Like any big music company, the offices of TuneCore, a digital distributor in Brooklyn, are lined with official-looking plaques certifying blockbuster record sales.


But rather than the industry’s standard gold and platinum records, they are TuneCore’s own awards for its clients — like a rippled black disc representing 500,000 downloads for Nine Inch Nails — and the first sign of a company looking to challenge music’s status quo.


TuneCore was founded six years ago by Jeff Price, a veteran independent label owner, as a service for artists working under the radar of the mainstream music industry. Without a label, most acts cannot get their music onto iTunes and Spotify, but for $50 a year TuneCore will place any album on dozens of online services around the world and route all royalties to the artist.


That simple model — revolutionary when introduced — has made TuneCore one of the world’s major suppliers of music, and made Mr. Price one of the digital world’s most influential figures. In the United States, TuneCore represents about 10 percent of the 20 million songs on iTunes, and it accounts for almost 4 percent of all digital sales.


“You wake up one day and go, ‘Oh, wow, the customers sold 600 million units of music and earned $300 million off their recordings,’ ” said Mr. Price, the company’s chief executive.


As TuneCore has grown, it has also served as a pulpit for Mr. Price to criticize the ways of the music business. Through aggressive posts on the company’s blog with titles like “How They Legally Steal Your Money,” and occasional outbursts at industry conferences, he has established himself as a particularly vocal gadfly, denouncing opaque accounting systems and sometimes hurling insults at companies he dislikes.


Mr. Price, a trim 45-year-old who speaks so rapidly he sometimes seems to be on fast-forward, says his actions are a form of advocacy in line with TuneCore’s original mission of serving musicians.


“The plan,” he said in an interview last week, “was to start a company that righted a wrong.”


Mr. Price has inserted himself into some of the most contentious issues in the music business, like the legal obligations of streaming services and the complex mechanisms for paying royalties. But his excitable manner — and his tendency to portray business disputes as pitched battles between right and wrong — do not always endear him to his colleagues.


“Typically when you hear people talk about how artists need to get paid, usually some party is posturing for political positioning,” said Michael Robertson, a digital music pioneer who has also fought the industry with his companies MP3.com and MP3tunes. “Jeff has done a fantastic job with TuneCore. But I think his bombastic style drives people crazy and doesn’t always serve him well.”


Mr. Price helped found spinART Records in 1991, putting out music by the Pixies, the Apples in Stereo and others, and learned about digital music through a job at eMusic. By the mid-2000s, with his label winding down, he began to rethink the way artists get their music for sale online. Rather than taking a cut of sales and offering marketing services, as many distributors do, he decided to charge a flat fee to deliver music to retailers and leave the rest to the bands.


“I’m not going to promise anyone they’re going to be a star,” Mr. Price said. “I am going to promise that if you pay me a fee for the service, I will distribute your music to the places you want it to go, and I will deal with all the hassles that come along with that.”


TuneCore can be lucrative for musicians who already have a following or can build one on their own. Major acts like Jay-Z and Keith Richards have used it, and two clients, the rapper Hoodie Allen and the Americana band the Civil Wars, recently hit No. 1 on iTunes after extensive social-media campaigns. But most of TuneCore’s 700,000 acts — as well as the clients of competing services like CD Baby and Zimbalam — have very low sales.