Too Lost vs Distrokid: Deep Dive Comparison

The battle of Too Lost vs. Distrokid comes down to how the two companies balance quality and cost.

Too lost gives artists so much for so little it feels like a no-brainer. But, it hasn’t unlocked any new method of distribution that allows it to give more than every other distributor for less.Instead, the economics appear to work by keeping overhead extremely low, and the tradeoff shows up in quality.

It comes down to a numbers game of which percentage of artists will experience or even notice an issue, actually need to engage with customer support in way that can’t be addressed with automated responses, or view the lack of quality as a deal breaker.

With Too Lost, you get more, but with major quality concerns.

With DistroKid, you get less, but the core distribution service has far fewer indications of systemic quality problems.

You’ll pay far more with Distrokid for extra features, because it passes the cost of providing additional services onto its customers. It charges you what’s necessary to provide quality distribution as far as delivery to stores is concerned. It’s incredibly reliable in that area.

Everything beyond standard distribution… you pay!

• Content ID: extra fee
• Automatic delivery to new stores: extra fee
• Delivery to audio recognition services: extra fee
• Advanced audio formats: extra fee

And you might find a lot of features you desire missing from its service like Apple Music Motion art. This is how it scales. It provides features with the highest level of demand that customers value enough to pay extra to access. That pricing gives DistroKid more room to provide those features at a respectable quality standard.

Where it concerns matters such as streaming fraud and infringement accusations, you run into another major problem with Too Lost. It appears to impose more verification/documentation friction before or during distribution. That may reflect a lower institutional tolerance for fraud/infringement exposure relative to DistroKid's enormous scale.

Whatever the reason, DistroKid doesn't appear to impose the same level of pre-distribution friction to protect its interests.

Too Lost requires KYC, including uploading identification. In my conversation with Too Lost's founder, he defended that system partly on the basis of accountability: if a DSP flags someone for fraud, Too Lost knows exactly who the user is and has identifying information it can provide when appropriate. That's great from the perspective of protecting Too Lost and its DSP partners, but it's another example of how much friction and personal accountability Too Lost is willing to impose on legitimate users in order to minimize its exposure to bad actors.

A Founders of Too Lost told Digital Music News

“We have flagged thousands of accounts... and have everything from IP addresses to IDs, first and last names, and emails documented.”

Artists report having releases stuck with requests for documents providing proof of ownership and creation for distribution.

This wouldn’t be so bad if customer support was outstanding and problems were resolved quickly, but Too Lost has notably bad customer support, if you go by customer complaints. Artists report getting late responses and in some cases, no responses at all.

And ultimately, Too Lost's value proposition provides the same answer to almost every criticism: “But look at all this stuff we're giving you.”

Quality issues “But look at all this stuff we’re giving you”

Friction “But look at all this stuff we’re giving you”

Customer support issues “But look at all this stuff we’re giving you”

Run down.

DistroKid packs light. Smaller inventory of stores, simple reports, fewer included features. Anything beyond the basics can get expensive. But what it does provide generally works. Only 5% of its Trustpilot reviews are one-star.

Too Lost packs heavy. More stores, more features, more services and an extraordinary amount of value on paper. But that creates a much larger operational surface area, and the customer complaints suggest Too Lost hasn't maintained the same level of quality across it. Thirty-four percent of its Trustpilot reviews are one-star.

So the question isn't really which distributor gives you more. Too Lost wins that easily.

The question is how much confidence you have that everything you're being given will work when you actually need it.

And that's where DistroKid wins.