Two different jobs, often confused for one.
Distributors are useful. People distribute for real reasons: getting music onto every platform so it's reachable, landing playlist placements a self-upload never would, having something official to point to when booking a gig. None of that is imaginary, and none of it is what this article is about.
What it's about is a separate question that gets bundled in with all of that, as if it's the same thing: who has the only copy of your metadata, your stream stats, your release history — if the distributor you're using ever shuts down, gets acquired, or changes its terms overnight.
Gets your music onto Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else. Handles the technical delivery pipeline. Sometimes pitches for playlists. This is real, ongoing work that benefits from scale — not something most independent artists want to do by hand, and not something this article is suggesting you should.
Keeps a copy of your own metadata — titles, ISRCs, release dates, links — somewhere that isn't only inside one company's system. If that company disappears, your music likely stays up (platforms don't delete releases just because a distributor folds), but your ability to prove what's yours, migrate cleanly, or even remember your own release history can get a lot harder without your own record of it.
This isn't hypothetical. It's the exact situation a lot of artists found themselves in during the Songtradr transition — a real distributor, with real deadlines, real withdrawal windows, and a real 90-day data backup clock most people didn't know was running until it already was. The artists who came through it easiest were the ones who already had their own copy of their metadata sitting somewhere they controlled. Everyone else was reconstructing release histories from memory and old emails.
This doesn't require leaving your distributor, or duplicating what they already do well. It just means keeping your own backup, separately, so a single company's fate is never the only copy of your own history:
That's what the catalog tool here does — it doesn't replace your distributor, it just makes sure you're never depending on one company's continued existence to know what you've released. Ten minutes now is a lot cheaper than reconstructing years of releases under a deadline later.