Is RouteNote really free, and when does its free plan stop making sense?

Yes, RouteNote Free is free in the sense that matters on day one: no upfront fee to put a release into stores. You pay later, and you pay in revenue. At the time of writing, RouteNote's own support hub says the Free model lets you keep 85% of net royalties, which means RouteNote keeps 15% of what the stores pay out for that release, for as long as it stays on Free.

So the real question is not whether it is free. It is when that 15% grows bigger than what Premium would cost for the same release. The short answer: a release stops making sense on Free once its yearly net revenue passes roughly 6.7 times the yearly Premium cost for that release. Below that line, Free is the cheaper plan. Above it, you are paying RouteNote more in share than you would pay in fees. The rest of this page is how to find that line for your own tracks, what else differs between the two models, and what to check on RouteNote's pages before you upload anything, AI-made or not.

We are not affiliated with RouteNote, we do not distribute music, and nothing here is a recommendation of any distributor. Prices and terms below are described as RouteNote published them when this was written; they change, so read the current version on routenote.com before you decide.

Before any of this: a release needs a song

A distributor delivers a finished track to stores. It does not write one, and it does not make one sound good. If you are reading a RouteNote review because you are about to release your first AI-made song, the part that decides whether anyone streams it past the first chorus comes earlier: the words.

That is the part we sell. The lyrics generator at /generators takes a short brief and returns a title and a full lyric with [Verse], [Chorus] and [Bridge] tags, ready to paste into whatever tool sings it, usually Suno. One generation is 20 credits, which works out to $0.20 inside a plan. You cannot buy a single generation on its own: the cheapest way in is the $5 monthly plan. It does not produce audio, ever; the audio is a second step in a tool you choose. If you want the whole path from words to a store listing, how to publish Suno songs on YouTube and Spotify covers the middle of it.

If you want the general question, whether any free distributor is a good deal and what "free" costs across the category, that lives in can you distribute your music for free. This page is RouteNote only.

What "free" means at RouteNote, in plain terms

RouteNote runs two models side by side, and at the time of writing a third, custom-priced option called All Access that you ask support about.

• Free. No upfront fee to distribute. RouteNote takes a share of the net revenue the release earns. Its support pages give that share as 15%, so you keep 85%.
• Premium. You pay per release, and you keep all of the streaming and download revenue. The support hub lists a first-year fee that depends on the format (single, EP, album, extended album) and a yearly renewal per release after that.

Two details in that description carry more weight than they look.

First, "net". The 85% is not 85% of what a listener pays. A store takes its own cut before anything reaches a distributor, and the share applies to what is left. That is normal across the industry, but it matters when you run the arithmetic: your baseline is the amount that shows up in your RouteNote dashboard, not a per-stream figure you read on a forum.

Second, per release. Premium is priced per release and renewed per release. So the decision is not "Free account or Premium account". It is a decision you make track by track, and a sensible catalogue often ends up mixed.

RouteNote's support page on the difference between the models says store selection is not restricted on either one, and that Premium comes with extra analytics: the page mentions a 90-day view in its RouteNote Trends tool and a fan location map. So on the face of it, what you trade on Free is money and some data, not reach. That is worth confirming on the current page, because feature lists are exactly the kind of thing that moves.

The break-even arithmetic, per release

Here is the whole calculation. Put your own numbers into it; the ones in the example are round placeholders, so take the real fee for your format from RouteNote's current pricing page.

share_on_free   = 0.15 x net_revenue_per_year
cost_on_premium = yearly Premium cost for this release
                  (first year: format fee; later years: renewal)

Free is cheaper while   0.15 x net_revenue_per_year < cost_on_premium
Break-even at           net_revenue_per_year = cost_on_premium / 0.15
                                             = cost_on_premium x 6.67

Illustration only, not a price list:
  if a single's Premium cost is 10 a year  -> break-even at ~67 a year net
  if an album's first Premium year is 30   -> break-even at ~200 net that year

Read the result back as a sentence and it becomes a rule you can keep in your head: a release has to earn about six and two-thirds times its Premium fee in a year before Premium pays for itself. If the share on Free ever changes, swap 0.15 for the new figure and the multiplier changes with it. At a 10% share the multiplier would be 10; at 20% it would be 5.

Three things make this rule sharper than it first appears.

The first year and later years are different sums. In RouteNote's current structure the first-year fee depends on format and the renewal is a flat amount per release. For a single, the two may sit close together. For an album, the first year costs more than the years after. So an album that sits just under break-even in year one can sit comfortably above it in year three, once only the renewal is left to cover.

Revenue decays, fees do not. Plenty of releases earn the bulk of their money around launch and then flatten. A Premium renewal is the same every year whether the track earned 400 or 4. A release that justified Premium in its launch year can quietly turn into a loss in its third, and nobody sends you a reminder about it. Look at each Premium release once a year, on its renewal date, and ask the same question again.

Premium across a big catalogue is a subscription in disguise. Twenty releases on Premium means twenty renewals. If you release AI-made music, you may well release a lot of it, and the fee that looks trivial for one single becomes a real yearly bill across a catalogue that mostly earns cents. That is the strongest argument for Free, and it gets stronger the more you release.

When Free is the right call

More often than people expect. Specifically:

• A first release. You have no idea yet what a release of yours earns. Free costs nothing to find out, and the 15% of a small number is a small number.
• Experiments and one-offs. A track you made for a birthday, a joke single, a genre you are trying for the first time. If it earns nothing, Free cost you nothing.
• The long tail of a catalogue. Old releases that earn a few cents a month. Paying a renewal to keep 100% of almost nothing is the quietest way to lose money on distribution.
• AI tracks while the rules are moving. Distributors, stores and rights bodies have been changing how they treat AI-made music. Paying upfront for a release that a platform might later flag, demonetise or pull is a bet on rules nobody can promise will hold. On Free you are not out of pocket if that happens.

