The Harsh Truth About DistroKid, TuneCore, and Your Royalties

Most independent artists assume that once a song is on DistroKid, TuneCore, or another distributor, they’re collecting everything the track earns.

They’re not.

Distributors collect master royalties — the money tied to the sound recording. If you wrote the song, produced it, or otherwise own a share of the composition, that’s a separate stack of money: publishing. Mechanical royalties and global performance royalties don’t magically appear in your distributor dashboard.

Leave publishing unclaimed and you’re often walking away from roughly 15–25% of what that song can generate. The streams still happen. The money still exists. It just doesn’t go to you.

What actually fixes it

To collect publishing, you need the composition registered and claimed through a publishing administrator — not another distributor upload. That’s the lane RightsTune works in: getting your works in front of the societies that pay mechanicals and performance income worldwide.