Spotify charges artists nothing to be on Spotify, but it does not take uploads directly. You need a distributor, and most free tiers have closed. RouteNote still runs a genuine $0 plan that keeps 15%, and SoundOn's free plan keeps 10%. The better-known names now start between $19 and $24.99 a year.
If you are looking for a free Spotify distributor, the useful thing to know first is that Spotify is not the one charging you. Free music distribution was a real category for years, and several services ran $0 tiers that took a percentage of royalties rather than an upfront fee. Most of that category has closed, though it is not extinct.
Two of the distributors checked for this article still list a genuine free distribution plan, and both charge a commission instead of a fee. The better-known names now use annual subscriptions from $19 to $24.99, while CD Baby charges a one-time fee per release. Below is what survives, what a free tier actually costs you in royalty share, what happens to your releases if you stop paying, and the earnings point where paying upfront becomes cheaper.
For how distribution works underneath the pricing, see the Music Distribution Guide. For where distribution sits inside a release timeline, see How to Plan a Music Release Step by Step.
What Spotify Charges You (Nothing)
Worth clearing up before you compare distributors: Spotify does not charge artists to have music on Spotify. Every fee in this article is a distributor's fee.
Spotify also does not take audio uploads directly from artists. Its own guidance is to work with a distributor, because the distributor handles licensing and pays out streaming royalties. Spotify closed its direct upload beta and has kept delivery with distribution partners since.
Spotify does publish a provider directory, a vetted list of the services it calls preferred and recommended for delivering to the platform. If a service is not on that list, that is worth knowing before you upload. Spotify's own wording is that most distributors charge a fee or commission, which is exactly why a genuinely free tier is now rare.
So "free Spotify distributor" is always a question about the distributor's pricing model, never about a Spotify fee you can avoid.
What Free Music Distribution Costs Now
Every figure below was read from the service's own pricing or support pages on 26 August 2026. Prices are USD.
Service | Free distribution? | Entry price | Royalties you keep |
|---|---|---|---|
RouteNote | Yes | $0 | 85% on Free, 100% on Premium |
SoundOn | Yes | $0 (Lite) | 90% on Lite, 100% on Core |
Ditto | No | $19/year (Starter) | 100% on streaming |
UnitedMasters | No | $19.99/year (DEBUT+) | 100% on DEBUT+ and SELECT |
Amuse | No | $23.99/year (Artist) | 100%, minus a 15% fee on YouTube Content ID |
DistroKid | No | $24.99/year (Musician) | 100% on stores, 80% on the optional Social Media Pack |
TuneCore | No | $24.99/year (Rising Artist) | 100% of digital-store revenue; 80% on social platforms and YouTube |
CD Baby | No | $9.99 per single, one-time | 91% streaming, 85% MLC, 70% social video, 60% sync |
Two patterns show up there. The paid entry price has converged, with the subscription services clustered between $19 and $24.99 a year for unlimited releases. And "100% royalties" is now the standard pitch rather than a premium feature, which is exactly why most of the $0 tiers stopped making sense for the companies running them.
That headline percentage is also doing more work than it looks. DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby all advertise a clean number and then document a different, lower rate for social video and YouTube monetization. Read the payout table in the help centre, not the price on the pricing page.
Two entries in that table need a footnote. UnitedMasters and Ditto both still offer a free account, but neither one distributes: UnitedMasters DEBUT exists so you can receive royalty splits and join another artist's team, and Ditto's Free Collab does the same job for collaborators. A free login is not a free release.
Terms change without announcement. Read the current pricing page before you sign up, whatever any comparison article tells you.
TuneCore Ended Its Free Plan, and Said So
The clearest evidence that free distribution is closing came from TuneCore's own support documentation.
TuneCore discontinued its New Artist Plan effective 18 June 2025, and stopped supporting free distribution to social platforms effective 23 May 2025. Artists who did not move to a paid plan had releases taken down. That was a named free tier at a major distributor, retired on a stated date.
