Why am I not on Amazon Music Unlimited, or other sites that require full licensing?

*A note regarding CD Baby Pro Publishing

Several sites like Amazon Music Unlimited, Pandora Premium/Plus, and more are beginning to require full licensing of publishing rights before allowing content to become available on their platforms within the US in order to guarantee royalties are paid to the proper channels.

If music is distributed by CD Baby with Publishing Administration (i.e. CD Baby Pro) for all songwriters, then it will be able to go live once all songs have a confirmed registration with publishing representation at their Performing Rights Organization. The license they require is a mechanical license and a Performing Rights Organization membership like ASCAP or BMI does not cover the license they need. This is one of the many benefits to signing up for CD Baby Pro even if you're already registered with a Performing Rights Organization. If you, or your co-writers lack Publishers, then these sites or services are choosing not to make your project live.

After you have completed a Pro submission, and it has been finalized, your content takes about 2-3 months to show up on BMI/ASCAP, etc. This time frame is standard in the industry for registration with a Performing Rights Organization, and is the same if signing up your content manually with alternates to CD Baby Pro, such as Music Reports, Inc. We do recommend using our Pro Service as the path of least resistance, since it provides you publishing representation, and these mechanical license / publishing requirements may be taken on by any number of our other partners in the future as the industry changes.

Once your content is showing up in your performance rights organization’s account (BMI/ASCAP, SOCAN, etc) or showing up on your Music Reports, Inc. account, you can let us know, and we can redeliver your content so it will be included on these sync and streaming services.

Regarding Amazon Music: 

Amazon has three venues for digital music: Amazon Prime, Amazon Music Unlimited (streaming-only) and Amazon Music (MP3 store for download-only). We will not be able to place you in Amazon Prime, as this is up to Amazon's discretion.

We deliver your content to Amazon Music’s MP3 store if you've chosen the distribution level: Downloads Only , Downloads and Streaming, or Do It All Even Unpaid.

If you are opted into Download and Streaming, or Do It All Even Unpaid, you will automatically be delivered to the Amazon Music Unlimited (streaming) repertoire, but you need to have full licensing of publishing rights for them to make your music live. 

Remember that distributors can't guarantee content will be included for playback on smart devices such as Amazon Echo, or Alexa, etc. as these services pull content from Amazon's Prime service, which is a curated library, much like Pandora.

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The CD Baby Pro Publishing service was discontinued as of August 8th, 2023. Any paid release which was signed up for CD Baby Pro Publishing prior to August 8th, 2023 is considered a Legacy Pro release and will continue to receive Pro Publishing services. CD Baby now offers a new expanded suite of revenue amplifiers called “CDB Boost” instead.