AWAL Reviews 54

I would strongly recommend against using AWAL. In my experience, the support has been very poor and has caused multiple issues with releases — including delays due to things like missed emails on their end.

I also didn’t receive any meaningful support around areas like playlisting, and found the upload process unnecessarily complicated. Accessing earnings was similarly slow and frustrating.

Overall, it made the process of releasing music far more difficult than it needed to be, and I’ve since moved back to DistroKid.

I have had an account with them since 2023. At first, they paid royalties normally. After a few months, they suddenly sent warning emails accusing me of using artificial bot streaming on my Spotify tracks — without providing any proof.

They then cut my payments.

When I contacted Spotify for Artists support, Spotify clearly told me:

They did not detect any artificial streaming

They did not send any warning to AWAL

They had no issue with my account

However, when I questioned AWAL, they claimed that Spotify warned them and cut the payments, which is false.

This shows clear contradictions and lack of transparency. In my experience, they have withheld and stolen money from artists using false accusations.

Artists deserve proof, transparency, and fair treatment — not threats and unpaid royalties.

Ein sehr schneller und guter Support, der erforderliche Schritte genau erklärt und bei weiteren Fragen sogar mehrfach am Tag. Daher kann ich die negativen Bewertungen anderer Nutzer hier nicht nachvollziehen.

Mir hat nicht nur der schnelle Support mit persönlichen Berater per E-Mail gefallen, sondern auch die relevanten Tipps.

Das Dashboard ist einfach und Übersichtlich dargestellt.Einzig das Anlegen von Projekten oder einer neuen Veröffentlichung ist etwas verwirrend.

Sie bieten verschiedene interne Tools an, die die eigene Entwicklung auf allen Plattformen darstellt und diese auch vergleibar sind mit anderen Künstlern.

Hilfreich sind auch die internen Videoguides, welche zu verschiedenen Themen, gute Informationen bereitstellen.

Die Bewerbungsprozedur verlief ganz easy und die Antwort erfolgte nach wenigen Tagen.

The absolute worst music distribution service I have ever used. The fact that you have to be reviewed and accepted to join made it seem like it was a privilege to be accepted, it was exciting. After a few years of being with them, they started, out of the blue, accusing me of "generating artificial streaming traffic" on Spotify to this 1 random song on one of my albums, for some reason. Which I absolutely never did, and never will. I didn't even need to do so, my music was doing well on it own. I then spoke with Spotify's artist support and they confirmed that I was, indeed, not doing that. I sent the transcript to AWAL, messaged them numerous, numerous times about it, in an very detailed matter, they kept ignoring, dismissing, denying. Their behaviour was outrageous. On top of that, they kept switching their iOS app and website between AWAL and Kobalt, with no clear explanation. I moved my entire library to another distributor.

A distribution service that claims to follow your artistic journey with the possibility of level advancements if certain conditions are met — this is absolutely untrue. They always focus on the same artists, and no one starting from the bottom is ever able to move up. They promise playlist pitching, which is also false, because it is merely a basic distribution service that offers no real support of any kind. Email replies are almost always copied and pasted.

A video of mine with 470,000 organic views, monetized through Content ID, did not generate a single euro in royalties. After several emails in which they assured me they would look into my case, I eventually received a message stating that the collaboration contract had been terminated.

Stay away.

They might accept you , but if you don't give them the numbers (Streams) you get a termination notice , I got mine a year and a half later .There is no artist development or communication with them , so now I have to transfer all my music to another distributer and pay all over again . If they were clear from the start I would never have gone with them .

The customer service is TERRIBLE!

Average reply time is up to 2 weeks, very stressful if you are an independent artist who wants to solve issues quickly.

My advice to any artist would be DO NOT GO WITH AWAL. No matter how shiny and glossy they present their offer to you it honestly isn’t worth it and there are so many better publishers out there.

I was an artist with AWAL publishing for 2 years. I got hacked by a playlist bot and all my music got taken down with no explanation from awal WHATSOEVER - they literally went awal on me lol maybe that’s why they are called that 😭. It was only after my friends started asking where’s all your music? That I realised and then had to wait two weeks to hear from anyone and got no explanation at all just totally removed and told to reupload using someone else.

As bots are becoming more and more of an issue within Spotify which many even established artists are suffering from is this is a kind or compassionate way to treat independent artists?

