Philip Kaplan’s DistroKid is a system designed to let musicians post their music to streaming services like Spotify and iTunes and then get royalties when their music is played. Thus far Kaplan and his small team have been sending one payment out to each musician and the musicians had to send smaller payments to collaborators and other musicians on the track. Now, however, he’s launched the DistroKid Payment Network, a way to add individual band members to a track and send them little pieces of the royalty payment.
“Currently, every existing aggregator & distributor pays only one recipient per release. The problem is that there are often many people involved in a release–who the recipient has to then manually pay,” he said.
The payment network lets you set percentages of royalties for each musician involved in production. For example, Kaplan said that some YouTubers will collaborate on tracks and, before, there was no easy way to split the proceeds down the middle. Now they can simply add PayPal addresses for each member and the system sends royalties automatically.
The payments system also gives collaborators access to the statistics associated with the song, ensuring transparent royalties and collaboration. Each recipient simply needs to supply an email address and they can see the percentages as well as download stats.
Kaplan launched Distrokid in 2013 and has distributed over 700,000 songs from 90,000 artists. The platform hosted a #1 iTunes hit and a top-10 Billboard hit.
The new service launches today.
