How to Release Music with Ditto Music in 7 Steps
Ditto sells unlimited releases for one fee a year and keeps nothing from the streams. The plan is the easy decision. The work is the store rights, the two settings that decide whether publishing and video income arrive at all, and a release calendar that fits into a week instead of eight.
The short version
Ditto sells three plans and bills each of them once a year: Starter at $19, Pro at $59, Labels from $109. Every plan includes unlimited releases, 150 or more stores and 100% of streaming royalties, so the plan decides which tools you get rather than how many singles you can put out. Create the account, attach a payout route, upload with an ISRC, tick only the stores your rights reach, set a date with a week of air around it, and switch publishing, sync and Content ID on after the release is live.
Step 1: Choose the plan before you upload anything
The three plans are on Ditto's pricing page, and the first thing to notice is that none of them is charged per release. Starter covers one artist, Pro covers two, and Labels starts at $109. The pricing page describes Labels as up to five artists while the Labels page advertises a roster of three to forty, so the tier you buy depends on how many names you are carrying. Treat $109 as the entry price rather than the price of a five-artist label.
Unlimited releases is the part that changes the arithmetic. There is no per-single charge, no per-EP charge, and nothing to pay when a release is added to a new store next year, which means the annual fee is the whole distribution bill. A distributor that charges $10 a release is cheaper for exactly one release a year and more expensive from the second one onward. The worked numbers for that trade are in the pricing comparison, including where the cheapest plan stops being the cheapest decision.
Because every plan renews annually, the date you sign up matters as much as the amount. $19 for twelve months is about $1.60 a month, and buying the plan six weeks before the first release just spends part of the year on nothing. Upgrades and downgrades are prorated, so starting on Starter and moving to Pro when a second artist appears costs the difference rather than a second full fee.
Step 2: Set up the money before the music
Making the account is free and takes about a minute. Three settings are worth doing before the first upload, because each of them is harder to fix after a release is live.
- Attach a payout route. Ditto pays royalties straight to a bank account and lets you withdraw on demand from the dashboard or the phone app, rather than waiting for a monthly cut-off date.
- Decide whether the renewal comes out of royalties. Ditto has a royalty renewal toggle in the account settings, so the yearly fee can be taken from the balance the catalogue has already earned instead of from a card.
- Check the currency you are being quoted. The pricing page shows dollars and the Pro page shows £59 for the same plan. Both are real, the currency follows the locale you land on, and neither is a discount for the other one.
The royalty renewal toggle is the setting that changes how the plan feels in year two. A catalogue earning $40 a year pays its own $19 renewal once that balance is switched on, and from that point the plan stops being money you carry and becomes money the music carries. A catalogue earning less than $19 a year does not reach that point, which is the honest argument for keeping the first plan small.
Step 3: Build the release inside the builder
Audio, artwork, metadata, store list and royalty splits all live in one flow. Ditto issues an ISRC and a UPC free if you do not have them, and it accepts codes you already own, which matters when a recording has been out before: stores use those numbers to attach the release to the artist page it already belongs to, and a fresh code on an old recording splits the catalogue into two profiles that are tedious to merge.
Three fields send more releases back than any others. The artist name has to be spelled exactly the same way on every release, because a store treats a different spelling as a different person. The title should read like the thing a listener would type into a search box rather than like a working title. The composer and lyricist lines have to be truthful, since for a cover they credit someone who is not you, and a rights holder who finds their work filed under the wrong name can have the release removed rather than corrected.
The builder also holds the tools that make an annual fee of $19 look small: a pre-save smartlink for every release at no charge, lyrics upload, credits on Spotify, a Canvas generator, promo cards, and an AI mastering preview you can hear before deciding whether to keep the render. Ditto's distribution page lists them with the store guide, so the fastest way to check whether a tool you need is on your plan is to search the list rather than to open a ticket.
Step 4: Tick only the stores your rights can reach
Ditto distributes to more than 150 streaming, download and social platforms, and the store guide on its site shows thirty at a time with a load-more control. Ticking every one of them is the right default for an original recording and the wrong default for anything you do not fully control, because a release that reaches a store it should not have reached gets pulled, and the pull is recorded against the account.
Two different rights travel with a single release. The distributor delivers the recording; the composition is a separate copyright, which is why Ditto sells publishing collection as a Pro feature rather than as part of distribution. A cover of somebody else's song needs a mechanical licence for the territories that require one, and the licence is not bundled in any Ditto plan, so either buy it from a licensing service or take those territories off the store list. This is the same question that decides the store list on every release in this catalogue, which is why the covers here are mostly public domain or cleared.
YouTube needs its own decision again. Content ID registration is available on Pro, but Ditto's eligibility note rules out public domain works, anything already registered with another provider, and beats licensed non-exclusively. A cover sits awkwardly in the middle: you own the recording of your performance, you do not own the song, and a claim registered on your cover can collide with the writer's own claim. Register the originals first and leave the covers alone until you have checked.
Step 5: Set the date, then the hour
Speed is Ditto's loudest claim. Its comparison table gives 1 to 3 days to Spotify and 2 to 5 or 2 to 7 days to the distributors it measures itself against. The fair reading is that 1 to 3 days is the fast path rather than a promise: artwork that fails the crop, a title that duplicates an existing release, or a store the account has never reached before can all add days, and nobody at any distributor can put a release back once a store has rejected it.
