DistroKid, TuneCore or CD Baby: which one should release your AI song?

Pick the one whose way of charging matches how often you will release, then check its written rules on AI before you pay anything. That is the whole answer, and it is more useful than a winner, because these three companies do not really compete on the same thing. They compete on three different ways of billing you for the same upload.

At the time of writing, DistroKid is built around a yearly subscription whose pitch is that one fee covers as many uploads as you make. CD Baby has long charged per release and kept a share of what the release earns. TuneCore started with per-release fees and has reworked its plans more than once since, so the model on its pricing page today is the one to trust, not anything you read about it last year, including here. If you plan a song a month, a flat subscription usually wins. If you plan one song, ever, a pay-once model usually wins. For an AI song, the price is the smaller question: the bigger one is what each company does when a track gets flagged.

None of these three is affiliated with us, and we do not distribute music. We write the words the song is built on, which is where every release starts. More on that below, right after the models.

Three ways to bill you for the same upload

Strip the branding off and every distributor sells some mix of three things. Knowing which mix you are looking at tells you more than the headline price.

Real plans often combine two of these: a per-release fee plus a cut, or a subscription with paid extras on top. That is fine. It only means you have to add both halves before comparing anything.

Here is the worksheet worth filling in, from each company's own pricing page, on the day you decide. Do not fill it in from a blog post, this one included.

DISTRIBUTOR WORKSHEET  (fill from the company's own page, date it)

Name:                      ____________   checked on: __________
Model:                     subscription / per release / cut / mix
Upfront fee:               ______ per year  OR  ______ per release
Share of royalties taken:  ______ %
Add-ons I actually need:   ______________________ (price each)
If I stop paying:          songs stay up / come down / one-off fee to keep
AI declaration at upload:  yes / no / not stated
Takedown notice + appeal:  described / vague / not stated
Payout methods in my
country:                   ______________________

The last row is not decoration. A distributor that cannot pay you where you live is the most expensive one on the list, whatever it charges.

Before any of them: something worth releasing

A distributor takes a finished track and delivers it to stores. It does not write the song, it does not make the audio, and it will not tell you your chorus is flat. Every one of these companies is waiting at the end of a process that starts with words.

That first step is what we sell. The lyrics generator takes a short brief (point of view, language, structure, hook type, vocal, emotion, a free-text theme up to 300 characters) and returns a title and a full lyric with [Verse] and [Chorus] tags already in place. One generation costs 20 credits, and at 100 credits to the dollar that is $0.20 per lyric inside a plan. New accounts start with no credits and there is no free trial, so the cheapest way in is the monthly plan. It does not sing and never will. The audio happens in a separate tool you choose, most often Suno, which is a different company that we do not resell or speak for.

If you are serious about releasing, the money move is the $19 lifetime plan: paid once, it keeps the style catalogue and the prompt generator open for good and comes with 1 500 credits, which is 75 lyric generations. Those credits do not refill, so it is not unlimited. The monthly plan is $5 and gives 500 credits, or 25 lyrics, each month. The prompt generator was built for Suno's style format; if your audio tool is something else, you will need to adapt its output to that tool's own instructions.

Put plainly: the cheapest line on your release budget is the lyric, and it is also the one that decides whether anyone listens past the first chorus.

DistroKid: the subscription model

A yearly fee, and uploads are not counted one by one. The logic rewards volume: the tenth single of the year costs you nothing extra on top of the subscription. That is why people who release often, or who test several AI songs to see which one catches, tend to land here.

The questions to put to it are the ones that apply to any subscription:

• What happens to released songs if I stop renewing? Under a subscription, your catalogue can be tied to your payments. Find the exact answer on its help pages, and look for any one-off option it sells to keep songs up without renewing.
• Which features cost extra? Subscription distributors often sell add-ons on top of the base plan. Decide which ones you would actually use before you compare the base fee with anyone else's.
• What does it say about AI? Search its help centre and terms for "AI" and "artificial". Note the date. Do not rely on a forum answer from two years ago.

We go through that one company in more depth, extras and all, in Is DistroKid worth it for AI music. This page stays on the comparison.

TuneCore: check which model is live today

TuneCore is the one where a remembered fact is most likely to be stale. It made its name with per-release fees, has since added tiered yearly plans, and has reworked its pricing more than once. At the time of writing its pricing page shows both side by side, and the per-release option is billed every year, not once. So the only honest advice is procedural: open the pricing page, identify which of the three models (or which mix) is live, and fill the worksheet from that.

Two things are worth asking specifically:

• Is there a free tier, and what does it leave out? Free tiers across this industry tend to limit which stores you reach, which features you get, or how much of the royalty you keep. Free is a price too; it is just paid later.
• If the plan is per release, is the fee annual per release? A per-release fee charged every year for every song adds up differently from a fee charged once. Over a small catalogue kept up for years, that difference can be larger than every other line in the worksheet.

