By Timothy Trudeau, Founder/CEO of Syntax Creative
I’m old enough to remember a time when releasing music required a physical product to move through the world. Somebody had to manufacture the product. Somebody had to decide how many units to press. Somebody had to warehouse it, ship it, pitch it, stock it, and then hope some stranger would walk in and pick it up off the shelf.
There was only so much room on the truck, only so much room in the warehouse, and only so much room on the shelf.
Don’t get me wrong, that system had plenty of problems. It kept out a lot of artists who deserved a shot. It favored relationships, budgets, timing, and sometimes just plain politics. I’m not trying to pretend the old model was perfect. But it did have something our current system doesn’t: friction.
Friction isn’t always bad. In physical distribution, friction created natural constraints. If a label was going to press 1,000 CDs, somebody had to believe there was a reason to press them. If a distributor was going to ship boxes across the country, somebody had to believe the boxes were worth shipping. If a retailer was going to give an artist the time of day, that meant someone else was getting passed over.
And that friction was not only about taste. It helped filter out fraud, infringement, rights issues, and people who couldn’t actually stand behind what they were trying to release.
Limitations forced decisions. Not always fair. But decisions.
Digital distribution removed most of those constraints. At first it felt like a miracle. And it was. Artists who couldn’t get a meeting could suddenly reach the world. Independent labels that were too niche for traditional retail could finally compete. Genres and subgenres that never made sense to chain-store buyers could find listeners directly.
I built a company on that miracle, so I’m not confused about the good side of it. But with great access came great volume.
With infinite space, the cost of putting one more title on the shelf got pretty close to zero. Once the truck disappeared, nobody had to ask whether there was room. Once the warehouse became a database, almost everything could fit. And once access became the selling point, distribution started shifting from curation to plumbing.
To be clear, the pipe isn’t free. Delivery, metadata, reporting, takedowns, royalty systems, fraud checks, and platform compliance all cost real money. The question isn’t whether distributors should get paid. The question is whether they get paid for outcomes or simply for keeping the pipe full.
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That’s where the incentives changed.
In the older model, a distributor made money if and when the music made money. That doesn’t mean distributors were all noble, or that every deal was good. But the basic business model was connected to performance. If the music earned, the distributor earned.
Think of it this way. If you had a booking agent who was compensated the same flat rate for every show booked, what kind of shows do you think you’d get? Is there an incentive to chase the arena show over a kid’s birthday party? The question isn’t whether your booking agent is incentivized.
The question is whether they are incentivized to get you the right shows, or just to stack up dates. Same thing with a manager. If they made the same amount of money every month whether your career grew or stalled, their incentive would be different. So why would we think this works differently with a record label or distributor?
Many advertise that an artist can keep “100%” of their royalties, but the distributor has already been paid up front and through an ongoing subscription fee. That money is paid before the music has proven anything. In that model, the customer isn’t the listener. It’s the artist.
I don’t automatically think that is wrong. There are artists who are perfectly served by a low-cost upload tool. They don’t need a distributor, a label, a marketing team, radio promotion, publicity, playlist strategy, or anyone else involved. They simply want their music available, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it’s important to understand who and what is being incentivized in the supply chain. If the model rewards uploads more than outcomes, how long before major DSPs start turning off the valve for distributors whose main job is keeping the pipe full?
And for the record, this isn’t an attack on other distributors. Some of my best friends are other distributors.
But those friendships don’t change the important questions we should all be asking. If a company makes money from the act of distribution instead of the result of distribution, it has less reason to ask: Is this music good? Is there an audience for it? Is there a plan, and is anyone actually going to work it?
That’s not an artistic permission question. I’m not interested in telling people what they’re allowed to make. Make whatever you want. Record whatever you want. Release whatever you want. But the industry shouldn’t act surprised when a system built around unlimited access produces unlimited supply.
That’s how we got here.
The numbers are hard to ignore. According to Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Music Report, 106,000 new tracks were delivered to DSPs every day in 2025. There are now over 253 million audio ISRCs in the marketplace. Of those, 88% had 1,000 streams or fewer during the year, and 120.5 million had zero to 10 streams.
That’s not a small discovery problem. It’s a structural problem.
