Why Distrify.me doesn’t charge a music subscription

We hate subscriptions. It’s not a marketing line; it is the principle on which we built Distrify.me. And rather than explain it through a boring PowerPoint, we want to start with a campaign we loved: “A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator,” by the Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet).

The video that explains the problem better than we can

The Forbrukerrådet — Norway’s public consumer-rights body — came up in February 2026 with a brilliant character: the “Enshittificator”, a professional whose job is literally to make things worse. With dark humour, the video lays out the familiar script: people are drawn in by something good and free, become dependent on it, and then the fees, ads and obstacles begin — ending with the joke that even a car’s heating could become a paid feature.

That script has had a name since 2022: “enshittification”, the term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how digital platforms deteriorate in three stages. First, they serve users; then they exploit users to benefit business customers; finally, they squeeze everyone until the service itself breaks down. The Norwegian Consumer Council’s “Breaking Free” report traces this pattern across connected cars, videogames, generative AI and subscription software, and calls for measures such as the EU Digital Fairness Act.

This feels very familiar in music

Annual-subscription distributors such as DistroKid follow almost exactly the same script. Their entry-level plan sounds like a bargain — $24.99 per year — but that headline price does not include many things people reasonably assume are already included.

The most painful one is “Leave a Legacy”: if you stop paying, your catalogue can be taken down from streaming unless you pay extra, release by release, to “save” it. With 20 singles and five albums, that fee alone can exceed $800 over five years — before the base subscription. It is exactly the Enshittificator joke, except your music is held hostage instead of your car’s heating.

Our model: pay once, then get on with your life

At Distrify.me, we do not charge a subscription because our actual work is not recurring. We do the work once: correctly setting up your release, preparing metadata, delivering it to stores and checking rights. Once that is done, keeping your music available on streaming platforms does not create a cost that justifies billing you year after year. So we do not do it.

You pay once per release, and your music stays there. No renewal charge. No anxiety that it might disappear because you forgot to pay. If you are an artist who does not release twenty songs a year, that means you do not pay for a service you barely use. You pay for the work we do, not for a monthly toll.

What depends on Distrify.me — and what depends on Spotify

There is an important distinction we want to be clear about. Some things are entirely in our control; other things are controlled by Spotify alone. Spotify has enormous power in this market, so every distributor — Distrify.me included — optimises delivery and metadata for Spotify’s discovery systems, because that is where much of the audience and revenue are.

That is the business-to-business version of the issue in the Enshittificator video: when one platform holds that much power, everyone who depends on it — distributors, labels and artists — must play by its rules, even when those rules are unclear or change without warning. And we want to be honest about this: if Spotify decides tomorrow to charge per release, introduce a levy for distributors or change its algorithmic rules overnight, we cannot stop it. That power belongs to Spotify, not to us. No distributor — Distrify.me or anyone else — can prevent it.

What we do control, completely, is our side of the agreement: how we charge you, how we treat you and what happens to your music if you decide to stop using us. We do not depend on anyone for that, and that is where we commit to never enshittifying your experience.

The difference in one sentence

Instead of a subscription model full of “extras” that are not truly optional in practice, Distrify.me charges once for the real work we do: getting your music correctly set up. No ransom fee for your own catalogue. No hidden add-ons enabled at checkout. No basic feature suddenly turned into a “premium” one. The difference between a decent service and an enshittified one is simple: does the provider try to extract more value from what you already created, or does it leave you in peace with what you paid for?