Every “DistroKid vs CD Baby” guide on the internet ends the same way: it depends — pick what fits you. Which is exactly no help when you are the one trying to pick. So we did the thing none of them will: we built a tool that decides. Answer six questions and it names your distributor, the specific mistake your profile is about to walk into, and what each option really costs you over three years. Then, if you want the reasoning, the whole case is below it — including the third name most of these comparisons leave out, TuneCore, and the one question that can get your release rejected outright.
The 60-Second Distributor Matcher
Six taps. We name your distributor, the costly mistake your profile walks into, and your real 3-year cost — no “it depends.”
Assisted = you write/produce, AI helps. Generated = the track is made by AI (Suno, Udio, etc.).
A ballpark is fine — it decides whether a flat fee or a 9% commission costs you less.
Collecting your songwriter / mechanical royalties, not just streaming payouts.
Answer all six to see your match
Your distributor
The trap for you
Estimated 3-year cost
Distribution-cost estimate only, from 2026 vendor pricing and your answers; publishing and social-monetization commissions are extra. Prices and AI policies change — confirm on each distributor’s site before paying.
This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't change the recommendation — the tool above runs the same math no matter which name it lands on.
The Three-Way, In Brief
Most comparisons treat this as a two-horse race because DistroKid and CD Baby are the two names beginners hear first. That framing is a trap, because the three biggest independent distributors aren't competing to do the same job — they encode three different bets about how your career actually works.
DistroKid is a flat annual subscription: pay once a year, release as much as you want, keep 100% of your streaming money. It's built for volume and speed. CD Baby is the opposite shape — pay a one-time fee per release, never pay again, and the music stays up forever, but CD Baby keeps a permanent 9% of everything it earns for you. TuneCore looks like DistroKid (flat annual unlimited, 100% of streaming) but carries the deepest rights-and-royalty infrastructure of the three, including a real publishing arm. The honest one-liner: DistroKid optimizes for cost-per-release-at-volume, CD Baby for permanence, TuneCore for collecting every dollar you're owed.
The reason that matters: the “best” distributor flips entirely depending on how often you release, how much you earn, whether you write your own songs, and — the one nobody's pricing in — whether your music involves AI. Hold those four variables in mind. They're what the tool above is actually weighing.
Leaving TuneCore out of the conversation is itself a tell. It's the distributor with the deepest rights infrastructure, and it gets omitted from beginner comparisons precisely because it's framed as “the one for serious people” — which quietly steers newcomers away from the option that would have collected their publishing royalties from day one. We're putting all three on the table because the right answer genuinely lives across the set, not inside a two-name rivalry that exists mostly because those are the two names a first-time releaser already knows.
Pricing: Three Different Bets
Here's the thing the cost tables get wrong: they line up the headline prices and declare a winner. But these three don't share a pricing model, so the headline number is meaningless on its own. What you're really choosing between is a subscription, a one-time fee, and a commission — and which one wins depends on you, not on the sticker.
| DistroKid | CD Baby | TuneCore | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Annual subscription, unlimited | One-time fee per release | Annual subscription, unlimited |
| Entry price | $24.99/yr | $9.99 single / $14.99 album | $24.99/yr |
| Higher tiers | Musician Plus $44.99 · Ultimate $89.99 | — (add-ons, not tiers) | Breakout $44.99 · Professional $54.99 |
| Cut of streaming | 0% (keeps 20% of Content ID) | 9% forever | 0% (20% on social monetization) |
| Catalog permanence | Pulled if you stop paying* | Stays up forever | Pulled if you stop paying |
| Publishing admin | None | Via CDB Boost add-on | Dedicated arm ($75 + 20%) |
| Owner | Independent | Downtown / UMG orbit | Believe |
*DistroKid removes releases if you cancel unless you buy Leave a Legacy ($29/single, $49/album, one-time per release). Prices and plans verified June 10, 2026 against distrokid.com/pricing, cdbaby.com, and tunecore.com/pricing. USD list prices; regional pricing and sales vary.
So who actually wins on price? If you release a couple of times and go quiet, CD Baby's one-time $9.99 beats paying $24.99 every single year — and the 9% barely registers when you're not earning. If you release constantly, the flat-fee unlimited plans (DistroKid or TuneCore) crush a per-release model. And the moment real streaming income shows up, CD Baby's 9% — which never stops — quietly becomes the most expensive option of the three. That's the crossover the tool computes for your exact numbers; there is no single right answer, which is precisely why a static table can't give you one.
