Can you distribute your music for free, and what does free cost you later?

Release fee today:            $0
Share of royalties, forever:  ?
Extras you will need later:   ?
Cost of leaving:              ?

Yes, you can put a song on Spotify, Apple Music and the other big stores without paying anything up front. Several distributors offer a free tier, and for a first release that is often the right choice. But "free" only describes the first line of that ledger. The distributor still pays for storage, delivery, support and payouts, and the money for that comes from one of the other three lines: a cut of what your music earns, extras sold to you once you need them, or friction when you try to leave.

So the useful question is not "is it free?" It is "which of those three lines will I be paying on, and when?" For one song that earns almost nothing, the answer is usually "none of them, for a long time". For a catalogue that starts to earn, the answer changes, and it changes in a direction that is expensive to reverse. This article walks through each line so you can fill in the question marks for the service you are looking at.

One thing no distributor, free or paid, will do: give you a song. A distributor releases a finished track. It does not write one. If you are reading this because you want to release something and the song is not written yet, that is the part we sell. The lyrics generator takes a short brief and returns a title and a full lyric with [Verse] and [Chorus] tags, for 20 credits, which works out to $0.20 a lyric inside a plan; the cheapest way in is $5 a month. It does not sing and it does not distribute. You take the words to whatever tool makes your audio, then to whichever distributor you choose below. We are not affiliated with any distributor, and none of them is ours.

Where the money in "free" actually comes from

A distributor that charges you nothing is still running a business with real costs on every upload, including the thousands of uploads that never earn a cent. It recovers that cost in one of a few recognisable ways, and a free tier often combines two of them.

The cut. The distributor keeps a percentage of the royalties the stores pay out for your tracks. You pay nothing when you upload, nothing when the song earns nothing, and a share of every payment after that. The percentage, and whether it applies to every income type or only some, differs by company and has changed over time, so read it off the current pricing page, not a review.

The upsell. The release itself is free, and the things around it are not. Which items sit behind a paywall varies, but the list tends to be drawn from the same pool: choosing an exact release date, faster delivery, a pre-save link, collecting YouTube Content ID income, splitting payments with a co-writer, delivery to smaller stores, a custom label name, priority support. None of these matter on day one. Several of them matter the week you have a song that people actually play.

The limit. A free tier may cap how many releases you can put out in a year, deliver to a shorter list of stores, put your release in a slower review queue, or reserve some features for accounts that have earned a certain amount. Limits are the least visible cost, because you only hit them when you try to do the next thing.

The door. Some free plans exist mainly to move you to a paid plan once you are invested. That is a fair model as long as it is written down. It becomes a problem only when the free plan quietly gets worse after you have forty tracks sitting on it.

The two free options people ask about most have their own pages here: whether RouteNote's free plan still makes sense and what the catch is with Amuse. This page stays general on purpose, because the terms of any one company can change the month after it is written.

Line one: the cut grows exactly when you start to care

A percentage is invisible when your royalties round to zero, and it is the only cost on this list that scales with your success. That makes it easy to accept and hard to judge.

The honest way to judge it is a break-even. Paid distributors generally charge either a yearly fee for unlimited releases or a fee per release, and keep less of your income or none of it. So there is an annual income level at which the percentage you give away equals the fee you would otherwise pay.

Free plan keeps:     c   (share of your royalties, as a decimal)
Paid plan costs:     F   (per year, for the releases you plan)
Break-even income:   E = F / c   (if the paid plan keeps no share)

Round numbers, invented for the arithmetic, not any company's terms:
c = 0.15, F = $20  ->  E = $20 / 0.15 = about $133 a year

Below $133 a year in royalties: free is cheaper.
Above it: free is the dearer plan, and the gap widens
by 15 cents with every extra dollar the song earns.

Replace c and F with the real figures from the two pricing pages you are comparing and the verdict comes out on its own. For most first releases it lands firmly on the free side, and that is the right answer. The trap is that nobody reruns the sum when things change. A song that picks up a playlist placement in its second year moves you across the line without an email telling you so.

Two details make the sum less clean than it looks. First, a paid plan's fee usually recurs, and on some models a release can be taken down if you stop paying, so check what happens to your tracks if the card lapses. Second, the percentage may apply to income types you have not thought about yet, such as YouTube or social platform royalties. Read which income the cut covers, not just the number.

Line two: extras you will want at the worst moment

The upsell costs nothing until the week it becomes urgent. That is by design and it is not dishonest, but it is worth mapping before you upload.

Here is the sequence that tends to trigger it. You release a song with the free plan's defaults. It does better than expected. Now you want the next one out on a set date so you can announce it, a pre-save link to share, and the YouTube version of the track to collect income when people use it in videos. On a free tier, each of those may be a separate purchase or a reason to upgrade. On a paid tier, some are included and some are still extras.

None of this is a reason to avoid free. It is a reason to open the feature table before you upload, find the three things you would want if a song took off, and note what each costs. Ten minutes now saves a decision made in a hurry later. If Content ID is on your list, read how YouTube publishing works for generated songs first, because generated audio has its own complications there.

Line three: leaving costs more than joining

This is the line people discover last and the one that hurts most, because it arrives after you have a catalogue.