The issue isn’t simply that listeners heard all these songs and rejected them. In many cases, listeners never encountered them in the first place. Music doesn’t just compete with other music anymore. It competes with every other song ever released, every podcast, every short video, every game, every notification, every news cycle, every job, every family obligation, and the basic human limit of time.
The shelf may be infinite, but attention isn’t.
That’s the real scarcity now. We solved the distribution problem and created a discovery problem.
Then, instead of slowing down, the industry kept making it easier to add more music to the pile. Home studios got better. Remote collaboration got easier. Beats got cheaper. Tools got smarter. Marketing advice became endless. Every artist was told to release more often so they could feed the algorithm. Then what we’re calling AI showed up and opened the firehose even wider.
But AI isn’t the whole story. It’s just the most obvious symptom. The deeper issue is that we built a music economy where supply can grow infinitely, while demand cannot. The number of tracks can double. The number of hours in a listener’s day cannot.
Physical distribution had plenty of gatekeepers. Digital distribution has plenty of tollbooths. A gatekeeper says no. A tollbooth says: “I’ll let you through so long as you pay.”
Artists understandably hated the gatekeepers. In many cases, they were right to. But now we have to ask whether removing every gatekeeper and replacing them with tollbooths actually solved the problem, or simply changed who gets paid.
Because if a release has no marketing, no audience, no plan, no story, and no real reason to be launched beyond “I made it,” what exactly was accomplished when it goes live everywhere?
The artist got access. The distributor got paid. The platform got another file. The database got another ISRC. But did the artist get closer to a career? Did listeners get better served? Did the music business get healthier?
This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, because the second you start talking about standards, someone hears elitism. I get that. Nobody wants to go back to a world where a small group of people decides what gets to exist.
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Access and strategy are not the same thing.
Uploading a song isn’t the same as launching a song. Availability isn’t demand. Distribution isn’t artist development. Being live on every platform doesn’t mean a release has been introduced to an audience.
In the old physical system, people had to think through some of these questions because there was real money on the line before the music ever reached the public. Manufacturing, freight, warehousing, sales effort, retail positioning, and returns all created pressure to make real decisions. Again, that didn’t make the old system perfect. But it did make people ask whether a project was ready, whether there was a market for it, and whether someone was prepared to work it.
Now the cost shows up later.
It shows up as good music getting buried. It shows up as fraud prevention. It shows up as metadata cleanup. It shows up as duplicate claims, takedowns, rights conflicts, and royalty systems processing microscopic earnings across massive catalogs. It shows up as platforms creating thresholds because the long tail has gotten so long that parts of it barely function as a market. And it shows up as legitimate artists wondering why it feels harder than ever to be heard in a world where access was supposed to make everything easier.
The answer isn’t to rebuild the old walls. It’s to stop pretending the absence of walls means there isn’t a problem.
Artists need to hear the truth too. Not every song needs the same release plan. Not every demo needs global distribution. Not every idea needs to become an ISRC. Sometimes the best thing an artist can do is wait, improve the song, test it live, build an audience, make better visuals, clarify the story, or create a reason for someone to care before sending it into the system.
Distributors also need to be clearer about what they are selling. Are they selling access? Administration? Strategy? Audience development? Marketing? A dashboard? A lottery ticket? There is nothing wrong with selling access. But access isn’t a career.
The music industry spent years celebrating the democratization of distribution, and for good reason. A lot of great music got through that never would have survived the old system. But democratization without discernment can become a landfill.
Sound harsh? The data says the same thing in nicer language. We can debate thresholds, platform policies, fraud rules, payment models, and whether the smallest tracks should be monetized. Those are all real conversations worth having.
But before we get there, we should start with the obvious: none of this happened by accident. We got here because every constraint was removed except the one constraint that still matters: human attention.
And that one isn’t going away.
Timothy Trudeau is the Founder and CEO of Syntax Creative, a Spotify Platinum Preferred digital distribution and marketing agency serving more than 150 record labels and administering exclusive worldwide rights to more than 85,000 songs. Since starting in music in 1997, he has been an artist, songwriter, producer, studio engineer, label owner, artist manager, booking agent, concert promoter, and distributor.
