What Your Music Distributor Now Owes You

The Featured Artists Coalition published its Kitemark for music distributors on 23 July 2026. Drawn up by the FAC Artist Council, it aims to set out what a distributor should offer as a bare minimum in the digital age we now live in. Clear contract terms, honest reporting, a stated position on AI, and a straight answer on what happens when you leave. Without cause for concern, nothing I’ve read in there reads as particularly radical, in fact it may seem like common sense. That is until you count how many distributors would probably struggle to meet the criteria.

If we boil the document down to its fundamentals you get three main things. Payments you can verify, on time and in full. Ownership that stays as yours, meaning the music, the rights and the data. And, when you choose to leave, a clean (easy in, easy out) exit that takes your catalogue, your codes and your royalty history with you.

The Kitemark develops those three standards into a seven-point written checklist built for you.

About the Author

Ron Pye is the CEO and Managing Director of IQ Artist Management, a music management and consultancy company based in the UK. They work with artists on a global scale. Ron was awarded an MA in Music Industry Studies from the University of Liverpool, with Distinction in 2024, and a BA in Music Business and Finance from the University of Middlesex.

Catalogue management sits at the centre of his working week. This means distribution agreements, royalty statements and release metadata are crossing his desk as working documents rather than just reading material. He has moved artist catalogues between distributors, chased down who issued the codes attached to them, and traced what a statement says an artist earned against what actually arrived. When a client asks which distributor to use, the answer costs real money either way, so it gets researched properly.

His writing on distribution comes from that side of the desk. He is the person reading and advising on the agreement before an artist signs it, rather than commenting on the paperwork from a distance.

The Seven Standards

In March 2026, Michael Smith pleaded guilty in the first US case of AI streaming fraud, having siphoned more than $10 million from the royalty pool that pays every working artist. I covered the case for Hypebot, along with Apple Music’s admission that it flagged two billion fraudulent streams in 2025. But the damage runs wider than just stolen money. The record industry took Suno and Udio to court in 2024 for training AI on copyrighted recordings nobody agreed to hand over. And companies holding artists’ money do sometimes fail. Utopia Music, which spent the early 2020s buying up music businesses across the industry, collapsed into bankruptcy proceedings having left staff and bills unpaid along the way, exactly the situation where royalties sitting inside a failing company stop being yours in any practical sense. And, fake tracks keep appearing on the streaming profiles of artists who never made them, a problem that’s grown so bad Spotify built a dedicated protection feature this March. Stolen money, harvested rights, trapped royalties, borrowed names. Each of the FAC’s seven standards is aimed at closing each of those doors.

Clear and transparent agreements

A distributor meeting this standard means quite simply that they will give you a contract you can actually read. Concise, in plain language, with revenue splits, rights and service fees spelled out in full and no hidden charges anywhere. It should also explain, or at least point you towards, how the streaming platforms make their money and how your royalties will be calculated. You should come away knowing exactly what you have agreed to and what every stream pays. Without it, the deductions can turn up on statements you never saw coming, from clauses you never knew you signed up to.

Fair revenue distribution

This covers how and when you will get paid. So, your royalties will arrive on time, reporting is clear and detailed, and the distributor discloses any minimum payout threshold before you sign rather than leaving you to discover it later. Commissions stay reasonable, and the FAC puts an actual number on that: standard distribution fees should not exceed 20%, with cuts of 30% or more justified only where the distributor does considerably more than delivery to the DSP platforms. A figure you can hold a contract against beats a vague promise of fairness.

Access to data & analytics

Bad metadata is quietly losing you, and everyone else who depends on it, money. Wrong credits, missed payments, tracks filed under someone else’s name. So, distributors must use consistent industry metadata standards, provide regular analytics on streams, sales and audience in a format you can use. They should also be able to say exactly what information they hold about you and your listeners, and what they do with it. Chart reporting also needs a simple answer: do they send your sales and streams to the official charts automatically, or only if you ask?

Support & communication

This one comes with numbers attached, which pleases me no end. A distributor should acknowledge a support enquiry within two to three working days, even if the full fix will take longer. They should also give a proper answer on a dispute within ten to fifteen days maximum. There should also be a clear route for escalating a problem higher when the first answer doesn’t sort it out for you. Anyone who has chased a faceless support inbox about a missing release will know exactly why the FAC wrote this down.

Artist autonomy & control

I think we can all agree in this age of digital confusion and uncertainty that artists should be able to keep the rights to their music. Exclusivity deals that run for years are out unless fair compensation comes attached, and you should stay in charge of territories and licensing.

