Trying out Warner Level Music as a distributor

I’m trying the beta for Warners new distribution service, Level.

I’ve been a bandcamp Pro user for some time and find it to be little more than a nice shop front.

Giving this a go to see how it fairs

My label uses distrokid as a distribution service. It’s relatively inexpensive and gets music to pretty much all the major services.

Same here, as an individual artist I can release as much as I want for $20US/year on DistroKid. Bandcamp is it’s own ecosystem.

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After 10 minutes of looking into Level, I’m already really against it. Warner is being sneaky and arguably fraudulent in its claims.

For example, the beta says it’s free with no upfront fees. Fine. They also claim this:

Complete ownership
No upfront charges or fees. Keep 100% of your rights, royalties, and earnings.

But in the agreement, they say you keep 100% of your net receipts, less an 8% distribution fee retained by them. Oops! That’s not 100%. They’re burying this distribution fee for your earnings in the agreement and not talking about it in the marketing, which is pretty bad.

Distrokid: $20 per year, you keep 100% of your royalties with no distribution fee

Warner: no upfront fee (in beta - you’ll probably be charged a fee once the beta is over), 8% taken off whatever you earn.

Also, I’m not totally sure how to parse this part, but it sounds like you can’t have the same music on both Bandcamp and Level simultaneously, which kills it for me:

Restrictions on Additional Distribution. You may not license or otherwise make available any Recordings to any Music Platform (whether directly or through a third party) other than under this Agreement, except with respect to countries for which you have notified us, pursuant to Section 6( c ) above, to cease making such Recordings available hereunder.

Summary:
You can ask us to take down your music and other info or materials from various music platforms, and we’ll pass your request along to such platforms, but we’re not responsible if a music platform fails to honor your request. In addition, if you want to independently make your songs available on a music platform, you have to first take those songs down from Level.

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I explained the above while deleting my Level account, and they sent a response which I’ll include here for the sake of fairness. Still inclined to go with Distrokid instead because I’ll never trust a major label, but this seems better than I thought at least.

If you are an 8% client of Level’s you would already know as there are only a handful of people who are charged this fee, but I can see how the terms are confusing to that degree - we’re scrubbing verbiage for clarity. Everyone else is in fact free without any upfront or backend fees - you keep 100% royalties / rights.

The second point means you can’t distribute the same exact songs/music to digital streaming platforms through Level & other distros (like Tunecore or CD Baby) … bandcamp isn’t included in that.

Heads up on Distrokid - I almost signed up but didn’t, then a day later they offered a 35% discount

DistroKid all the way for me. Does exactly what it says on the tin. They’re ace.