AWAL I will see you at Wembley stadium I’m sorry you missed the opportunity

Awful experience. I signed up with AWAL back in summer of 2024 and explained my timeline for releases as well as budgets, marketing plans and everything else they'd need to know in order to accept me on their website. They accepted me and allowed me to start putting my music onto their platform. After 2 months of being with them i released my first release which did really well getting onto BBC Radio Introducing Essex and getting on a lot of playlists etc resulting in my second song to ever reach over 1,000 streams so quickly!

Over the next few months I released a few more singles leading up to the september 26th 2025 when I released my first ever album which had 15 tracks on it and a budget of £3000 marketing wise with a further £5000 on mixing, mastering, album artwork, YouTube videos, beats and other material.

I have started my marketing campaign as told to AWAL at the beginning of october. To date my album has done extremely well resulting in a lot of social media attention, blog posts, and even getting my TikTok verified! (all of this was done by myself mind you with my marketing budget, nothing done by AWAL).

Suddenly at the end of october I received an email explaining they have taken a look at all the artists using AWAL and decided I am not a good fit for them anymore and that within 30 days my music will be taken off all platforms and my account closed.... WHAT?

So... you're telling me, despite all the information i've given you, despite my marketing efforts and my social media attention that I DID all by MYSELF wasn't good enough despite you knowing exactly what plans I made when you accepted me onto your platform? And also you think that telling me this during one of the busiest periods for digital services which makes it harder to quickly get my music moved over to a new distributor in time? Very scummy.

I have emailed support and all I keep getting is the same "we're sorry about the inconvenience. Let us know if we can help otherwise your account will be deleted within 30 days.".

This is a disgusting treatment of the company to independent artists which it says it protects and helps to grow...

AVOID AWAL AT ALL COSTS. I WILL BE TELLING EVERYONE HOW BAD THIS COMPANY IS. AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.

I nearly uploaded uploaded 6 or 7 tracks with them in 2022-2023 and a few of them crossed 100k+ listens in Spotify and I was happy.

1 of my uploads had a copyright issue and immediately within a few days my agreement with them was terminated. I requested for "only the track with an issue to be taken down and the rest of the tracks to stay" but they never bothered and just took down all my songs. As an artist who had put in a lot of effort to produce those tracks from scratch, it was disheartening.

Also they din give me any explanation on why they are terminating my contract, I just had to assume it's because of the recent copyright strike. Moreover I've never been able to get the payment that I've earned with those tracks till then.

Overall it was disheartening. Yet I'm not giving them a single star as I have to agree that I was careless and made a mistake to be not careful about the copyright policies with a particular release.

This is an employment scam! Avoid at all costs!
I was contacted to do a job where I would be paid $100 per day plus commission to do tasks. These tasks were simply tapping on submit when a pop up of a musicians song recording would appear. They set up an account to have the so-called cost of the recording to be blasted out over social media sites. The catch is if I did not have enough earned money in my work account to cover the cost of a blast the site required me to deposit my own funds paid in bitcoin to cover the costs. They play it as it a temporary deposit to move forward in completing the set of 40 tasks. I did a deposit of 130$ in BTC and a few submissions later I was hit with another shortfall of $325. This of course they said would be just another “temporary “ deposit! Meanwhile I’m looking at a frozen balance of over $670 they refused to unfreeze until I gave them another $325. Save your money and keep far away from this scam !!!

Awal was great in 2015 when I joined.
Since Sony bought it from Kobalt and joined it with The Orchard it has been a disaster in service, upload and payout

Service: longer and longer to respond. Incoherent like provided by people who do not know what they are talking about.

Upload: Errors and very long delay in treatment

Payout: they added many charges that do not make sense and change month to month since they work with Payoneer.
Payoneer is catastrophic. It was so much simpler before

Three years ago, I distributed a song through AWAL. The track gained massive traction, with over 1 million Instagram reels created using it. Based on standard monetization, this should have generated over $20,000, but AWAL paid me just a few cents.

When I contacted them about this serious discrepancy, they asked me to provide proof of the 1 million+ reels. Unfortunately, I had already taken down the song due to a new distribution deal. However, I was fortunate to have screenshots from the Instagram audio page clearly showing the reel count, which they acknowledged.