Moving a release from one distributor to another usually means the old one takes it down and the new one delivers it again. Whether the song keeps its play count, its playlist placements and its place on your artist profile depends largely on whether the new delivery carries the same identifying codes: the ISRC for each recording and the UPC for the release. When the codes match, stores generally treat it as the same product. When they do not, you can end up with a fresh release that starts from zero, and sometimes a gap of days when the song is on neither.

So the single most useful question to ask a free distributor before you upload is: if I leave, can I take my codes with me? Some let you bring your own codes in and take theirs out; some issue codes tied to their own account. What an ISRC is and who issues it covers the mechanics. Ask both the old and the new distributor how a transfer works before you request any takedown, not after.

Three smaller exit costs sit next to it:

• Payout thresholds. Many services pay out only above a minimum balance, and a small catalogue can sit under it for a long time. Find out what happens to a balance under the threshold when you close the account.
• Payout methods. Check that the service actually pays out in your country, by a method you can receive. This is a deciding question for many readers, and it is invisible on the homepage.
• Account-level decisions. If a service suspends an account, every release on it is affected at once. That is true of paid services too, but a free service carries the cost of every upload that earns nothing, so it has the strongest reason to be strict with bulk uploads.

If your songs are AI-assisted, add one more column

Distributors differ on AI-generated and AI-assisted music, they have changed their rules more than once, and some ask you to declare AI involvement at submission. That applies to free and paid services alike, and we will not tell you what any particular company currently allows, because it could be wrong by the time you read this. Read the current AI or content policy page of the service you are considering, and look for three things: whether they ask for a declaration, what happens if a track is flagged after release, and whether there is a review or appeal. The questions worth asking each distributor about AI songs goes through them one by one.

Separate from the distributor's policy is your own right to release the material. For the audio, that depends on the terms of the tool that made it, and on some tools on the plan you were on when you made it. For lyrics made with our generator, our disclaimer says what we do and do not promise: commercial use is allowed, we claim no authorship and ask no royalty, but the rights are non-exclusive and the same words can come back for another user, and we clear nothing against anyone else's rights. If an overlap causes a distributor to refuse a track, that is not something we can fix for you.

This is general information, not legal advice. Rules about ownership, royalties and platform enforcement differ by country and by contract. If money or rights of any size depend on a release, ask a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

When free is the right call, and when it stops being

Our position: start free, but pick a free service you can leave cleanly. Most people reading this have one song or a handful, earn close to nothing from streaming, and gain nothing from paying a yearly fee for a catalogue that does not exist yet. The economics of streaming are unkind to small catalogues, and a free tier is the only model that costs nothing while you find out whether anyone listens.

What decides between two free services is not the headline. It is the exit. A free distributor that lets you take your codes, pays out in your country and publishes its percentage clearly beats a slightly more generous one that does none of those.

Free stops making sense when any of these becomes true:

1. Your break-even sum from above tips toward paid.
2. You release often enough that a per-year plan is cheaper than per-release extras.
3. You need something on the free plan's paywall every release, such as scheduled dates or Content ID.
4. The free plan's limits (release count, store list, review queue) are now the thing slowing you down.

When one of them does, switch deliberately: check the code transfer first, move one release, confirm its counts survived, then move the rest. If you are comparing paid models, DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby side by side lays out subscription against per-release against percentage. The full release checklist, from artwork to lead time, lives in how to release music on Spotify.

The first cost is not the distributor

Before any of the above applies, you need a finished track, and before that a lyric that is worth releasing. This is where people spend the least and regret it most: a distributor will deliver a weak song as efficiently as a strong one.

A brief for our generator looks like this. Every field below is a real option in the form:

POV        first
language   en
structure  classic
hook       title-line
vocal      female
emotion    hope
age        25-34
theme      Leaving a small town at 29 after everyone said I would stay.
           Last shift at the diner, the bus at 6 a.m., my mother
           pretending not to cry in the parking lot.

What comes back is a title and a complete lyric, sectioned with [Verse], [Chorus] and the rest, ready to take to whichever generator makes your audio. If that is Suno, the tags and the structure are already in the shape Suno reads; turning a lyric into a song covers that step. If it is a different tool, check how that tool wants lyrics formatted. Our prompt generator writes style descriptions in Suno's format, so outside Suno treat its output as a starting point to adapt rather than a paste.

Run the brief three or four times and keep the lyric that reads best aloud. Inside a plan that is 60 or 80 credits, under a dollar's worth, spent on the only part of the chain the distributor cannot supply.

What it costs, in plain numbers

• One lyric: 20 credits, which is $0.20 inside a plan. New accounts start with no credits, so a single lyric cannot be bought on its own: the cheapest way in is the monthly plan below.
• Monthly, $5: the catalogue of nearly 2 000 styles and more than 1 000 artist-style prompts, the prompt generator, and 500 credits every month, which is 25 lyrics.
• Lifetime, $19 once: the catalogue and the prompt generator stay yours for good, and 1 500 credits come with it once, which is 75 lyrics. The credits do not refill.
• Credit pack, $10: 1 000 more credits, available on top of an active plan.

Free distribution means the first release costs you nothing to deliver. Make sure the song on it was worth delivering. Pick a plan on the pricing page, $5 a month or $19 once, then open the lyrics generator, write your theme in a few lines and generate the first draft.