CD Baby: pay per release, and a share

The long-standing CD Baby shape is a fee per release plus a percentage of what that release earns. It suits a different person from the subscriber: someone releasing rarely who wants a song to stay up without a recurring bill. Confirm on its current page both that the fee is one-off and what percentage applies, because either half can change.

Where this model hurts is success. A cut is small on a song that earns little and grows with a song that earns a lot. If you honestly expect a handful of streams from friends and family, the cut barely matters. If you are building a catalogue you expect to earn from, run the arithmetic below before you decide.

Run the numbers without trusting anyone's numbers

Prices change, so here is the arithmetic instead of a price list. Fill in the letters from each company's page on the day.

S  = subscription fee per year
Y  = years you want the song(s) to stay up
R  = per-release fee (and is it one-off or yearly?)
N  = number of releases over those years
c  = revenue share the distributor keeps (as a decimal)
E  = what you expect the releases to earn in total

Subscription:          S x Y                (+ any add-ons, + keep-up fee if you stop)
Per release, one-off:  R x N  +  c x E
Per release, yearly:   R x N x Y  +  c x E
Pure cut:              c x E

Two scenarios show how the answer flips.

One song, kept up. You made a song for your parents' anniversary and want it on their phones for years. N is 1, E is close to nothing. The subscription line keeps growing with Y. The one-off per-release line barely moves. The pure cut costs almost nothing because E is tiny. Here a subscription is usually the wrong tool unless you plan to release more.

A song a month. You are building an AI project and releasing a single every month. N is 12 a year and grows. Any fee multiplied by N climbs fast; the subscription line stays flat. Here the subscription is usually the right tool, provided you are sure you will keep paying, because that is the year you find out what "if I stop paying" means.

Most readers of this page sit between the two. The worksheet settles it in ten minutes, which is less time than a forum thread will take to argue it.

For an AI song, the rules matter more than the fee

A price difference costs you a few dollars a year. A takedown can cost you the release, the royalties already earned on it, and in the worst case other releases on the same account. So when you compare these three for an AI track, three questions outrank the price:

1. Does the upload form ask about AI, and what counts? Lyrics, audio, vocals, mastering? Answer honestly.
2. If a store flags one track, what happens to the rest of the account?
3. What happens to royalties on a track that gets removed?

Look for the answers in each company's help pages and terms, and if you cannot find them, ask support in writing and save the reply. Our guide to which distributors take AI songs turns those into a fuller checklist and explains what actually gets AI tracks pulled. We will not give a verdict per company: rules in this area change often, and a confident wrong line about someone else's policy would cost you more than no line at all.

A rule of thumb: a strict written policy is safer than a vague friendly one, because you can predict it.

What the lyric has to survive

A distributor will ask you to confirm you hold the rights to what you upload. So look at the words with that sentence in mind before you release.

Our position is written on the disclaimer page: you may use generator lyrics commercially, we claim no rights in them and want no credit, but the rights you get are non-exclusive, and because one model writes for every user, similar briefs can produce overlapping lines. We do not check output for uniqueness. Whether your country treats a prompted text as yours at all is unsettled and differs by jurisdiction; the U.S. Copyright Office, for example, has taken the position that output from a prompt alone, without meaningful human contribution, is not protectable.

The practical consequence is the same everywhere: edit the lyric. Rewrite the lines that could belong to anyone, put your own images in, change the structure if it helps the song. That makes the song better and gives you a much clearer answer when the upload form asks what you contributed.

This is general information, not legal advice. For anything with real money or a real dispute behind it, talk to a lawyer where you live.

Questions people ask before choosing

Can I switch distributors later? Generally yes, but it is fiddly. The usual approach is to re-deliver the same recording through the new distributor with its existing ISRC so stores can connect it to its history, then take it down from the old one. Check both companies' instructions on this before you move, and do it in that order.

Can I put the same song out through two of them at once? Delivering the same recording through two distributors tends to create duplicate listings and rights-matching conflicts. Read each company's terms on exclusivity; do not assume.

Do any of these three help write or produce the song? No. They release finished audio. The song, the words and the audio all come before them.

Which one is best for a first release? The one whose model fits how many songs you will release this year and whose AI rules you could explain to a friend after reading them once. For the step-by-step of that first release, see how to release music on Spotify, and for the Suno-specific path, publishing Suno songs to YouTube and Spotify.

Will a distributor make my AI song earn money? A distributor puts the song in front of listeners; it does not find them for you. If income is the goal, read what works and what does not when making money with AI music before paying for a year of anything.

The order that saves money

Do it in this sequence. Write the song. Make the audio in the tool you trust. Edit the lyric until you would defend every line. Only then fill in the worksheet for DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby and pay the one that fits.

The distributor is the last bill, not the first. The first is the lyric, and inside a plan one draft costs $0.20. There is no free trial, so the cheapest way in is $5 a month on the pricing page, with 25 lyrics every month. If you plan to release for years, the $19 lifetime plan is paid once: the catalogue and prompt generator stay open for every release after this one, and 75 lyrics come with it, which do not refill. Then open the lyrics generator and fill in the brief for the song you actually want to release.