This is the pattern worth recognising. A free tier rarely gets a farewell announcement on the homepage. It gets retired in a support article, and the comparison pages keep listing it for another year. The date-stamped support doc is the honest source.
RouteNote Free: What the 15% Actually Covers
RouteNote splits distribution into Free and Premium, and you choose per release. A third tier, All Access, is priced on request for labels.
On Free you pay nothing and keep 85% of net revenue. RouteNote's support documentation puts the 15% cut on streaming, downloads and YouTube Content ID earnings alike, which is the detail most comparison pages miss. Content ID is not a paid add-on here, but it is not exempt from the commission either.
On Premium you pay once per release and keep 100%. That is $10 for a single, $20 for an EP of two to six tracks, $30 for an album of seven to eighteen tracks, and $45 for nineteen tracks or more. Every Premium release then carries a $9.99 annual renewal after the first year.
Both tiers get the full store list with no restrictions on where you send a release, and both accept MP3 and FLAC. RouteNote Trends gives every user 7-day and 30-day breakdowns, then adds a 90-day view and an interactive fan location map on Premium. The pricing page also lists Fast Track moderation as a Premium benefit, though RouteNote does not publish what that delivers in days.
So the free tier is not a stripped-down delivery pipe. It is the same catalog reach at a commission.
SoundOn Lite: The Other $0 Plan
SoundOn, TikTok's distribution service, runs a free plan called Lite with no upfront and no recurring fee. Its pricing page states that SoundOn retains 10% of revenue earned from digital streaming services, naming Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music directly. You keep 90%.
Paid plans move you to 100% of streaming revenue: Core at $2.50 a month billed annually for up to two primary artists, and Max from $6.25 a month for larger rosters. Lite also includes access to Spotify Discovery Mode.
One carve-out is worth reading before you assume 90% is the whole picture. SoundOn notes that YouTube, Meta and TikTok carry separate fees or revenue-sharing terms depending on the platform and the monetization method, and that this applies across plans rather than only to Lite. The streaming split is the clear number. The social and video terms are the ones to check against your own release.
Budget the Wait, Not Just the Fee
A free tier can still cost you a release date. RouteNote's support pages put its current moderation queue at 25 to 27 working days, and say plainly that this is longer than usual because of submission volume. Releases made with AI get additional review.
That is roughly five working weeks between upload and store delivery, before you have picked a release date or pitched anything. Most distributors ask for lead time, but a queue stated in working days is the kind of number that quietly breaks a plan built around a Friday.
If you are working backward from a fixed date, treat the stated queue as the floor and add your own buffer on top.
What Happens If You Stop Paying
This is the question the free-versus-paid comparison usually skips, and it has the most expensive wrong answer. A subscription distributor is renting you shelf space, and the terms differ far more than the prices do.
Service | If you stop paying | Getting back up |
|---|---|---|
DistroKid | Music is removed from stores | Releases are restored automatically once the past-due charge clears |
TuneCore | Releases are taken down after the Unlimited-plan grace period | After renewing, contact TuneCore with the affected UPCs to ask about making the releases live again |
CD Baby | Nothing. There is no subscription to lapse | Not applicable |
RouteNote Free | Nothing. There is no fee to miss | Not applicable |
DistroKid sells a per-release add-on that exempts a release from lapse removal, bought per release rather than per account. TuneCore sends renewal reminders for about five weeks before the account downgrades.
Read those first two rows next to each other. Similar price and catalog reach, but different recovery paths: DistroKid says releases restore automatically after the past-due charge clears, while TuneCore says to renew and contact support with the affected UPCs. If you are choosing between subscriptions on price alone, this is the line that should decide it instead.
The Breakeven Math on 15%
A percentage looks harmless until you convert it into dollars against a fixed fee.
RouteNote Premium on a single costs $10 in year one, then $9.99 a year. Free costs 15% of whatever that release earns. The two meet at about $67 a year in royalties for that single.
Below $67, the free plan is cheaper. Above it, you are paying more than the fee to avoid the fee.
