How your music actually gets onto Spotify

You cannot upload music directly to Spotify or Apple Music. Both platforms only accept music through a distributor — a middleman service that delivers your files, artwork and metadata to every streaming platform at once and collects your royalties from them on your behalf.

Why you need a distributor at all

Spotify and Apple Music don't take submissions from individual artists. They take feeds from distributors who've already agreed to their technical and legal requirements. You sign up with a distributor, upload your track, artwork and release date, and they push it out to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer and the rest in one go. The distributor also collects the royalties those platforms owe you and pays them into your account.

There is no way around this step. Anyone offering to "get you on Spotify" without naming a specific distributor is either using one themselves and marking up the price, or running a scam.

What DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby and Bandcamp actually differ on

These four get lumped together but they work in genuinely different ways, and the differences matter more than which logo looks nicest.

DistroKid charges a flat annual fee that covers unlimited uploads for that year. You keep all of your royalties while you're subscribed. The catch is the subscription: if you don't renew, your entire catalogue can come down from every platform, not just the release you stopped paying for.

TuneCore charges per release, per year. Each single or album has its own renewal fee, and if you let one lapse, that specific release comes down — the rest of your catalogue is unaffected. You also keep all your royalties here. This model suits someone with one or two releases; it gets expensive fast if you release often.

CD Baby charges once per release, upfront, and there's no renewal fee ever. The trade-off is that CD Baby takes a percentage of your royalties going forward, rather than a subscription. So you pay less over time in fees but more in a permanent cut. If you release rarely and want to set it and forget it, this is the calmer option.

Bandcamp is not really a distributor to Spotify and Apple Music at all — it's a direct-to-fan storefront. Fans buy your music straight from you on Bandcamp, you keep the large majority of that sale, and nothing you do on Bandcamp puts you on streaming platforms by itself. Some artists run Bandcamp for direct sales and merch alongside a separate distributor for streaming. Don't assume uploading to Bandcamp gets you onto Spotify — it doesn't.

The practical decision comes down to how often you release and whether you'd rather pay a fee or give up a percentage. Frequent releasers usually do better with an annual unlimited plan. Someone dropping one single a year often comes out ahead paying once and giving up a slice of royalties than paying a subscription they might forget to renew.

Submit weeks before the release date, not the day of

Distributors need lead time to process your release and deliver it to every platform before it goes live, and streaming platforms need lead time if you want any chance of an editorial playlist look. As a rule, submit at least two to four weeks before your intended release date. Submitting the week you want it out is the single most common reason a release date slips — the distributor's own processing time eats into it, and if you also want to pitch the track to Spotify's editorial team through Spotify for Artists, that pitch has to go in before the release, not after. Once a track is live, it's no longer eligible for that early pitch window.

Build your release date backward from that lead time, not forward from when the track happens to be finished.

What a distributor will not do for you

A distributor's job ends at delivery. It gets your song onto the platforms and gets your money back to you. It does not promote the release, does not pitch it to playlists beyond the basic submission form, does not write your bio, does not build a press kit, and does not talk to venues or media on your behalf. Some offer paid add-ons for playlist pitching or marketing, but treat those the same as any other paid promotion — read what's actually guaranteed before paying, because usually nothing is.

Getting your music live is a mechanical task. Getting people to notice it is a separate job, and it's the one distributors leave entirely to you: a website, a press kit, a way for a promoter or blog to find your music and photos in one place without emailing you for a Dropbox link. Roadshow handles that side — describe your band in a sentence and it builds a real website, and generates a press kit PDF from it with your bio, photos, tracklist, dates and booking contact, on every plan including the free trial. It's not a distributor and it won't put your song on Spotify, but it's the piece that starts once the distributor's job is finished.