.99 one-time fee)

Nowadays, one of the most important steps in mastering a song is achieving commercial loudness without resulting in clipping and unwanted distortion at higher volumes. DistroKid’s Loudness Normalization promises to adjust your song’s volume to fit streaming services’ standards.

If you’ve mastered your project properly, you should already have the optimal loudness acquired on your song. If you’re not sure about the quality of your mix and mastering, should you even be releasing your music? I’m not saying you must always aim for perfection, but ensuring your tracks are up to the industry’s standards helps you  to find and connect with listeners significantly better.

I don’t really think this is a worthy investment, especially if you’ve already invested in mixing and mastering your tracks. I suggest skipping this one.

Tidal Master/MQA ($8.99 one-time fee)

Tidal is a platform specifically targeted for listeners looking for high-fidelity audio. If you opt for the Tidal Master add-on, DistroKid encodes your audio using MQA, which gives the “Master” badge on your song in Tidal. This indicates that your project is delivering high-quality audio.

This add-on is a worthy investment if you’re specifically working with higher sample rates and aim to create high-fidelity audio tracks, . On the other hand, if you’re using commercial sample rates (44.1 kHz or 48 kHz), then there’s no need to opt for this option. Moreover, if you’re planning on building a fanbase, Tidal is certainly not the most popular streaming service to count on.

Unless you’re making high-fidelity audio tracks, I don’t suggest spending $8.99 for DistroKid’s Tidal Master/MQA.

Leave A Legacy ($29.00 one-time fee)

DistroKid will keep your songs on streaming services as long as your monthly payment gets through. Should you face any issues with the transaction, DistroKid will remove all of your songs from streaming platforms. One of the ways to ensure that never happens is to pay an extra $29 per track to ensure they never get removed and stay on streaming services forever. Of course, you can choose to delete your songs manually anytime you want.

I don’t think this is a worthy investment since it costs more than a year of DistroKid’s “Musician Plan” per single track. Instead, I recommend ensuring your monthly payments always get through so that you won’t face any issues.

Final Thoughts On Using DistroKid Services

When choosing DistroKid as your distributor, you shouldn’t worry too much about the extras. One thing to keep in mind is that DistroKid’s plans are priced relatively low, so it makes sense for them to up-sale most of these extras. Some of them might come in handy, but most of them are things that I wouldn’t recommend to the majority of artists and musicians. 

If you’re interested in using DistroKid to distribute your songs, click here to get a 7% discount on your deal.