Private equity and the majors are now fighting over the same real estate: the infrastructure layer that indie artists use (and have used to avoid them). That’s not a contradiction, it’s the whole story of this fortnight. I think it’s good and it’s bad, so if you don’t like nuance, you know what to do.
CVC Capital Partners (who?) has signed a deal for a majority stake in DistroKid (we know them), reportedly valuing the company around $2 billion. Insight Partners keeps a minority position, Phil Bauer stays on as President, and the deal is expected to close in Q3.
If you’ve told a client for the past decade that DistroKid is the scrappy, artist-first alternative to label distribution, that pitch needs an update. Don’t get me wrong, I felt that DistroKid’s support has been lacking for a long time, but it has certainly become the ubiquitous channel for the early-stage indie artist. It’s still the same product tomorrow, but the ownership logic changes. Private equity doesn’t buy $2 billion assets to leave them alone - expect pricing tiers to tighten, upsells to multiply, and “free” features to migrate behind paywalls over the next 18 months. Honestly, I’ve not been steering people towards Distrokid but let’s watch this space to see if anything helpful happens as a result of this change. That seems unlikely to me so my guess is this wouldn’t change my view that you’re probably going to be better served with a Symphonic Distribution or Tunecore.
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