Awal Reviews

AWAL the WORST customer service

Everything was fine with AWAL sending my quarterly payments to my bank account Since September 2022 they switched to using Payoneer who are equally as useless with NO customer service AWAL shows me my statements from Sept 2022 to Jan 2023 but they just say closed on them and no attempt to forward them to payoneer which was finally approved after 3 long weeks Every support request i send they reply NOT addressing my issue WANTING MY MONEY but rather send me to Payoneer The new AWAL workstation set up is clunky incompetent opens 20 different duplicate tabs every time you click on a page and absolutely impossible to get any sensible help Seems everything went pair-shaped when AWAL was bought by SONY Dont give a toss about the users who have been using the platform for over 15 years Just treat em like dirt while you cream the profits AVOID AWAL like the plague

The orchard or Awal

The orchard or Awal both working together with artist is a total nonesense so i upload a track and 3 days later they said it contained a copyrighted sample so i ask them to take it down then i know is going to cause problems in stores So I deleted the process of releasing the song A week later they said they are closing my portal i ask for the reason and they give none all they said is we are closing your portal bad customer service and also have a complicated interface portal you any mistake you getting banned Bad bad bad for distribution Dont use I shouldn t have in the first place

DO NOT USE AWAL

To make a long story short they simply do not care for their smaller artists whatsoever I released a song using them on Friday however they fail to tell anyone they upload your song to SoundCloud on a completely different account without you knowing I received 2 copyright strikes from them on my main SoundCloud account even though the track is MINE resulting in not being able to upload the song without getting my account permanently banned I tried to reach out to both AWAL and SoundCloud in hopes to delete the track and resolve it within the next day and heard absolutely nothing No email response no notification It took them 3 days to respond using bot template emails and after filling out multiple forms and replying to multiple emails they still haven t removed the track from SoundCloud even though they said they would As of writing this review it s now been over a week and this issue has still not been resolved I have never seen a distribution company with this lack of support in over 5 years of doing music production Please avoid AWAL if you are a small artist like myself

Scammers are using the distributor to issue fake releases

This company allows scammers to distribute stolen content on streaming platforms Recently an unauthorized third party using their platform has published copyrighted protected material without the permission or knowledge of the original authors How is this possible Do they have any mechanism to verify that this content is actually owned by them How can they issue fake UPC for those songs as in most cases they are already available on streaming websites published by other providers Their support on the subject is really bad They must reevaluate their policy and prevent scammers to exploit their system

Really terrible

Really terrible The support is incredibly slow Takes 3-5 days for a response which even if you have included all of the information that they state they need in their Help section they still send a mail merge response asking for the information Which then means it takes at least another day to respond The payout system is confusing and irregular too Now it s been purchased by Sony it s not independent anymore either Not worth 15 of your revenue as an artist label at all easier to go to a smaller distributor

SCAM ALERT We lost 5 months of earnings

Hello I recently used to be a loyal customer of AWAL I felt super happy with the customer service and the speed of the entire system it was very efficient but one day they only sent us the following email Good Afternoon Having reviewed your account we have decided to end the agreement with have in place As a result we need to issue takedown notices to the streaming platforms and other services where we ve delivered your catalog imminently and we will disable the uploader in the AWAL Workstation This email constitutes our written notice to terminate the agreement between us For clarity the agreement will end within 30 days of this message being sent You will have access to the platform to review outstanding statements Please let me know Thanks again for working with us and good luck with your future projects No other explanation provided Support won t respond any mailThe thing is we never did anything wrong we were always very careful to follow the regulations within the label we were very strict about following all the rules The day after I received that email 80 of our catalog had been removed from all platforms Worse yet that happened just before we reached the minimum payout threshold 50 That ain t no coincidence So if your looking to get on AWAL be careful to fall on this kinds of scams they robbed 5 months of hard work for us

Fraudulent Company

Won t pay royalties and whenever you send them an email they give the same fence sitting reply knowing response takes days on end Guess Sony has to steal independent artists hard earned money Will update if problem is solved but by the looks of things that s not going to happen

AWAL tricks you into thinking that they

AWAL tricks you into thinking that they would be a better distributor than others because they are selective about whose music they distribute but they are worse than distrokid or ditto or anything other online distributors You may not pay with money but you pay with stress and mistakes instead Multiple deadlines missed because of system glitches due to relentless and pointless updates sometimes you can t even get into your account sometimes you check boxes and they uncheck when you go to the next page and then they blame you for not doing it right They are massively unhelpful when you need their assistance and actually make managing your online music harder than it ever has to be They do not care about the small artists and they are a diseased spot on the music industry I have an issue everytime I need to deal with them They cant fulfil simple requests and refuse to compensate you when things go wrong For example I tried to release a single in June because of a system glitch my submission never went through when i complained cause a had a gig to celebrate the single launch which ended up being ruined they were just like prove it and obviously I didn t have proof because what psycho would take screenshots of every step when asking a company to complete the ONLY SERVICE THEY PROVIDE It will not benefit you in any way to be on AWAL Avoid it at all cost pay to do it through distrokid or something more reliable cause these guys SUCK

Removed ALL my music

Removed ALL my music About a decade of work and streams that were in the tens of thousands gone Not even the dignity of telling me what the supicious activity was for me to at least argue my case - I have never done anything suspicious with my tunes knowingly I truly have no idea what the issue was 2 albums countless singles and EP s gone with nothing but silence from the customer service Disgusting way to treat artists