If you’re a musician/band and you want to release your music on the major stores (Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music) in the best way possible you’re in the right place! Let’s compare the most modern platform so that you can choose the best for your music!
As of today there are quite some websites that allow you to realease music completely for free, this is such a relief for small independent artists!
I didn’t mind (that much) to pay when releasing an album but I really hated the services that make you pay a yearly fee or they will remove your music from the stores.
I’ve selected some (I think all but the list may vary) websites to publish music completely for free and checked them for features that I think are extremely important in 2018.
Platforms
Features you will need
Everybody is on budget nowadays, everybody needs to release songs and videos on YouTube and most of the artists also release cover songs thus:
- low or no costs/fees
- Youtube ContentID (it allows you to monetize YouTube views)
- easy licensing for cover songs
Platform comparison
Amuse – VOTE 8.5
- The greatest idea of this website is that, if they like your work, they may offer you a license deal! I’m not personally looking for deals anymore but it’s a nice plus and it shows that they care about the artists they work with
- 0 costs to upload and publish your music
- 100% royalities go to you
- YouTube correctly supported
- No automatic license for cover songs (they suggest you use songfile)
Freshtunes – VOTE 8
- 0 costs to upload and publish your music
- 100% royalities go to you
- YouTube contentID… unclear, I couldn’t find out
- No automatic license for cover songs
Music Kickup – VOTE 6
- 0 costs to upload and publish your music
- 100% royalities go to you
- YouTube contentID is available only if you pay the PRO version for 45$/year and we don’t like that
- I couldn’t find any info about cover songs licensing thus I think they don’t support any automatic licensing
Routenote – VOTE 6
- 0 costs to upload and publish your music if you accept to give them 15% of the royalities
- 100% royalities if you pay ($10 single, $20 EP, $30 album and $45 extended album. Then $9.99 annually) to upload
- I don’t like annual fees, in my opition they don’t make sense for small artists so I’ll not analyse their platform further
Soundrop – VOTE 8
- 0 costs to upload and publish your music
- 85% royalities go to you, 15% fee for them
- YouTube contentID is available
- Automatic licences for cover songs available for 10$/song
Stem – VOTE 7.5
- 0 costs to upload and publish your music
- 95% royalities go to you, 5% fee for them
- YouTube contentID is available
- No automatic cover songs licensing
CONCLUSIONS
- If you plan to release original music AND cover songs go with Soundrop! They’ll take a 15% fee and 10$ for every cover song but that’s gonna make everything extremely simple for you.
- If you’re a youtube and you’re going to release almost only cover songs… Soundrop for sure again!
- If you’re only going to release your original music go with Amuse! 100% royalities, no costs and maybe a record deal? It’s almost too great to be true but it’s real!