Then there is the AI part which is a section I’d read twice. Generative AI systems get built by training on enormous amounts of existing music data, and a distributor holds exactly that. Your recordings, your artwork, your photos, all sitting on its servers. The standard says a distributor must tell you openly if any of your content goes anywhere near an AI or machine learning system. And it must never be used for training without asking you first. It’s also not to be buried in a frequently updated terms page. The Suno and Udio lawsuits above show what happens when the asking gets skipped at the industry scale. Without this standard, your own catalogue can end up teaching the software that will end up competing for the same streams you need. And, you’d never know. So, ask your current distributor where it stands on AI training.

Marketing & promotion opportunities

If you have released music, then you will be aware that many distributors offer marketing on top of the delivery. Playlist pitching, social promotion, extra services around a release date. This standard requires those services to be described accurately, priced clearly as optional extras, and sold on honest claims about what they can realistically achieve. You should know exactly what you’re buying, what it costs, and what it does before any money changes hands. Without that kind of clarity, a distributor can promise you playlists and exposure just to get you signed up, and once you’ve paid, those promises may never turn into anything.

Ethical practices

Put simply, no payola. Which means not secretly paying for playlist spots or airplays. No artificial streaming, which means no bots faking plays. Distributors should also check who new clients are before taking them on, so fraudsters find it harder to get in the door. And if fraud does touch you, there should be a set process for it. Fake tracks uploaded under your name should be taken down quickly, and support for when streams get wrongly flagged as manipulated. Because a wrongful flag can freeze your royalties while you prove your innocence. Without this standard, you’ll have to deal with all of that on your own.

Above the seven minimums sits a Gold Standard tier. And, my favourite item in it is that distributors should hold artist revenues separately from their operating money. That means holding it in escrow or similar, so your unpaid royalties survive if the company hits any financial troubles. Given how many distribution businesses have changed hands recently, that one reads less like idealism and more like insurance.

The full document, all fourteen pages, and the question checklist in the appendix is well worth the download for anyone considering or changing distributors.

Why the FAC built it

MIDiA Research counted 8.2 million artists releasing their own music in 2024, up 17.2% in a year, earning around $2 billion between them. It’s March 2026 update showed the squeeze arriving. Artists releasing their own work saw their share fall in 2025 even as the market grew to $39.5 billion, streaming payout thresholds being one big reason for this, as MIDiA confirms. More artists + more streams = a smaller slice. And when that slice shrinks, every buried deduction in a distribution deal counts for more. Which is why the distributor has quietly become the biggest business relationship most artists have. Maybe no label, mostly no manager or publisher, just one distribution agreement standing between the music and the money.

And, let’s face it, hardly anyone reads a distribution agreement properly, because signing up feels like accepting software terms rather than doing a deal. A label deal requires a lawyer. A distribution deal gets you ticking a box. Yet, for an artist without a label, the distributor occupies the seat a label used to hold, the company touching the music, money and data all at once. And, if you’ve been releasing music in recent years, you’ll be aware that the companies keep changing hands.

So, consolidation is the other half of the why. All three major labels own distribution companies, and some of the best known started out independent. AWAL, short for Artists Without A Label, was bought by Sony in 2021, and The Orchard belongs to Sony too. Universal folded the independent distributor Ingrooves into what is now Virgin Music, and ADA is Warner’s. So a distributor still trading on an independent name can be a major label in practice, which is exactly why the FAC’s Gold Standard asks companies to state plainly whether they’re independently owned or part of a major group. You shouldn’t have to dig through corporate filings to find that out. Concord bought Ninja Tune in March 2026, publishing arm included, and Secretly Distribution picked up Babel Ops and Entertainment Intelligence a few weeks later. I traced the pattern in my piece on who actually owns your distributor, and the deals have kept coming since.

CD Baby shows what all this buying and selling looks like from the artist’s side. Founded in 1998, it practically invented DIY distribution, and for two decades it was the badge of doing it without a label. Downtown bought it in 2019. Then in February 2026, Universal completed its $775 million purchase of Downtown, taking CD Baby and the distributor FUGA with it. The artists who signed up with an independent company now sit inside the world’s biggest music company. Same login, different owner. Believe bought Sentric precisely to bolt publishing onto its distribution business, and plenty of distributors now sell publishing administration as an added extra; I’ve written about what a publishing administrator actually does if that side is fuzzy. My view: an everything deal parks your risk with one counterparty, and one souring relationship or one insolvency touches every income stream you have at the same time. Bundling gets sold as convenience. Price the risk in as well.

Bella Levina Lueen aka Levina, the singer-songwriter who chairs the FAC’s Artist Council, the group of artists behind the Kitemark, made the same case at the launch. Artists running their own releases and labels means the distributor relationship matters.

The FAC has provenance here. A kitemark for the live business sector arrived in 2021, and the Artist Council launched in January 2025 with more on its agenda surrounding streaming reform, grassroots touring and licensing of music for AI. Distribution came next because of everything discussed above. It’s the ‘eggs in one basket analogy’ when one agreement carries your money, your rights and your data, it’s the relationship where the most can go wrong.