The headline price is also not the real price, because all three sell add-ons. DistroKid's stack matters most: YouTube Content ID runs $4.95 per track per year (and DistroKid keeps 20% of what it collects), Store Maximizer is about $7.95/year per release, and Leave a Legacy — the one you'll actually feel — is $29 per single or $49 per album to keep a release live if you ever cancel. CD Baby's big add-on is CDB Boost at $39.99 per release (sync, extra monetization, and the publishing collection that used to be its own product), plus FastForward at $29.99 for priority review. TuneCore bundles more into the base plan but charges $14.99 per additional artist profile on its top tier and $75 to enroll in publishing. The takeaway: price the catalog you'll actually build, not the first release — the add-ons are where a “cheap” distributor quietly stops being cheap.
To make the crossover concrete, here are three profiles over three years. The hobbyist: two singles, about $50/year in streams. DistroKid runs $75 (three years at $24.99) plus $58 if she wants both tracks kept up permanently via Leave a Legacy — roughly $133. CD Baby is about $20 in one-time fees plus $14 in commission — $34 total, and her music never comes down. CD Baby wins clean. The prolific releaser: a track a month, 36 releases, about $3,000/year. DistroKid stays $75 flat. CD Baby is $360 in per-release fees plus roughly $810 in commission — about $1,170, and climbing every year she keeps earning. DistroKid wins by a mile. The earner: steady output, $20,000/year. DistroKid is still around $75. CD Baby's 9% alone is $1,800 a year — $5,400 over three. Same music, same streams, a five-thousand-dollar swing. None of these are edge cases; they're the three places most artists actually live, and they point at three different answers. That's the entire argument for letting the tool run the arithmetic on your numbers instead of trusting a sticker price.
Royalties: Who Takes a Cut
“Keep 100% of your royalties” is the line all of them lean on, and it's only fully true for two of them. DistroKid and TuneCore take 0% of your core streaming royalties — Spotify, Apple Music, the big DSPs — and make their money on the subscription instead. DistroKid's one carve-out is YouTube Content ID, where it keeps 20% of what it collects. TuneCore keeps 20% of social-platform monetization (TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts), so if short-form is where your money lives, factor that in.
CD Baby is the one that takes an actual cut of the music itself: 9% of all distribution revenue, permanently. Not for a year — for the life of the release. On top of that, reported deductions run higher on the ancillary streams: around 15% on mechanical (MLC) collections, roughly 30% on social monetization, and up to 40% on sync placements. None of that is hidden — it's the trade for never paying an annual fee — but it inverts the math as you grow. A hobbyist earning $50 a year hands CD Baby about $4.50. An artist earning $20,000 a year hands them $1,800, every year, forever. The tool above turns that abstraction into your number.
People choose CD Baby for the “no subscription” line while they're broke, then never re-evaluate once the streams climb. The 9% is invisible at $50/year and brutal at $20,000/year. Permanence is a real feature — just make sure you're buying it on purpose, not by accident.
How and when you actually get paid differs too. CD Baby pays weekly, which is a real cash-flow edge if you're living release-to-release. DistroKid and TuneCore pay monthly, on the standard streaming-reporting lag (platforms report earnings roughly a month or two after the streams happen, and your distributor passes them along after that). Minimum payout thresholds are low across the board, so small earners aren't trapped waiting to cross a high bar. The practical point: none of the three is slow to pay, but if weekly versus monthly matters to your budget, that's a genuine, if small, reason to weigh CD Baby up — one of the few places its model quietly helps the working artist rather than taxing them.
What You're Actually Collecting
Before you can judge who collects your money, you need to know what money exists — because most independent artists are only collecting half of it. A released song generates two separate streams of royalties, owned and paid out completely differently, and the distinction is the hinge the entire publishing question turns on.
The first is the sound recording — the master, the actual audio file you uploaded. Every distributor on this page collects these for you: the streaming and download royalties from the recording itself, paid out minus CD Baby's 9% or nothing at all on DistroKid and TuneCore. This is the money everyone pictures when they say “streaming royalties,” and it's the easy half. All three do it competently.
