Distovia is a digital music distributor. You upload a single, an EP or an album; we check the master, review the metadata against the rules the stores enforce, deliver it on their own DDEX feeds, and report what it earns — per store, per country, per track. We charge for the plan, never a percentage of your music.
What music distribution is
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and the rest do not take uploads from the public. They accept deliveries from approved distributors over a machine-readable feed — DDEX — that carries the audio, the artwork and about fifty fields of metadata per track. A digital music distributor is the party with those feeds, and the party the store pays.
That means the job has three real parts, and most of the difference between distributors is how well they do the two nobody advertises:
Distovia does all three in one account, on the web and on Android, and shows you the working behind each of them rather than a single number you are asked to trust.
Thirty-eight active stores and platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, TIDAL, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, Pandora, JioSaavn, Anghami, Boomplay, iHeartRadio, Napster, JOOX, KKBOX, Qobuz and 7digital. You choose which of them a release goes to and which territories it is available in — worldwide by default, or a specific list when a deal requires it.
The South and South-East Asian and African platforms matter more than they are usually given credit for: JioSaavn, Anghami, Boomplay, JOOX and KKBOX are where a large share of listening in those regions actually happens, and a release that skips them is invisible to those audiences.
Step by step
WAV, FLAC or MP3, validated by their actual contents rather than the file extension, and artwork that has to be square and at least 1400px because that is what the stores require. We measure loudness, true peak, clipping and silence before anything is sent.
Titles, versions, featured artists, writers and composers, genre, language, explicit flag, territories, release date. An ISRC is assigned if you do not already have one, and a UPC for the release.
A person checks the release against the rules stores actually enforce. If something has to change you get the reason in plain words, not a status code — and the release goes back to you rather than into a queue you cannot see.
Sent on each store's own feed. You watch every store confirm separately, with the timestamp it changed and what it said — not one word that says "delivered" for all of them.
Once you are live we find the real store pages — not a search result — from the stores' own open APIs, and build the smart link, the pre-save, the promo images and the social teaser from the artwork we already hold.
Store reports are ingested automatically, matched to your recordings, split with your collaborators and turned into a statement. Withdraw to a bank account, a mobile wallet or Payoneer.
Included, not upsold
Distribution is the easy half. These are the parts that change whether a record is accepted, found, and paid for correctly.
Streaming services normalise playback — roughly −14 LUFS on Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and Tidal, about −16 on Apple Music. A master delivered at −6 is not played louder, it is turned down, and the dynamics compressed away to get there do not come back. We measure it before you submit and give you a corrected copy in one tap.
The same recording released twice is the most common accident in a catalogue, and stores do not merge them: the plays split, both entries look smaller than the record really is, and editorial teams read duplicates as spam. We compare the audio itself and catch it before delivery.
Add a collaborator by email and their share is held from the first payment — even before they have an account. Nobody has to remember to forward money, and nobody has to trust that they will.
Your synced lyrics, artwork and audio are already on the server, so the lyric video is one button — widescreen or square. Bengali and other complex scripts are shaped through HarfBuzz, so conjuncts and matras join the way a reader expects. See also video distribution.
We check whether a listing is actually your recording by comparing the audio, not the title and artist name. Two artists share a name, songs get covered, tribute bands record whole albums — and a wrong match sends your own fans to somebody else's song.
Recordings and compositions are different rights that pay separately. Export CWR 2.1 — the fixed-width file PRS, ASCAP, BMI and IPRS accept — so the publishing side gets registered instead of quietly forgotten.
Royalties
Distovia takes no commission on what the streaming services pay. The plan is the price; those royalties are yours, and that does not change when a record does well.
The exception is the social and UGC platforms — TikTok, Instagram, the Facebook rights libraries, Snapchat, CapCut and YouTube Content ID — which pay through at 80%. That money does not come from plays of your release; it comes from rights-management claims against other people's uploads, and each one has administration behind it. The full list of which platform sits in which group is on the pricing page, taken from the same table that decides what you are paid.
What actually reaches you depends on the store, the country and the listener's subscription tier — no distributor controls that, and any distributor quoting you a fixed per-stream rate is guessing. What a distributor can control is whether you can see the arithmetic. Here you can:
Distribution collects the recording side. The composition side — performance and mechanical royalties — is collected by your society (PRS, ASCAP, BMI, IPRS and the rest) once the work is registered. That is why the CWR export exists, and why a distributor telling you it collects "everything" is worth a second question.
Switching
The reason artists stay with a distributor they dislike is the work of retyping forty releases. Paste a Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or MusicBrainz artist link and your back catalogue arrives as drafts to correct.
| Step | What happens | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Import | We read your public catalogue and create a draft per release, noting where it came from. | Paste one link. |
| 2. Correct | Drafts keep whatever the public listing had, which is often wrong in the credits. | Fix titles, credits and ISRCs. |
| 3. Take down | Your previous distributor removes the old delivery. Only they can. | Request the takedown there. |
| 4. Redeliver | We deliver with your existing ISRCs, so streams and playlist positions follow the recording. | Submit when the old one is gone. |
Nothing is ever delivered straight from an import. A listing on Spotify is not proof that whoever pressed the button owns the recording, and a tool that created anything more than a draft from a public search result would be a tool for claiming other people's work.
Export your whole catalogue whenever you want, and delete your account from a browser without signing in or emailing anybody. A service that is easy to leave is one worth staying with.
Music distribution FAQ
It is the service that delivers your recordings to streaming services and download stores, which do not accept uploads directly from the public. The distributor holds the machine feeds the stores accept, sends your audio and metadata over them, collects the sales reports that come back, and pays you.
Distovia charges a plan fee and takes no commission on streaming royalties; social and UGC platforms pay through at 80%. There is a free plan that takes one release end to end, and paid plans with unlimited releases. Current prices and rates are on the pricing page, read live so they cannot go stale here.
Delivery usually reaches the stores within a day or two of approval, and each store then publishes on its own schedule. Set the release date at least two weeks ahead if you want playlist consideration — editorial teams need lead time, and a release delivered on the day cannot be pitched.
Yes. Distovia is a distributor, not a label. You keep your masters and your copyright, and you can export the catalogue and leave at any time.
Yes. An ISRC identifies a recording and a UPC identifies a release; both are assigned if you do not already have them. If you do have them — from a previous distributor or your own registrant code — use those, because keeping the ISRC is what lets streams and playlist history follow a recording when you switch.
A cover needs a mechanical licence for the composition in the territories you release to. Distribution does not grant that licence, and no distributor can grant it for you — it comes from the publisher or a licensing agency. Deliver a cover without one and it is liable to be taken down.
WAV or FLAC at the resolution you mastered at, 16-bit/44.1kHz or better. MP3 is accepted but it is already lossy, so the stores' own encoding runs on top of somebody else's. Files are validated by their contents, not their extension, so a renamed MP3 is caught rather than delivered.
You have 30 minutes to cancel. A takedown is the one action that pressing again does not undo — listings, links and play counts do not come back — and it tends to be pressed in a hurry, so there is a window.
Yes — see video distribution for music videos and YouTube Art Tracks, and VEVO distribution for VEVO channels.
Start free with one release and see the whole route — the loudness check, the review, the delivery, the first statement.