When Free stops making sense

• A release crosses the line. Use the arithmetic above on real dashboard numbers from the last twelve months, not on hopes. If a track is steadily above six and two-thirds times its yearly Premium cost, you are paying for Free.
• You need the data. If Premium's extra analytics and fan location map are still what the support page describes, and you are planning shows, ads or a follow-up release aimed at a specific city, the data may be worth more than the break-even says.
• You want a clean number for a buyer or a partner. If you are licensing a track, sharing revenue with a collaborator or a vocalist, or running the release as part of a small business, 100% of revenue is simpler to split and to report than 85% of net. That is an accounting reason, not a legal one, but it is real.

Notice what is not on the list: "because Premium sounds more professional". Stores do not show listeners which plan a release is on. A song does not stream better because you paid to upload it.

What to check on RouteNote's own pages before uploading

The figures above are a snapshot. These are the questions whose answers decide whether RouteNote suits you, and every one of them should be answered by RouteNote's current pages or by its support team, not by a review, this one included.

1. Split on Free today: still 85/15 of net, and net of what exactly?
2. Premium today: first-year fee for my format, and yearly renewal per release
3. Switching: can I move this release Free -> Premium and back?
   Does a switch re-deliver the release? From which date does the new split apply?
4. If I stop paying a Premium renewal: does the release revert to Free,
   or come down from stores?
5. Payouts: minimum withdrawal, payout methods, fees, and whether they work
   in my country
6. AI content: current policy, what disclosure is asked for, what gets rejected
7. YouTube Content ID and similar programmes: opt-in or default, and how the
   share applies to that income
8. Stores: which ones, and whether the stores where my listeners are
   actually are on the list

Question 3 matters more than it looks. RouteNote's own blog describes moving releases between the models as a normal part of how artists use it. The details of how that happens, and whether any history, stats or earlier earnings are affected, are the kind of thing to read in the current support article before you switch a release that is doing well.

Question 6 is the one people skip. It is also the one that decides whether a release survives. We are deliberately not telling you what RouteNote's AI policy is: whatever we wrote would be out of date the week it changed, and a confident wrong statement about someone else's rules would cost you more than no statement. Our wider guide, which music distributor accepts AI songs, lays out the questions that matter for any distributor, RouteNote included.

AI-made tracks: the part that is not about money

A few things hold regardless of which RouteNote model you pick.

The generator's plan decides what you may release. Suno and other music generators have their own terms on commercial use, and those terms often depend on which plan you were on when the track was made. RouteNote cannot fix a track you had no right to release in the first place. Check the generator's terms for the plan you used, at the date you made the track.

Keep a provenance note. For every release, save which tools you used, which plan you were on, the date, and the prompt and lyric you started from. If a distributor or a store ever asks how a track was made, a note written at the time is a much better answer than a reconstruction.

Our lyrics are yours to use, and they are not exclusive. Our /disclaimer says commercial use is allowed and that we claim no rights in the text. It also says plainly that one model writes for everyone, so lines can coincide with what another user received, and that we do not check output for uniqueness. Read a generated lyric before you release it, and change what you would not want to share with a stranger. Separately from anything we say, whether a text is protectable at all depends on your country's law.

This is general information, not legal advice. For a release that matters to you, ask a lawyer who practises in your country.

What the chain actually looks like

Three steps, three different companies, and it helps to keep them apart in your head:

1. Words. The lyric and title. This is the step we do: a brief in, a tagged lyric out.
2. Audio. A music generator that sings, usually Suno, which is a separate company we do not resell or control. You paste the lyric into its lyrics field and describe the style.
3. Release. A distributor, RouteNote or another, delivers the finished audio and its metadata to stores.

A brief for step 1 is short. Something like this, using the generator's actual fields:

theme      A late train home after a long shift, the city lit up,
           the phone at 3%, deciding whether to call someone
POV        first
language   en
structure  classic
hook       question
emotion    longing
vocal      female
age        25-34

That returns a title and a full lyric with section tags. You take it to the audio step, and only then does a RouteNote review matter.

FAQ

Is RouteNote Free actually free? It costs nothing upfront to distribute a release on Free. You pay with a share of that release's net revenue, which RouteNote's support hub gives as 15% at the time of writing.

How do I know when to move a release to Premium? When its yearly net revenue passes roughly 6.7 times its yearly Premium cost. Use your real dashboard figures from the past year, and redo the check on each renewal date.

Should my whole catalogue be on one model? Rarely. The decision is per release. A typical sensible catalogue has a handful of earners on Premium and everything else on Free.

Does Premium get my music into more stores? RouteNote's support page says store selection is not restricted on either model. Confirm on the current page before paying for that reason.

Does RouteNote accept AI-made music? Check its current policy on its own pages. We do not state other companies' AI rules as fact, because they change.

Does sunomarket distribute music or work with RouteNote? No. We make lyrics and style prompts. We have no relationship with RouteNote or any other distributor.

Start with the part that is actually yours

RouteNote Free means you can release without paying first, and the break-even rule tells you when that stops being the cheap option. Neither of those helps a song that has nothing worth streaming in it.

So do the first step now. Open the lyrics generator, put one real situation into the theme field, and get a titled, tagged lyric back. The $5 monthly plan gives 500 credits a month, which is 25 lyrics. If you end up releasing regularly, the $19 lifetime plan keeps the catalogue and the prompt generator open for good and comes with 1 500 credits once, which is 75 lyrics. Write the song first. The distributor can wait until there is something to distribute.