DistroKid Unveils Next Generation of Its Popular Splits Service

DistroKid, the world's leading distributor of independent music, has launched an expanded update of its automatic royalty distribution service.

Splits, which was first unveiled in 2017, allows artists who use DistroKid to automatically split any percentage of royalties, from any track, with anyone. So everyone who worked on a track gets their share: producers, beat makers, guest performers, featured artists, photographers, friends, investors, etc.

Beginning today, DistroKid members will also be able to specify Recoupments for each track, designating collaborators who should receive payments first-before anyone else gets paid. With Recoupments, collaborators can be automatically reimbursed for their out-of-pocket expenses before royalty splits kick in.

This new innovation builds upon DistroKid's popular Splits feature. Artists will continue to be able to add or remove unlimited collaborators at any time, and change splits percentages at any time. Splits also makes it possible for artists to view the history of their royalty splits over time, so that if any changes are made, they have a record of all previous percentage designations.

Currently, 300,000 collaborators have been added to Splits on more than 1.5 million songs.

"Artists love DistroKid's Splits feature, and have been asking if we could add a tool that enables them to reimburse a collaborator who fronted money for a video or studio time, or provided some other service on an individual track," said DistroKid Founder, Philip Kaplan. "We're excited to roll out Recoupments, which give artists even more control over how their earnings are distributed."

It is estimated that 30-40% of all new music in the world is distributed by DistroKid, with the company ingesting and processing more than 35,000 new tracks every day, significantly more than any other distributor. DistroKid's catalog holds nearly 20 million tracks from more than 2 million artists.

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