Following on from the last post about sample pack best practices, this post will talk about sample pack distribution and review a couple of different distributors I have used.
The reviews will cover; Splice, TrakTrain LANDR, ADSR, and a multi distributor called Rightsify.
I started sample package distribution with an offer from traktrain after I submitted some beats, they hadn’t heard flute and sax before and we’re interested for me to make a sample pack for them. Thus the “Night Winds flute and sax pack” was created, this was distributed on splice and to the traktrain website. The benefit of this was I got a copy of splice’s distribution guidelines which were very thorough and useful for creating my first pack. (See best practices post for renaming and conventions)
After creating a few sample packs for traktrain I decided to diversify and use a multi-distribution website called rightsify in Dec 2019. the benefit of this platform was that it distributed to multiple websites at once, so you could upload your sample pack once and it would distribute to many. Similar to how a distributor like TuneCore distributes music to Spotify, iTunes, Google music and everything. Because I didn’t have many sample packs I didn’t make great sales for the first year but after that it started to pick up especially considering I added more sample packs. Numbers is the key, it helps you refine your craft and you also don’t know which ones are going to be the most popular. Sometimes the packs that I put the least amount of effort into are the best sellers.
As I was trying to scale up operations with rightsify communication started to become difficult, they changed their pack requirements a number of times and asked packs to be re categorized which became a pain. Admittedly I may have become sloppy with some of my attention to detail in distribution but I was becoming annoyed that their promise was to distribute to many platforms at the beginning of my contract and they were not fulfilling this requirement by only distributing to a few.
So in mid 2021 I stopped working with rightsify and directly approached some of the distributors such as ADSR and LANDR. So far I have been most happy with ADSR, the sales have been the best, they provide the widest range of samples and formats, and overall communication and user experience is really good (the exception being uploading via FTP was a little tricky the first time but you get the hang of it). LANDR comes in 2nd, again very good communication and easy upload process. the platform looks smaller than the others so there seems to be less competition (my guitar pack was ranked #2 in the top 10!). That being said I’ve only really just started with them this year as an independent provider and I’m yet to see how they go long term.
See the comparison table below for an overview.
Comparison table
| Sample distributor | Pros | Cons | Notes | Split | Sales rank |
| SPLICE | Biggest and most well known (doesn’t mean best sales) | *Hard to get your packs on – usually only larger companies accepted now *Packs get pirated more | Subscription model | 50% | 3 (I only have 1 pack here so not representative) |
| ADSR | Does everything, midi, WAVs, MPC and more. | *Upload process is tedious via FTP | Buy full packs (may be adding subscriptions also) | 50% | 1 |
| LANDR | Upload process is simple and fast, Smaller platform = less competition | *Doesn’t do MIDI packs *Sales reporting / invoicing is tedious | Subscription model ($0.27 per sample =0.11 after 40% royalty split | 40% non exclusive 50% exclusive | 2 |
| Traktrain | Good communication, easy to work with | Almost uniquely hip-hop / trap | (Least sales of all) | 50% | 4 |
| Rightsify | Distributes to multiple websites Good sales stats | Format requirements and communication | Great if you have lots of packs and want to simplify distribution, but be prepared to pay the fee for it. | You get 70% after website split = 70% of 50% total revenue. | NA |