DistroKid and Enshittification

So, it’s beginning, the further enshittification of DistroKid. The music distributor has been one of the least obnoxious of music distributors. This seems to be in my estimation and Miss Krystle’s. They have the least onerous terms and conditions and apparently aren’t enamored of AI slop, although their “mastering” tool appears to be AI driven.

But as you may have read, there’s a number of analyses of DistroKid’s potential sale. see this screenshot of DuckDuckGo’s search page for the prompt “DistroKid sale”.

This isn’t a good sugn. Either they sell out to one of the major players in the music industry, where they get further enshittified, or they get bought by private equity, which strip-mines them to later die.

One of the first signs of cost-cutting appeared to me as the batchification of reports. Formerly, reports were run immediately upon request. Now reports are scheduled to be run later, with a new reports page and a warning that you’ll get an email when the report’s completed. They also make available a zip file instead of the old csv file format, and the file name is not descriptive as the old name was. But at least they didn’t change the format of the file, so my scripts and sql commands still work.