Most people who want to start a distribution business start from the wrong end. They pick a name, design a logo, and then look for a back end to plug into. Six months later they are answering emails about a release that was rejected for a mismatched artist name, a duplicate identifier, or artwork that failed a store's automated check — and they have no process for any of it, because the process was never the plan.
Distribution is an operations business. The delivery pipe is the easy part. What you are selling is that a release goes out correct the first time, that the paperwork behind it survives an audit, and that when money arrives you can explain where it came from.
Decide what you are actually selling
"Distribution" covers at least four different businesses, and they need different skills:
- Delivery only. Finished, correct files sent to stores. Low effort per release, and you compete with everyone.
- Release preparation. Metadata, master checks, identifiers, artwork. The part clients genuinely cannot do alone.
- Rights administration. Splits, publishing registration, label copy, ownership records. Where disputes get prevented or created.
- Artist services. Release planning, press assets, link pages, campaign support.
Pick one to be good at before you offer the rest. The most common failure is offering all four and doing release preparation badly, because release preparation is the one that generates rejections, and rejections are what clients remember.
Be equally clear about who you serve. A catalogue of Arabic-language releases, a single genre, or one city's scene is a defensible position. "Any artist anywhere" is not a position, it is an absence of one.
Build the metadata discipline first
Nearly every avoidable rejection is a metadata problem. Stores enforce their own style rules, and the industry reference most of them align with is the Music Biz Metadata Style Guide. Read it once properly, then turn it into a checklist your team follows on every release rather than a document nobody opens.
The rules that cause the most damage in practice:
- One artist name, spelled one way, forever. Inconsistent spellings split a catalogue across multiple store profiles, and merging them afterwards is slow and sometimes impossible.
- Featured artists belong in the feature field, not appended to the title. Titles that carry credits get flagged or silently rewritten.
- Version information belongs in parentheses and should describe the recording, not advertise it.
- Non-Latin script needs testing, not assumption. Mixing Latin tokens into an Arabic, Persian or Urdu string invokes the Unicode bidirectional algorithm (UAX #9), and the result on a store's display can reorder in ways that look fine in your spreadsheet and wrong on a phone. Preview the exact string as it will render before delivering it.
For a mechanical pass before human review, the metadata checker runs in the browser and catches structural mistakes quickly. It does not replace reading the style guide.
Understand the identifiers, because clients will not
An identifier mistake follows a catalogue for years. You need to be the person in the room who knows the rules.
Three codes do three different jobs: an ISRC names the recording, a UPC or EAN names the release it is sold as, and an ISWC names the underlying composition and is issued through publishing rather than distribution. Character-by-character layouts for the first two are in the ISRC and UPC reference; pin them to the wall of whoever does your deliveries.
Details that get misapplied constantly:
- Hyphens in an ISRC are a display convention only, not part of the code, and there is no check digit in an ISRC — so nothing catches a typo for you.
- A UPC-A becomes an EAN-13 by prefixing a zero, and the check digit is unaffected — the same product, written two ways, is not two products.
- A new ISRC is required for a materially different recording — a remix, an edit, a live version, an instrumental. It is not required to re-release the same recording.
- Remastering triggers a new ISRC far less often than clients assume: the test is whether creative input was applied to the recording, not whether an engineer touched the file at all.
- An ISRC stays with the recording when an artist changes distributor. Never reissue one to make your own numbering tidy.
Validate structure and check digits on every delivery, mechanically, before anything leaves your queue.
Know what happens to the master
You do not need to be a mastering engineer, but you need to be able to explain normalisation without repeating folklore.
Spotify publishes an integrated target of −14 LUFS, with a true peak ceiling of −1 dBTP, or −2 dBTP where the master is louder than −14 LUFS. Measurement follows ITU-R BS.1770; edition 5, published November 2023, is the one in force, though many deployed meters still cite the superseded edition 4. The AES technical document TD1008 gives −16 LUFS for music — the −18 LUFS figure that circulates applies to speech-led content, and repeating it as a music target is a serious and common error.
Most of the other large services — Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, TIDAL and Deezer among them — have never put a target in writing. Numbers for each of them are easy to find, but they come from third-party measurement, not from the service, so they cannot carry the weight of an acceptance criterion.
The mechanism a client needs to hear: services turn loud masters down by the difference on playback. Spotify also states that positive gain is applied to softer masters, while considering headroom and leaving 1 dB for lossy encoding — so a quiet master with high peaks may not be raised all the way. Neither "quiet tracks never get turned up" nor "quiet tracks always reach target" is true. What follows is the defensible point: over-limiting buys flatness, not loudness.
Handle rights and tax paperwork before the money moves
Splits are the largest source of client disputes and the cheapest to prevent. Get a split sheet signed at the session, not after the first payout.
US withholding is the other predictable surprise. Where no W-8BEN is on file, the statutory rate on US-sourced royalties is 30%; a valid form applies whatever copyright-royalty rate the artist's country of residence has negotiated, and for countries with no relevant treaty the statutory rate simply stands. Line 6 accepts a foreign tax identification number, so most artists do not need a US ITIN, and a completed form is valid through the last day of the third succeeding calendar year. Walking a client through the payout calculator during onboarding is cheaper than explaining a deduction afterwards.
Say plainly that withholding and any bank transfer fees are not your commission. Clients who are surprised by a deduction assume you took it.
Set expectations about earnings honestly
You cannot forecast what a release will earn, and neither can anyone else. Spotify states that it does not pay a per-stream rate: revenue is pooled and divided by streamshare, and per-country differences follow from local subscription pricing and advertising rates. No service publishes a per-country payout rate.
That means any figure quoted to a prospective client — per stream, per thousand streams, per market — is invented. Refusing to invent one costs you a few deals and saves you every dispute that would have followed. It is also the clearest signal to a serious artist that you know what you are doing.
Starting checklist
- Choose one of the four business types above and write down what you will not do.
- Turn the Music Biz Metadata Style Guide into a per-release checklist, and fix your artist-name and title conventions before the first delivery.
- Set up an identifier register: every ISRC and UPC you touch, what it belongs to, and where it came from.
- Validate every identifier's structure and check digit before delivery.
- Define master acceptance criteria in LUFS and dBTP, with the reasoning written down for clients.
- Test any non-Latin metadata string as rendered, not as typed.
- Require a signed split sheet before a release is scheduled.
- Collect W-8BEN forms during onboarding, and diarise the expiry.
- Publish, in plain language, exactly what you charge and what you do not — and never quote an earnings figure.
None of the above is a reason not to build the business. But if what you actually want is your own catalogue out in the world rather than an operations job, that is a different decision: Mazufa releases at no charge and keeps none of the royalties, and a person reads every complete application before access is granted. Details are on the application page.