I need to be clear about what this is, though. It’s guidance. No regulator stands behind it and no ‘official badge’ exists. There is no regulator to oversee music distribution, the way Ofcom oversees broadcasting, so there is nobody to report a bad distributor to. The way this will be ‘enforced’ if you like, is through you, the artists. This is a benchmarking document to compare deals against. A published standard of artists’ expectations for 2026.

What it will mean for you in practice

How distributors make their money

Distributors traditionally charge in one of three ways. You can pay them a yearly fee with no commission taken. There’s the one off fee per release, sometimes with commission added on top a la CD Baby. And there is the ‘free’ upload version in exchange for a larger cut taken which is normally around 15% of the earned royalties.

My issue at the moment sits with the subscription model. If I was an unscrupulous person, or, just not fully informed about how distributors really work, I’d launch a distributor tomorrow morning. I’d charge a flat yearly fee, allow unlimited releases, and let everyone keep 100% of their royalties. And I’d sleep very well, because I’d be betting that most of my customers never earn enough in royalties to cover the fee. And, that’s the game. Keep 100% of your royalties is an amazing slogan when 100% equates to less than what you paid to release it. The commission model also deserves the same level of scrutiny, just in reverse. Imagine your release makes £500 with you doing everything yourself. Now imagine a distributor’s marketing team gets that same release to £1,000 earned. They take their 20% cut, which is £200, and you keep £800. You just made £300 more than you would have alone, even after paying them. So, the percentage is never really the question. The question is whether what they do for you brings in more than what they charge you, and at signing the marketing deal, that’s a promise you’re taking on faith. Some 20% deals earn their keep many times over. Others, as many of us are more than aware, are 20% for delivery and a newsletter, and not much more.

As a wise person once said, 100% of nothing is still nothing.

So, ask yourself the money questions from the FAC’s checklist before you sign anything. Does it cost anything to take a track down? Who pays for the ISRC codes? Are there fees on withdrawals or on currency conversion? And are there any thresholds about how much must you earn before any money reaches you?

Then check what the royalty statements will look like. A good one shows what each track earned on each platform in each country. It will list every deduction, and arrives on the date the contract promises. You should be able to follow one stream from Spotify’s payout all the way to your bank account. Most artists never look, and that’s fair enough, statements are dull, but dull is where the money leaks. Music Royalties 101 covers where the money goes from there.

What leaving involves

The Kitemark is to be treated as a measure of good practice. A large part of the FAC’s guidance deals with what happens when you leave a distributor. That’s pretty deliberate as well as nobody polices these standards. So, the only real penalty a bad distributor will ever face is artists walking out the door.

The FAC’s checklist gives you the questions to ask before you sign. Can I remove my music whenever I want? Does that cost anything? And when I go, do I get back the full right to take my catalogue somewhere else?

A few practical checks are worth doing now, not on the day you decide to move. Find out your notice period. Check whether taking a track down costs any money. Ask who issued your ISRC and UPC codes, the reference numbers attached to every track and release, because the FAC says (as is normal practice) you should use the same codes with your next distributor. And, download your royalty statements regularly, because your login usually stops working the moment the deal ends.

When you do move, timing matters. Get your releases live with the new distributor before the old one takes them down. Do it the other way round and your music can vanish from DSP’s during the changeover, and any playlist spots you’d built up go with it. Exactly the sort of housekeeping I handle in catalogue management work.

Using it before you sign or renew

The FAC’s checklist ends with a list of questions for you to put to any distributor you are considering. Use it before you sign with anyone new, and, run through it again at renewal, because the company holding your catalogue may have new owners, new terms and a new AI policy since the last time you read anything they sent you. And bring it out a third time whenever your distributor gets bought or sold. Anyone with CD Baby watched their distributor become part of Universal this February, and they had every reason to ask who they were now dealing with.

A distributor with nothing to hide can tell you its payout threshold off the top of its head, show you the exact clause that covers leaving, and sum up its AI policy in a sentence. Vague answers tell you something too. If a company can’t explain its own fees clearly while it’s trying to win your business, imagine how clear the royalty statements will be once it has you signed up.

And if the answers aren’t what you expect, walk away. There are plenty of distributors out there, even after all the takeovers. A company that meets the FAC’s standards is worth far more to you than one with a slightly better rate that dodges half the important questions.

Everything in this article is to be considered as information, drawn from the FAC’s published guidance and my own catalogue work. It isn’t legal advice and I am not a lawyer. As always, before you sign or renew anything, put the contract in front of a music lawyer, because an hour of their time costs far less than a dispute will. The Kitemark gives you the questions to ask. Whether the answers are good enough is always your call.