In other words: Artists have more ability than ever to put out music themselves, but doing so means taking on some of the business mechanics once handled largely behind the scenes by labels.The key piece of that infrastructure is the music distributor.
In the physical era, distribution largely meant pressing records and CDs, shipping them to retailers and getting them onto store shelves. Today, digital distributors act as the bridge between an artist and Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TikTok and other platforms.
Once music is live, distributors also help collect recording revenue reported by streaming services and stores and make that money available to the artist or other master-rights holder. That is separate from music publishing: royalties generated by the underlying composition can travel through publishers, performing-rights organizations and other collection systems.
