Photo Credit: Too Lost
Distribution is the part of the music business that clients are asked to trust and rarely get to measure. Too Lost is changing that. The global music distribution and technology company has launched the Too Lost Transparency Initiative, a public reporting program that gives artists, labels, and music businesses a direct view into how its platform performs at scale.
This article was created in collaboration with DMN partner Too Lost.
The report is now live at toolost.com/transparency. It publishes operational data straight from Too Lost’s administrative systems and updates continuously, with views across daily, rolling 30-day, monthly, and 12-month periods. The initial report tracks a broad set of operating metrics. On the service side, it shows the number of support inquiries handled, average support resolution time, and chatbot inquiries and success rates. On the growth side, it covers new users, tracks and releases uploaded, and catalog onboarding requests. It also reports client retention, digital service provider (DSP) product deliveries, average payout acceptance times, API adoption, and product updates shipped.
Too Lost’s Transparency Report also goes beyond service metrics to give an evolving look at the music moving through the platform. It shows the genres being distributed, where artists and labels are creating and releasing music, and the geographic distribution of the audiences who are consuming that music. The report also includes platform reviews and selected DSP editorial wins and highlights. Too Lost says it plans to add operational and commercial metrics to the report over time, with the data powering an annual Too Lost Transparency Report to be published after each calendar year.
For Too Lost, the point is greater accountability among music distributors. “Too Lost is growing quickly, but growth is not an excuse to lose sight of what our clients actually pay us to do,” CEO & Co-Founder Gregory Hirschhorn tells Digital Music News. “We can open offices around the world, acquire companies and catalogs, invest in artists and labels, and build new businesses, and all of that is exciting. But none of it replaces our core responsibility: providing artists and labels with a distribution platform and service that performs at an extremely high level.”
“The purpose of this initiative is simple: hold us accountable,” Hirschhorn continues. “We want our artists and labels to look at the data, following how we are performing, and form their own opinions. We also want our own team looking at the same information every day. If something gets better, everyone should be able to see it. If something gets worse, everyone should be able to see that, too.”
The Transparency Initiative is meant to add context to the reality of running a distribution platform for hundreds of thousands of artists and labels. One artist may have an exceptional experience with a distributor, while another runs into a complicated support, delivery, payment, or compliance issue. The Too Lost team believes no single experience gives a complete picture of a platform’s performance, and this transparency initiative gives clients a broader dataset against which to judge their own experience.
“Every individual artist and label experience matters to us, including the ones where we fall short,” Hirschhorn continues. “At the same time, we think artists and labels should be able to evaluate a distributor using more than anecdotes. How many inquiries are being handled and how quickly are they being resolved? How reliably are releases being delivered and how quickly are payouts being processed? Are clients staying? Are we making improvements to the product? Those are questions a distribution company should be willing to answer publicly.”
This transparency initiative comes during a period of significant expansion for Too Lost. The company has continued to grow internationally while moving beyond distribution into publishing, rights management, artist and label services, financing, catalog investment, and corporate development. The company says that growth makes measuring its core distribution operations more important, not less, and it expects the scope of public reporting to grow alongside its products and services.
“This isn’t meant to be a finished report,” says Hirschchorn. “This is the starting point. As we identify better ways to measure service quality and platform performance, we intend to publish more.”
The initiative extends Too Lost’s broader work on transparency, content integrity, and fraud prevention. Too Lost is a founding member of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance, an industry coalition of distributors, streaming services, rights holders, and other music companies working to identify, prevent, and mitigate streaming fraud. The Alliance lists Too Lost among its members, with Hirschhorn among its leadership.
Too Lost has also joined the IFPI Streaming Integrity Initiative, announced September 14, 2026, alongside Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, The Orchard, FUGA, Symphonic, RouteNote, and others. That initiative sets baseline distributor practices around identity verification, rights verification, content vetting, AI-related risk, fraud detection, repeat offenders, information sharing, and measurement of anti-fraud systems. One of its central principles is that distributors should know who is using their platforms, and IFPI specifically calls for robust Know Your Customer (KYC) processes before music is distributed, along with tools to identify infringement, fraudulent activity, and risks tied to AI-generated music.
Too Lost began publicly expanding its KYC and anti-fraud safeguards in 2022, adding verification requirements and checkpoints across its platform. The company later implemented identity verification using government identification and photo verification through Veriff, which remains a required part of Too Lost account onboarding. The company sees those requirements and the Transparency Initiative as part of one philosophy: distribution platforms have an obligation both to understand the customers they represent and to be transparent about their performance.
As generative AI changes the volume and nature of music entering digital platforms, the industry is increasingly focused on unauthorized AI content, artificial streaming, identity and likeness infringement, and large-scale synthetic-content operations. IFPI’s new initiative specifically calls on distributors to put measures in place that can identify AI-generated content and potential infringement involving an artist’s voice, name, image, or likeness. Too Lost says it will keep investing in technology and policy that separate legitimate creative uses of new technology from fraudulent, infringing, or manipulative activity.
“AI is going to create new licensing opportunities for artists, but it is also going to make it easier to manufacture content, imitate people, and operate fraudulent schemes at a scale that wasn’t previously possible,” says Hirschhorn. “Distributors sit at one of the most important gateways between content creation and the streaming ecosystem. That comes with responsibility.”
“Our goal is to make sure the catalog represented by Too Lost remains compliant with our DSP partners, protects legitimate rights holders, and maintains a high standard of quality. We think transparency around how we operate should be part of that responsibility.”
Hirschhorn hopes the transparency report will push other distributors to publish comparable information about their own operations. He believes artists and labels should have more visibility into their companies that deliver their music, administer their royalties, and support their businesses.
“We don’t think transparency should be a competitive disadvantage,” continues Hirschhorn. “We think it should become an industry expectation. Artists and labels entrust distributors with their catalogs, their royalties, and in many cases, a meaningful part of their businesses. They deserve meaningful information about how those distributors are performing.”
“We’re asking our clients to hold us accountable, and we’re asking our team to hold themselves accountable. Hopefully other companies will eventually choose to do the same.”
Too Lost says its Transparency Report will continue expanding with additional operational, platform, audience, commercial, and compliance data as the company grows.