By Ronnie Desiderio
This week, in a public thread about a company in our space, somebody asked the questions every artist and every brand should ask before they sign anything:
What is your actual relationship with your distributor? What do the fees buy? Are there other charges underneath? And who owns what?
The company didn't have clean answers. We do — ours are printed on our website. But the thread matters because it points at the one idea this whole business turns on:
Distribution is rented
Anybody can open a DistroKid account tonight. Anybody can upload songs to every platform on earth by Friday. That is not a business. That is a subscription.
Distribution is a pipe. Pipes are useful, and we use them — our partners open their own DistroKid accounts because DistroKid is a good accountant: it tracks the money and pays it out. But a pipe owns nothing. When the subscription is the whole offer, there is nothing underneath it.
Ownership is the asset
Here is what we own at Toys and Beats: a catalog of 100,000 plus records and growing, written and produced by one person, with every master recording and all of the publishing in one name — mine.
That is not a brag. It is a legal fact, and it is the whole product. One name on the masters and one name on the publishing means a clean chain of title on every track. No split ownership. No clearance headaches. No chasing five co-writers for a signature when a brand wants to use a song. A partner can build on it because there is exactly one door to knock on, and it is ours.
Split ownership is where music money goes to die. Owned-clean is where it compounds.
A catalog you can prove is human
This matters more every month. The platforms are flooding with prompt-made music — and a prompt is not a composer. Type words into a generator and the machine composed and performed the song, not you; that is why it has to be disclosed as machine-made, and why the prompter's claim on it is so thin.
Our catalog is the opposite. Twenty years of songs made by hand, in real sessions, layer by layer. Ownership we can document, because one person made it and kept the paperwork. As the flood rises, provably human, provably owned catalogs do not get cheaper. They get rarer.
How we run it
Two doors, and every page on this site speaks to one of them — never both blurred together.
Brands: we build a complete audio business from your IP and run all of it — original music, releases, titles, schedule, registration and collection, audio ads. You earn 50% of what the audio makes on the back end. For Brands — your audio revenue department
Creators: your art becomes the cover of a real release, your name goes on it as featured artist, and you earn 50% of the royalties. For Creators — get featured, get paid
Partners are royalty licensees, not co-owners. They keep 100% of their art, their characters and their logos — we never own their IP. We keep the masters and the publishing — that is what keeps the chain of title clean for everyone earning on it. The split is confirmed in writing on every release.
And the costs are printed, not whispered: $99 all-in for a creator to start, including their first DistroKid year. A one-time $299 studio setup for a brand. No subscription. No other charges from us. The full FAQ is on both pages, because the questions at the top of this post deserve answers in public.
Why this is the future
Every brand is becoming a media company. Every creator posts content every day. Under almost all of it sits audio — and that audio will be owned by somebody.
The companies that own it clean, in one name, with the registration handled and the paperwork straight, get paid on it for decades. The ones renting pipes and splitting masters five ways get a dashboard and a headache.
It was never about distribution. It's about ownership. It always was.
"Get Poppin" — Epic Toy Sound feat. KIDULT. One track from the catalog: one owner, clean title, earning on every platform it touches.
Ronnie Desiderio is the founder of Epic Toy Sound and Zillion Records, and the producer behind the Toys and Beats catalog — two decades of original music, paired with the toy photography community that gives it a face. More about the story behind the sound →