Sockpuppet Blog.

The good

The price is pretty good. $20/year, similar to many of the other distributors.

They care a lot about metadata, and allow you to enter existing ISRCs and UPCs if you have them. (Which I technically do but I can’t be bothered to look them up or deal with their bad user interface, but more on that in a bit.)

They also allow people to declare their use of generative AI, so if people are insisting on using that stuff, they can be filed appropriately. (And hopefully those of us who have nothing to lie about won’t be penalized for the quagmire that techbros with deep pockets and shallow thoughts¹ have unleashed upon us.)

The bad

The UX on the uploader is pretty terrible. It tries way too hard to be “app-like,” but also has so much negative space and no visibility into the item you’re working on, so the UI has a lot of scrolling and clicking.

You also need to individually specify a lot of metadata on a per-track basis; there’s no way to just, like, apply the same performer/writer credits to all the tracks on a release, or things like recording year, recording country, etc., and a lot of the UI elements have these awful custom controls with a very slow/annoying search mechanism and piss-poor defaults. (Why does it default to Aaron Copeland for every credit?! Aside from him being alphabetically first in their database, of course. You’d think they’d only be drawing from names that I’ve already submitted things with. You’d think.)

The actual upload flow is also a bit confusing and weird, and of course it doesn’t try to take in the existing metadata from my FLAC files, even though they’re all already perfectly tagged with the majority of the information they are looking for.

Every single track edit is its own little tiny usability nightmare, and it makes my chronic pain flare up very quickly. And I have a lot of tracks to get through if I’m going to make all my stuff available again.

Ideally I could just upload, like, a bunch of .flac files and a JSON/CSV/whatever file with my metadata. I can handle that just fine. Let me write a trivial bandcrash-to-whatever converter and call it a day. But no, everything has to be built the long way around.

Of the points on my classic rant about web usability, they have violated at least seven of those principles, although at least they provide some amount of keyboard accessibility. Not enough, mind you, but at least an effort was made.

The ugly

When you first sign up you have to declare your label name up front, and the UI for it makes it very easy to make a mistake. And it can’t be changed once you’ve signed up.

Also, the way referral links work are kinda bad from a privacy standpoint. Let’s just say I wish things would let you use a preferred name and leave it at that.

Yet another side rant about AI

As an independent musician with accessibility needs, I would absolutely love it if AI could help me with the parts of the process that are physically painful for me to do. The tedious, mechanial parts, like formatting my upload metadata and submitting it to the system (with my oversight, of course).

But no, all of the AI bullshit out there is working on replacing the parts that I enjoy doing, and the parts that make my stuff unique.

Music/AI tech people, do better. Focus on solving the problems that need to be solved, please.

Conclusion

Anyway. I sent them a support request asking them to make a better bulk-editing interface, because as things are it’s kind of untenable from a usability standpoint. But nobody ever gives a shit about people with chronic pain disabilities or motor issues, I’ve found, and that’s a bigger rant about the usability of the web itself at this point.

It’s a bit sad that of all the distributors I’ve used, Distrokid with its straight-from-1998 Extremely Web 1.0 interface is the only one that doesn’t make me want to gnaw my own foot off while using it. (But then again, I feel like Web 1.0 actually had pretty good usability from the get-go.)

But anyway. If you don’t care about (or are willing to deal with) the UX issues, it might be worth a try. Also, if you sign up with my affiliate link you get 25% off your first year (a savings of $5), and I get $10.

(And please, if you run into a site which is difficult for you to use, please let the people who run it know. So much of the modern web was built by people who have never heard the first thing about accessibility.)