Who owns your distributor matters.
In July 2026, DistroKid agreed to hand majority control to CVC Capital Partners, a European private equity firm.1 TuneCore is owned by Believe. CD Baby is owned by Universal Music Group. The three biggest indie distributors are now owned by companies whose first job is returning money to shareholders.
DistroFlowy is owned and operated by working artists: Shaun Lichtenstein of Lansdowne, Mark Roberge, John Roberge of Prospect Hill, and Jim Foster of Nullset. We put our own releases through this platform. When you release with us, you're not funding an investor's returns, you're releasing on a platform run by people doing exactly what you're doing.
1. Ownership and figures as publicly reported. See sources.
Sources
DistroKid
On 6 July 2026, CVC Capital Partners announced it had signed a definitive agreement to make a majority investment in DistroKid. Insight Partners, DistroKid's longtime investor, retains a significant minority stake. Terms were not disclosed and the transaction was expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. Insight Partners had held majority control since a recapitalization in August 2021 that valued DistroKid at $1.3 billion. Over that period the Musician plan rose from $19.99 to $22.99 to $24.99 a year, a 25% increase across two changes.
TuneCore
TuneCore has been owned by Believe since 2015; Believe is listed on Euronext Paris. TuneCore replaced per-release pricing with annual unlimited plans in June 2022. The entry Rising Artist plan launched at $14.99 a year and is $24.99 today, a 67% increase. TuneCore's publishing administration commission rose from 15% to 20% of royalties collected, effective 1 January 2026.
CD Baby
CD Baby's parent, Downtown Music Holdings, was acquired by Virgin Music Group, a Universal Music Group company, in a $775 million deal completed in February 2026. The European Commission cleared the deal subject to divestment of Downtown's Curve Royalty Systems. CD Baby retains 9% of streaming and download royalties for the life of the release. It discontinued physical distribution in June 2023 and CD Baby Pro Publishing in August 2023.
Figures verified 7 August 2026. Ownership and pricing as publicly reported.
We don't distribute AI music.
Every major distributor is pushing AI-generated tracks to DSPs alongside your song. Millions of them, uploaded at scale, splitting the streaming royalty pool and burying real artists in the feed. Spotify is choking on it.
We built DistroFlowy for humans making music. If you upload an AI-generated track to us, we will reject it. That stance costs us volume, and volume is revenue. If that's the price of putting artists first, so be it. It also means the platform your song sits on isn't drowning in slop that's actively hurting your earnings.
Music
Simple pricing. No hidden fees. Keep 100% of your royalties.
Every plan gets full access to DistroFlowy's distribution engine.
You keep 100% of royalties on every plan. No upgrade required.
Every plan includes The Indie Artist's Compass.
A 100+ page strategy guide written by the artists behind DistroFlowy. What to do the day your song goes live, how to build an audience across your next few releases, and how to actually get paid. Not a course to grind through. A working plan. Free with every plan.
Ready to build a fanbase you own?
DistroFlowy gets your song live. FanFlowy is the fan conversion engine that turns listeners into people you can reach any time, without renting them back from Instagram every month. Bundle them and you launch on one and grow on the other.
From song to streams in four steps.
We built this because we needed it.
We're Make Our Music. Shaun Lichtenstein, Mark Roberge, Jim Foster, and John Roberge. Shaun's band Lansdowne does over six figures a year and 200 million+ streams. The rest of us are gigging too. We built DistroFlowy because every other option was either private-equity owned, drowning in AI music, or both.