The second is the composition — the underlying song: melody, chords, lyrics. That's a separate copyright you own as the writer, and it throws off its own royalties: performance royalties (when your song is played publicly or streamed, collected by PROs like ASCAP or BMI), mechanical royalties (per reproduction or stream, collected in the U.S. by the MLC), and sync royalties (when your song is licensed to film, TV, ads, or games). Basic distribution collects none of these. If all you have is a distributor and you wrote your own songs, that entire second stream is sitting uncollected — frequently 20–30% of what your music actually earns, money that simply expires unclaimed.
This is exactly what the publishing-administration question is about. DistroKid collects the recording money and stops there. TuneCore's publishing arm and CD Baby's Boost add-on reach into that second stream and collect the composition money too. For a producer releasing instrumental beats or a DJ putting out remixes, the gap may be small. For a singer-songwriter, it can be the difference between collecting half your income and all of it — which is why “which distributor” and “do I need publishing admin” are really the same decision wearing two hats.
Speed, Reach & Permanence
On raw reach, this is a tie nobody should agonize over: all three deliver to 150+ stores and platforms — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, TikTok, YouTube Music, Deezer, the lot. On speed, DistroKid is consistently the fastest to go live, which matters if you're chasing a release date or a Friday drop; CD Baby and TuneCore are reliable but typically a touch slower through review. For most artists the speed gap is a tiebreaker, not a deciding factor.
Where the three quietly differ is the release tooling layered on top of raw distribution. DistroKid's HyperFollow generates a free pre-save and smart link for every release, which is genuinely useful for building day-one momentum and converting fans into streams the moment a track drops. CD Baby leans on its longer-standing promotional services and its sync-licensing pitching network. TuneCore bundles social and marketing features that expand as you move up its tiers. None of these is decisive on its own — and, as you'll see two sections down, none of them replaces actually marketing your music — but if pre-save pages and smart links are part of how you launch, DistroKid's are the most frictionless and come standard on every plan. Reach itself, to repeat the point that matters, is a wash: any of the three puts you on effectively every platform worth being on.
The axis that actually separates them is permanence, and it's the one buried at the bottom of every other comparison. CD Baby's one-time model means your release stays live forever — stop logging in, stop paying, doesn't matter, the music stays up and keeps earning. DistroKid and TuneCore are subscriptions: the day a payment fails, your catalog comes down — streams, saves, playlist placements, algorithmic momentum, gone. DistroKid's answer is Leave a Legacy, a one-time fee per release that keeps that specific track up even if you lapse. It works, but on a large catalog it adds up fast: thirty-six releases at $29 each is over a thousand dollars on top of the subscription. If “my music can never disappear” is non-negotiable for you, CD Baby is the only one that guarantees it by default.
Support, Dashboards & Catalog Control
The day-to-day experience of running your catalog is where these three quietly diverge, and it's the part you only notice once something goes wrong. DistroKid is built for self-service speed: the dashboard is fast, uploads are frictionless, and royalty splits to collaborators are baked in on every plan — you set each contributor's percentage and DistroKid pays them directly, no spreadsheets, no chasing. The trade-off is that support is largely ticket-based; you're rarely talking to a human in real time. For most artists that's a fair deal for the speed.
TuneCore offers the most structured support of the three, with response-time tiers that improve as you move up plans (down to one business day on Professional) and the deepest analytics — daily trend reports, detailed sales data, and rights tooling that reflects its label-services parentage at Believe. Splits are free across all paid plans. If you treat your music like a business and want reporting that matches, TuneCore's dashboard rewards the attention. CD Baby has the longest track record — it's been distributing independent artists since 1998 — and it pays out weekly rather than monthly, which is a genuine cash-flow advantage. But its support has thinned through the operational changes and ownership consolidation of recent years, and artists have reported slower handling of transfers and edits. None of the three is bad here; the question is whether you want raw speed (DistroKid), business-grade tooling (TuneCore), or longevity and weekly pay (CD Baby).
One more piece of catalog control worth naming: switching. Moving an existing catalog between distributors is routine but never quite free — it's involved enough that it gets its own section below. The short version: choose deliberately the first time rather than distributor-hopping every year chasing a slightly lower price.
Publishing: The Differentiator That Just Changed
For years, the standard advice was simple: if you write your own songs and want a distributor to collect your publishing royalties too, pick CD Baby Pro. That advice is now out of date, and the comparisons still repeating it haven't noticed.