The same arithmetic on longer releases:
Release type | Premium fee (year 1) | Free plan costs more once the release earns |
|---|---|---|
Single | $10 | about $67/year |
EP (2 to 6 tracks) | $20 | about $133/year |
Album (7 to 18 tracks) | $30 | about $200/year |
Against an unlimited subscription the threshold is a catalog number, not a release number. At $24.99 a year for unlimited uploads, a 15% commission costs more once your whole catalog clears roughly $167 a year. That is a low bar. A single track holding a small playlist can pass it.
This is the honest case for free distribution. It is cheapest when you are earning almost nothing, and it gets expensive faster than most artists expect. For a fuller breakdown of what comes out of a payout before it reaches you, see distribution splits and fees explained.
The Cheapest Ways In When You Have No Budget
Free is not the only zero-risk option, and it is not always the cheapest one.
If you have no money at all, RouteNote Free and SoundOn Lite both get a release live for nothing, and you can move up a tier later. If you can spend once and never again, CD Baby charges $9.99 for a single and $14.99 for an album with no subscription, which means no renewal to forget and no lapse takedown. If you plan to put out more than two releases in a year, an unlimited plan at $19 to $24.99 beats paying per release almost immediately.
The decision is really about which cost you can absorb: a percentage forever, a one-time fee per release, or a yearly subscription. Most independent artists start on the percentage and stay there long past the point where it stopped being the cheap option.
How to Check a Free Tier Before You Trust It
Every comparison of free distribution, including this one, starts going stale the day it is published. Several of the services above advertised free delivery not long ago. Checking takes about two minutes per service.
Open the service's own pricing page, not a review site, and answer five questions in order:
Is a $0 or "Free" plan listed on the pricing page itself? If free only appears in blog posts or old help articles, it is probably retired.
What percentage does the free plan keep, and on which revenue types? A free tier is priced in royalty share, so the number should be stated plainly. Check whether it also applies to YouTube and social monetization. Smaller services do advertise $0 plans without publishing a streaming rate anywhere on the site, and a missing number is the answer to the question.
Does the rate on the pricing page match the rate in the help centre? When they disagree, the dated support article is usually the accurate one.
What is the current moderation or delivery lead time? This decides whether your release date is realistic.
What happens to live releases if you stop paying or downgrade? Ask before you have a catalog riding on the answer.
Write down the date you checked. When you revisit the decision a year later, you will know whether the numbers you based it on still apply.
What Switching Actually Involves
Moving between plans or between services is routine, but the order matters.
Within RouteNote, you can move a release from Premium down to Free at any time at no cost, so a Premium purchase is not a permanent commitment. Note that the fee you already paid is only refundable inside a short window, so downgrading is free but it is not a refund.
Moving between two different distributors is more involved. Record the ISRC for every track before you start, then upload to the new service with the same audio files, ISRCs and release metadata. That match is what distributors ask for. DistroKid's own guidance for artists moving a catalog to it says play counts and playlist placements generally carry over but cannot be guaranteed, because the process sits with the stores.
Confirm the new delivery is live everywhere before you take the old one down. A gap in availability is a risk you do not need to take.
For a side-by-side look at the paid options, see DistroKid vs. TuneCore vs. CD Baby. For a decision framework, see How to Choose a Music Distribution Service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a free distributor for Spotify?
Yes. RouteNote's Free plan keeps 15% of your revenue instead of charging a fee, and SoundOn's Lite plan keeps 10% of streaming revenue. Spotify itself charges artists nothing.
Can I upload music to Spotify without a distributor?
No. Spotify does not accept direct audio uploads from artists. Its guidance is to work with a distributor, which handles licensing and pays out streaming royalties.
At what point does paying beat a free plan?
Around $67 a year in royalties for a single on RouteNote Premium, or roughly $167 a year across a catalog against a $24.99 unlimited subscription. Below those numbers the commission is cheaper.
What happens to my music if I stop paying a distributor?
It depends on the service. DistroKid says releases are restored automatically once the past-due charge clears. For a lapsed TuneCore Unlimited plan, renew and contact Artist Support with the affected UPCs.
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