If you don’t have a clear promotion path to planned out and/or the money to do it, then don’t expect to really get paid or hit that threshold so you can get paid.

With that being said, you have to understand the threshold at which payouts happen, many people fail to understand how these different distribution companies payout, you can’t expect to get paid literally everytime you make a cent or so, the money has to build up to a certain amount, typically somewhere like 10-25 dollars, then and only then will you get paid. I never had any problems with any of them, the only thing which I did was with MondoTunes, now known as Octiive which was taking down everything I uploaded, which they only did about 4 months ago after continuously requesting to take them down and not using them since 2017. I’ve personally used CDBaby, and many other distributors in the past but will primarily use Symphonic going forward. Tldr: bandcamp may be significantly more lucrative than standard streaming services like spotify So this is a nice way to share music with them for free, and if they want to support you, they can buy digital (or physical if you offer) copies of the music directly from the site with a pretty fair royalty cut.

I refuse to pay for a personal spotify account because of how little they value and pay all artists, and I have many fans who don't have accounts either. You can also sell merch directly from there, and my personal favorite part is that listeners can stream for free without an account.

Despite thousands of streams on the major platforms, one digital album sale on a bandcamp Friday (when artists get 100% of sales) can easily pay higher than tens of thousands of streams on spotify, iTunes et al. That said, seconding what others have said, I've found Bandcamp to be much more lucrative. Otherwise, I haven't had any major problems with DK and they've generally been quick to respond to questions, even if not with the most informative answers. I have contacted DK and youtube numerous times and both only point their fingers at each other).

I have a very common name so they have uploaded to another guy with the same name's page. I use distrokid and haven't had too many major problems (other than they/youtube uploading my songs to youtube on the wrong account. Agreed with all the comments above, distributors are a necessary evil if you want to go the major streaming route.

Can i pay spotify with itunes