CD Baby's standalone Pro Publishing tier is gone. Publishing royalty collection now lives inside the CDB Boost add-on ($39.99 per release), bundled with sync and extra monetization rather than sold as a dedicated administration service. This shift arrives alongside a bigger one: CD Baby now sits inside the Downtown / Universal Music Group consolidation of independent-music services — the same wave of ownership change reshaping the tools indie artists rely on. (We dug into what that consolidation means for artists in our piece on the Native Instruments / inMusic acquisition.) None of it makes CD Baby a bad distributor. It does mean “CD Baby for publishing” is no longer the automatic answer.
The cleanest dedicated publishing arm of the three is now TuneCore's (owned by Believe): a $75 one-time signup per songwriter, then 20% of the publishing royalties it collects across performance, mechanical, and sync — comparable to Songtrust's model and genuinely comprehensive. DistroKid offers no publishing administration at all; if you're on DistroKid and writing your own songs, those mechanical and performance royalties go uncollected unless you register separately with a PRO and the MLC. That's not a knock on DistroKid — it's a flat-fee distributor doing one job well — but it's the single most expensive blind spot for songwriters who don't realize they're leaving money on the table. For the full picture of what you're owed, see how music royalties actually work.
Why does the ownership question belong in a distributor comparison at all? Because consolidation changes incentives over time. When an independent-first service becomes one product line inside a major-label services group, the pressure to upsell, to prioritize the catalog that earns the parent the most, and to quietly reshape terms goes up — not overnight, and not necessarily against you, but it's a variable worth tracking. DistroKid remaining independent is a genuine point in its favor for artists who want a distributor whose only customer is them. TuneCore under Believe and CD Baby in the UMG orbit aren't disqualified by it; you just want to choose them for what they do well today, with clear eyes about who now sets the roadmap.
Will Your Track Get Rejected?
Here's the question no pricing table asks, and the one that can make every other consideration irrelevant: is your music made with AI? Because the three distributors have sharply different answers, and getting it wrong doesn't cost you money — it costs you the release.
CD Baby is the strictest of the three. It bans fully AI-generated tracks outright, and it enforces retroactively: a track that passes review can still be pulled later if it's identified as AI-generated, and repeat attempts can put your whole account at risk. That ban applies even if you hold a commercial license from a paid Suno or Udio subscription — the issue is the U.S. copyright rule that purely AI-generated work has no human author to protect. CD Baby does allow AI-assisted music, where a human is clearly the creative force and AI is a tool (mastering, idea generation, sound design).
DistroKid is the most permissive. It accepts AI-generated music as long as you own the rights and disclose the AI involvement; disclosed AI tracks move through its pipeline the same as anything else, with no cap on how many you upload. TuneCore sits in between — it'll take AI music but wants receipts: disclosure, data-licensing assurance, and attribution. If you're releasing fully AI-generated music, that ordering is the whole decision, and it's why the tool above rules CD Baby out the moment you say your tracks are fully generated. (New to this and want the ground rules? Start with our breakdown in Suno vs Udio.)
Your distributor's policy is only the first gate. Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube run their own AI detection and can remove a track after it's live, no matter who distributed it. Disclosure isn't a formality — it's what keeps a release from quietly vanishing a month after launch.
There's a deeper reason this matters beyond takedowns. Under current U.S. law, a purely AI-generated work has no human author, which means it can't be registered for copyright — and that has a knock-on effect most artists don't see coming: you may not be able to register fully AI-generated tracks with a PRO or collect publishing royalties on them, because there's no protectable songwriting to administer. You can still earn streaming income as the owner of the sound recording, but the publishing layer — the exact thing TuneCore's arm is built to collect — may simply not apply. If your catalog is AI-heavy, choose your distributor for distribution, and don't expect publishing administration to recover money that legally isn't there.
In practice, disclosure is a checkbox-and-attestation step at upload, not a bureaucratic ordeal — you confirm you hold the rights and indicate AI involvement, and the release proceeds. The mistake that gets tracks pulled isn't using AI; it's hiding it. An undisclosed AI track that a platform's detection later flags can be removed without warning and can put your whole distributor relationship at risk, whereas the same track disclosed up front usually sails through. If you're working with AI tools at all, treat honest disclosure as the price of a stable release — and keep your own records of the licenses and prompts behind each track, because the burden of proving you own what you uploaded sits with you, not the distributor.
