DistroKid has announced the launch of DistroKid Publishing, in partnership with Kobalt. This is the first move the world’s largest DIY music distributor has made into the publishing space, and it marks Kobalt’s first move into the long tail of music publishing.
The publishing service, which DistroKid president Phil Bauer says is the “top request” he’s been receiving from customers, is available to talent that has at least one release with DistroKid and has earned more than $50 in the last 12 months. To sign up, users must pay $75 upfront, and DistroKid will pay out 80% of royalties to the user, retaining 20% for itself. There is no long-term commitment required. According to a representative for the company, “covers, mash-ups, remixes and fully AI-generated tracks don’t qualify” for DistroKid Publishing.
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Publishing, or the royalties accrued for songwriting, has historically been seen as a much more complicated — and less lucrative — business than recorded music. This is because songs are often written by several writers, royalty rates are lower and the collection process of all royalty streams is more complex. Because of these challenges, there have been few options available to independent musicians to collect their money.
Still, there have been attempts at cornering the DIY market before. Downtown Music Holdings has SongTrust, while TuneCore has TuneCore Publishing. For a songwriter who earns a little more than that, Kobalt launched a largely tech-focused publishing platform called Kosign in 2025, which qualifying songwriters can sign up for — or leave — at pretty much any time. The key difference is that Kosign is gated, only accepting talent earning above a certain threshold.
In an interview with Billboard about the launch of Kosign, Jacob Paul, director of creative strategy at Kobalt, said: “One thing that we’ve learned is that being open to everyone and prioritizing openness and volume doesn’t work from a scalable service perspective. That’s never been our interest,” he explained. “That’s a key difference between KOSIGN and others who are in this space. We very much want to be accessible in the sense that it’s extremely easy to apply and to join, you can get going very quickly, but we’re not really interested in touching the long tail where, frankly, there isn’t enough out there to collect to justify a Kobalt level of service.”
Kobalt’s move to power DistroKid Publishing sees the independent publisher, which was acquired by Primary Wave in July, moving into a new area of business. Following the new partnership, its services are essentially open to almost every level of songwriter.
In September, Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against DistroKid for allegedly flooding streaming services with “AI-generated slop” and “polluting the listening experience.” The distributor, which is responsible for 30-40% of all new music in the world, fired back at the accusations, saying, “We strongly disagree with UMG’s allegations and are disappointed that it chose litigation rather than established industry processes to address these issues. We are confident in our practices and intend to defend DistroKid vigorously.”
In his full statement about DistroKid Publishing, Bauer said, “The top request we’ve been getting from DistroKid members is for help collecting the music publishing revenue generated by their songs, something that has historically been very difficult for independent artists. Through this partnership with Kobalt, we’re making it easier than ever for songwriters to collect the royalties they’ve earned, with just a few clicks from their DistroKid dashboard.”
