Thinking about leaving DistroKid? Here's something you should know about transferring your music to another distributor, especially on YouTube.
With all the recent DistroKid issues, particularly the YouTube royalty delays, I know many artists are considering switching distributors. However, there's something important you should understand before transferring your catalog: YouTube may be the platform most affected by the move.
We recently transferred several releases from distributors we were paying annual fees to maintain, despite having only one or two releases with them. Everything went smoothly on Spotify and Apple Music, and the music is now available on YouTube through the new distributor.
But there's one major difference: Our YouTube Art Track views are gone.
Unlike Spotify and Apple Music, where streaming history can generally be preserved through proper catalog matching, YouTube handles Art Track transfers differently.
According to YouTube's official documentation, Art Tracks generally cannot be transferred between music partners. Instead, the new distributor must redeliver the recordings, creating entirely new Art Tracks with new video IDs and view counts starting at zero. The previous views cannot be transferred.
You can keep the same ISRC, UPC, audio, and metadata, but that won't preserve the original Art Track's public view count.
YouTube does explain that maintaining identical identifiers helps preserve placements in algorithmic playlists, user-created playlists, and libraries within YouTube Music. So this doesn't necessarily mean losing all your YouTube Music history or audience connections.
There's also another potential issue: YouTube warns that removing or unlisting the original Art Track can affect the Shorts creation count associated with its sound page.
For our label, losing views on releases with little or no traction isn't a major concern. However, we have an Art Track in our catalog with approximately 3 million views. Transferring that release would mean losing the public view count that demonstrates its historical success.
And that's not something I'm willing to sacrifice just to change distributors.
My advice is to evaluate your catalog individually before transferring everything. A song with 500 views is one thing. A song with hundreds of thousands or millions of views is an entirely different situation.
If your main concern is DistroKid's YouTube payment delays, switching distributors might resolve your future distribution concerns, but it won't necessarily preserve everything you've already built on YouTube.
This isn't a DistroKid-specific problem. It's how YouTube handles Art Track redelivery between music partners.
There may be exceptions depending on the transfer method, so ask your receiving distributor whether they support YouTube's SentOnBehalfOf DDEX process before moving high-performing releases.
Official YouTube documentation:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12732257?hl=en