What None of Them Do For You
Worth saying plainly, because the upload-and-wait fantasy ends more careers than any pricing decision ever has: a distributor's entire job is to get your music into stores and collect the money it earns. That's the whole job. None of these three will market your release, build your audience, or make a single person press play. The “free playlist pitching” all of them advertise is just the standard Spotify for Artists editorial form — the same form, with the same long odds, no matter who distributes you. Choosing the “best” distributor and expecting streams to follow is like buying the nicest possible mailbox and expecting it to fill itself with letters.
What actually moves the needle happens before and after the distributor: the songs themselves, the artwork, the timing, the pre-save campaign, the content you make around the drop, the relationships you build with listeners and curators. A distributor can hand you a smart link and a pre-save page; it cannot hand you an audience. So if you're choosing one in the hope that it will be the thing that breaks you, you're optimizing the wrong variable entirely. Pick the option whose model fits your economics — which is exactly what the tool at the top of this page does in about sixty seconds — and pour your real energy into the music and the marketing, where returns actually compound. The distributor is plumbing. Important plumbing, worth getting right once, but plumbing. Get it right, then go do the work that matters.
Who Should Choose What
The tool gives you a personalized answer; this is the plain-language version of the same logic. Find yourself here, then go run your real numbers above.
| If you're… | Pick | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Releasing constantly, keeping 100% | DistroKid | Flat unlimited fee never scales with output; fastest to stores. |
| Releasing rarely, want it up forever | CD Baby | One-time fee + permanent hosting beats paying yearly for a small catalog. |
| A songwriter who needs publishing collected | TuneCore | The only one with a real, dedicated publishing arm. |
| Releasing fully AI-generated music | DistroKid / TuneCore | CD Baby will reject or pull it; the other two accept it with disclosure. |
| A high earner | DistroKid / TuneCore | A flat fee beats CD Baby's 9% cut once income is real. |
| Genuinely unsure / brand new | Keep it cheap | One CD Baby single is $9.99 with nothing to cancel — a low-stakes first release. |
And the honest meta-answer the SERP won't give you: plenty of working artists use two — DistroKid or TuneCore for the bulk of new releases, CD Baby for the catalog they want frozen in place permanently. You can't run the same release through two distributors at once, but there's no rule against matching the tool to the job.
If you want the one-line verdict: DistroKid is the right default for most independent artists in 2026 — flat, fast, 100% royalties, and the most forgiving on AI — which is why the tool lands there most often. TuneCore is the upgrade for songwriters and career artists who need publishing collected and reporting that behaves like a business. CD Baby is the specialist: unbeatable for the artist who releases rarely, earns modestly, and wants their music up forever — and disqualified for anyone making fully AI-generated music. But “most artists” isn't you. Run your six answers through the matcher at the top, read the trap it flags, and check the three-year number against your real output and earnings. That's the decision — not the headline price, and definitely not “it depends.”
How to Switch Without Losing Momentum
Say you picked wrong a year ago, or your career simply outgrew the choice. Moving a catalog between distributors is routine, but done carelessly it can cost you streams, playlist placements, and the algorithmic momentum you've spent months building. Here's the sequence that protects all three.
First, never take music down before the new home is ready. The goal is the shortest possible gap. Set up the new distributor, prepare the release fully, and only then schedule the takedown — ideally timing the new upload to go live the same week the old one comes down. A track that vanishes for a month loses its placement on algorithmic playlists and has to re-earn them.
Second, carry over your ISRC and UPC codes. Your ISRC identifies the recording and your UPC identifies the release. Re-using the same codes on the new distributor lets streaming platforms recognize the upload as the same song rather than a brand-new one — which is what preserves your existing stream counts and play history. Upload with fresh codes by accident and you can reset those numbers to zero, which is exactly what knocks a track out of Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Most distributors let you enter existing codes manually; use that field, don't let the system auto-generate new ones.
Third, account for the permanence trap in reverse. If you're leaving CD Baby, remember its releases stay up forever by default — you have to actively take them down, or you'll have duplicates competing with your new uploads and splitting your streams. If you're leaving DistroKid or TuneCore, the opposite risk applies: simply lapsing your subscription pulls everything, so don't cancel until the migration is fully complete and confirmed live.