Plan a week. A release finished and submitted on a Monday can be live in the same week, and the stores that ingest slowest (Amazon, the Japanese services, a few of the smaller download shops) can take longer than the first one. Setting the sales date a week out costs nothing and means a release never launches with a missing store link, which is the situation that makes an artist pay for distribution twice.
The exact hour is a Pro feature. Timed releases let you set the time a record goes live on release day instead of waiting for the store's own refresh, which is the whole difference between a countdown that lands at midnight and one that lands at nine in the morning. A pre-save link runs on every plan and is worth setting even for a small release: it does not sell records, it collects a reminder and a follow, and both of those outlast the launch week.
Read the storage line before letting a renewal lapse. Pro and Labels include release protection, which promises that releases stay live even if a payment is missed or the plan is cancelled. The pricing table offers long-term storage free on selected plans and $29 otherwise, so on Starter the question "what happens if I skip a year" has a price.
Step 6: Switch on the income the upload leaves out
Distribution pays for streams. It does not pay for the composition, for a placement in a television show, or for the video a fan uploads with your chorus underneath it. Ditto sells those as three separate switches, and all three sit on Pro.
Publishing. Once a release is live, the Publishing tab registers the song with collection societies worldwide and collects the writer's share, mechanicals, YouTube income and performance income. Ditto's own page says publishing can add up to 20% to an artist's earnings, and that most independent artists never claim it. The commission is quoted as 10% on the publishing page and as 15% for publishing and sync in the pricing FAQ, both live in November 2026, so get the figure that applies to your account in writing before you budget on it.
Sync.
Sync briefs appear in the Pro dashboard, and the sync team pitches the tracks it thinks fit. Their placements page lists work on Bel-Air, a Hugo Boss campaign, Gymshark and Royal Enfield. There is no rate card: their own FAQ says some placements pay a few hundred and major campaigns pay thousands, with royalties on top in some deals. What matters for a small catalogue is that pitching costs nothing beyond the plan, so a track that never gets picked costs nothing to have offered.
YouTube Content ID and the Official Artist Channel. Both are Pro features set up per release in the builder. Content ID claims video uploads that use your audio and routes the ad revenue to the account, paid in as Ditto receives it each month. The Official Artist Channel is the verified channel with your releases in one place, and it is the piece most artists notice on the viewer's side rather than in the bank.
Splits and chart registration.
Automatic royalty splits are free to set up and free for collaborators to join, which matters when a producer or a featured vocalist is owed a share: an account that has to pay for its own seat tends not to claim it. Official chart registration is the other quiet one, and it only matters if first-week sales are part of the plan.
Step 7: Read the dashboard, then take the money out
Streams, playlist movement, audience data and royalties land in the dashboard in real time, and the Labels dashboard adds a side-by-side comparison across the roster. Withdrawal is on demand to a bank account, or from the app with a couple of taps, which is a different rhythm from a distributor that pays once a month after a threshold: money that can leave when it arrives is money that can pay for the next release.
What the plan keeps is worth stating plainly. Streaming and download royalties are 100% yours on every plan, with no commission taken. Publishing and sync royalties carry the commission quoted above, and that is the only cut on the account. Ditto's home page puts it as no deductions and no complex tax forms, and the pricing FAQ is explicit that 100% of streaming income is the artist's.
The practical consequence: a distributor taking 15% of everything and a distributor taking nothing from streams but 10 to 15% of publishing are not the same deal, and which one costs more depends on where the money in your catalogue comes from. If almost all of it is streaming, the commission-free plan wins on the first dollar. If a sync or a publishing catalogue is the goal, the plan that includes those tools is the cheaper one even at five times the fee.
Questions the seven steps raise
Is Ditto Music free?
Signing up is free, and the app, the store guide and the release builder are visible before you pay anything. Releasing is not free: Starter is $19 a year, Pro is $59 and Labels starts at $109. There is no per-release fee inside any of the three, which is the difference between Ditto and the distributors that charge for each single.
How much of my royalties does Ditto keep?
None of the streaming income. Ditto states 100% on every plan, with no commission on streams or downloads. Publishing and sync royalties, which Pro and Labels add, carry a commission that Ditto's pages quote as 10% in one place and 15% in another, and that is the only deduction on the account.
How long until my music is on Spotify?
Ditto's own comparison table puts Spotify at 1 to 3 days and the slower stores at 2 to 5 or 2 to 7. Plan a week anyway, and plan longer if the artwork, the title or the store list needs fixing after submission.
Can I release a cover song through Ditto?
You can distribute the recording. The composition belongs to someone else, so publishing collection does not apply, a mechanical licence for the territories that require one is not part of any plan, and Content ID on a cover can clash with the writer's own claim. Buy the licence or take those territories off the list, and check the release page for Harry Potter Theme Music Box to see what a cleared cover looks like from the listener's side.
What happens to my releases if I stop paying?
On Pro and Labels, release protection keeps them live after a missed payment or a cancellation. On Starter, the pricing table prices long-term storage at $29 for the plans where it is not included, so the honest answer is that a lapsed renewal can end a release.
Do I need Pro for YouTube Content ID?
Yes. Content ID registration and Official Artist Channel setup are Pro features, and both are configured per release inside the builder. RouteNote does it on a free account, which is one of the few places its free plan beats Ditto's cheapest one; the comparison is in the post on the two bills.
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