Despite that, they demanded proof of the total number of views across all reels — something that's virtually impossible for an artist to track independently. I asked AWAL to take this up with Meta (Instagram's parent company), but they refused and insisted it was my responsibility to provide that data. Without it, they said I wouldn't get paid.

This situation has been nothing short of a scam. AWAL failed to support their artist and shifted the burden entirely onto me. This is the worst experience I've had with a music distributor. I strongly advise fellow musicians and creators to avoid AWAL — they do not act in the best interest of independent artists.

We had been with AWAL since 2012 released hundreds of tracks across various labels with them for years then in June 2024 without warning they disabled the product builder so we could not release any more content. When I raised this issue they wanted proof of ownership of any samples used but did not state to what track or tracks they were referring, so I raised the issue of reactivating the product builder this week March 2025 only to receive an abrupt email from their VP that they had ended our account with no explanation as to why,take forever to get stuff online, you would be better off heading over another distributor, where customer service is not so corporate, abrupt, and at a more friendly level, luckily we have several distributor accounts so AWAL is no loss.

AWAL is a great distributor, glad they picked me up 2 years ago. Their portal is a bit confusing at first but it gets better as you use it. Will note though, you can’t upload atmos or 32 bit audio on their distribution service. I’ve never had issues with payments with them and their 15% cut is perfectly fine as I’ve still received a great amount of payments from them. And also you don’t get presave/stream links on their distribution plan. TL;DR: AWAL IS GOOD, A FEW FEATURES NOT AVAILABLE :)

Beatport created profile never updated the tracks, since months still not there, keep me waiting.

They told us to mention in notes what we want and dont want special requests, so we wanted to whitelist a SoundCloud profile now we got a copyright strike. Since days no respond, this company Sony is absolutly rubish at that point where landed.

I submitted two tracks to AWAL over a month ago, and they were never reviewed. I’ve sent multiple emails to their support team, but not a single one has been answered. Their lack of response is utterly unprofessional and makes it impossible to rely on their platform for any serious music distribution. This experience has been nothing but frustrating, and I regret ever wasting my time with AWAL. If you’re looking for a dependable partner for your music career, look elsewhere.

Awful, horrendous and very frustrating experience from the very start. They draw you in with the allure of being a selective distributer using a so called screening process to pick the best music. You believe that you may even get the higher tier level of support as I did considering I have 30 years experience in the music industry and a Grammy to my name! Nope, instead from the start the confusion begins - firstly you are left wondering which to which tier of service you have been accepted, you then have to chase through the very slow support system which can take days to receive a simple answer and this my friends, sets the tone for the rest of your journey. The whole process is neither intuitive or fast. many issues that could be resolved with a simple phone call are instead drawn out through a series of support tickets many of which are simply verbatim notes from the tutorials - it's clear that the support agents rarely actually look into your release info. You simply get a generic regurgitation of existing material you probably already know.

YES AND NOT. I DON'T EVEN EXPLAIN WHY, IT'S TOO LONG, I EXPLAIN WELL IN A VIDEO, OR DO A GOOGLE SEARCH WITH MY ME NAME AND SEE HOW MUCH EXPERIENCE I HAVE. I TOLD YOU.

ALLA LARGA. NON VI SPIEGO NEMMENO IL PERCHE', TROPPO LUNGO, SPIEGO BENE IN UN VIDEO, OPPURE FATE UNA RICERCA GOOGLE COL MIO NO ME E VEDETE QUANTAQ ESPERIENZA HO. IO VE LO HO DETTO.

AWAL has recently sent out mails to multiple legit artists about immediate account ending due to made up excuses. Stay away from AWAL! This can happen to anybody at any time, they don’t care. Also the support takes forever, massive delivery delays & tons of system glitches. It’s gone particularly bad since the summer, so something’s definitely up there..

“ I've used AWAL for my music label, i never had any problem with them
I read a lot of artist that get their catalog removed.
Many artist stole songs, use platforms to distribute unauthorized song, cover, etc... When you distribute though platform like AWAL, you need to own 100% of the rights
AWAL will never ban you if you respect that, if you are banned, it's because you used the platform to distribute stolen song.”

lol Toni Perret you’ve been in the industry less than 5 minutes attempting to dismiss the experiences of thousands of artists who have been exploited by this Sh!tty company. You definitely work for them.