The honest takeaway: switching is worth doing when the math has clearly and durably changed — you started earning real money and CD Baby's 9% now stings, or you became a songwriter and need publishing collected. It is not worth doing every year to chase a few dollars, because each move risks the momentum that's worth far more than the saving. Choose deliberately, move rarely, and when you do move, move carefully.
Before You Commit: 3 Checks
Run these before you pay anyone. Each takes a few minutes and catches the mistakes that are expensive to undo.
- Estimate how many releases you'll put out over the next three years, and roughly what you earn from streaming per year.
- Run those two numbers through the tool above and read the 3-year cost table.
- Notice where the cheapest option flips — that crossover point is your actual decision, not the headline price.
- Be honest about how each release was made: no AI, AI-assisted with a human core, or fully AI-generated.
- If anything is fully generated, cross CD Baby off — its ban is retroactive and can take your account with it.
- For anything AI-touched, plan to disclose it at upload on whichever distributor you choose. Undisclosed is what gets pulled.
- Ask: what happens if I stop paying for a year? On DistroKid/TuneCore, your catalog comes down unless you've paid Leave a Legacy.
- If you write your own songs, ask: who is collecting my mechanical and performance royalties? On DistroKid, the answer is “nobody, unless you set it up yourself.”
- Price the permanence and the publishing as line items, not afterthoughts. They're where the long-term money hides.
Frequently Asked Questions
They're close: both are flat annual unlimited plans starting at $24.99/year that keep 100% of your streaming royalties. DistroKid is faster to stores and slightly cheaper at the top tiers; TuneCore carries deeper rights tooling and the only dedicated publishing-administration arm of the major flat-fee distributors. Pick DistroKid for pure speed-and-volume distribution; pick TuneCore if you write your own songs and want publishing collected in the same place.
For a first release where you just want music in stores cheaply and fast, DistroKid's $24.99/year Musician plan is the simplest starting point. Consider TuneCore from the start only if you already know you'll need publishing administration. Either way, both pull your catalog if you stop paying — so budget for the renewal, not just year one.
Only for a specific profile: artists who release infrequently and want their music to stay up permanently without an annual fee. CD Baby's one-time $9.99/single model and forever-hosting beat a subscription for a small, static catalog. But CD Baby keeps 9% of your revenue forever, can't host fully AI-generated music, and no longer sells standalone publishing administration — so for frequent releasers, high earners, or AI artists, DistroKid is usually the better pick.
CD Baby doesn't set a per-stream rate — the streaming platforms do (roughly $0.003–$0.005 per Spotify stream, varying by listener and region). CD Baby passes that through minus its 9% commission, so you receive about 91% of whatever the platform pays. Across a million Spotify streams earning, say, $4,000, CD Baby's cut would be roughly $360. DistroKid and TuneCore take 0% of that same streaming income.
The main ones: a permanent 9% commission on distribution revenue (which scales painfully as you earn more), an outright ban on fully AI-generated music that's enforced retroactively, the retirement of its standalone publishing-administration tier (now bundled into the CDB Boost add-on), and per-release fees that add up for prolific artists. Its standout advantage — permanent, one-time-fee hosting — is real, but it's the right trade only for infrequent releasers who earn modestly.
Yes — just not for the same release. You can't distribute one song through two distributors simultaneously, but many artists use one for new releases and leave older releases on the other. A common setup is DistroKid or TuneCore for active output plus CD Baby for a catalog they want hosted permanently. Moving an existing release between services means taking it down on one before re-uploading on the other, which briefly interrupts its availability and can reset some platform stats.
Your releases are removed from streaming platforms unless you purchased Leave a Legacy ($29/single, $49/album, one-time) for them. TuneCore works the same way — lapse and your catalog comes down. CD Baby is the exception: because you paid a one-time fee, your music stays live indefinitely whether or not you keep an active relationship with them.
It depends on the distributor and on how the music was made. DistroKid accepts AI-generated music with rights ownership and disclosure; TuneCore accepts it with disclosure plus data-licensing assurance; CD Baby bans fully AI-generated tracks outright and enforces that retroactively. All three allow AI-assisted music where a human is the primary creator. And regardless of distributor, Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube can remove undisclosed AI tracks after release, so disclosure is essential.