Upload to Tapedeck,earn everywhere
Release your music on Tapedeck and, if you choose, send the same release to Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and more than 25 other platforms.
No annual fees · No subscriptions · Keep your masters
Release directly on Tapedeck for free
Tapedeck is a music streaming service and digital record store, so there are no distribution fees, subscriptions, or flat fees to release your music on our app.
You keep 80% of everything your music earns on Tapedeck. Similar to Bandcamp, we keep 20% to run the service.
Distribute beyond,
completely risk‑free
You can optionally distribute to Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and 25+ other platforms with no upfront cost, flat fees or subscriptions.
If your music earns nothing, you pay nothing. If it earns, we take 12.5%1 of the royalties for distribution. You keep your masters too.
1 We take 5%, and our partner Revelator takes 7.5% of the royalties, for a combined 12.5% rate.
Earn more with Tapedeck
This is how our music streaming and distribution services compares to others. We offer flexibility and transparent pricing with no limits.
| Feature | Tapedeck | RouteNoteFree | DistroKidMusician | SoundCloudArtist | DistroKidMusician |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual subscription | Free | Free | $24.99 | $39 | $24.99 |
| Distribution cut | 12.5%1 | 15% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Unlimited releases | Yes | Yes | Yes | 2 tracks per month | Yes |
| Unlimited tracks | Yes | Yes | Yes | 3 hours per month | Yes |
| Use your own label name | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Schedule release date | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Sell digital music | Yes | No | No | No | No |
- 1 We take 5%, and our partner Revelator takes 7.5% of the royalties, for a combined 12.5% rate.
Grow your audience,
get paid for it
Earn $1 for every new Tapedeck app install you drive. We pay this on top of all the royalties from every track those fans play or buy.
Built by a real musician
I’m Tim Quirk, the mind behind Tapedeck.
I’ve spent decades making music with Too Much Joy and Wonderlick, while also helping build digital music services like Rhapsody and Google Play Music. I’ve seen streaming from both sides: building the platforms, and getting paid by them as an artist.
Everything we do at Tapedeck comes from that experience. I wanted to build a better deal for artists like myself, and prove that it can work.
Our stance on AI generated music
We are an artist-first platform through and through, and we believe art is made by people, for people.
We are not interested in policing the tools musicians use. People have always made music with whatever was available to them, from drum machines and samplers to Auto-Tune and software instruments. AI is going to be part of that toolbox too.
What we do not want is a catalog full of music nobody really made.
It is now possible to generate thousands of tracks, upload them at scale, and hope a few of them catch streams. That may be good for someone trying to game a platform, but it is bad for musicians and bad for listeners.
Artists already have to fight hard enough to get heard. They should not have to compete with an endless supply of automatically generated tracks made to fill search results, playlists, and royalty pools.
We review every release by ourselves. We look for spam, fraudulent uploads, and mass-produced AI music, and we do our best to keep it off Tapedeck and out of the music we distribute.
That does not mean a song stops being real because AI was used somewhere in the process. If a musician uses AI as a tool to make something that is genuinely theirs, that is very different from pressing a button 5,000 times and calling the output a catalog.
We care about the person behind the music. Someone wrote it, played it, produced it, obsessed over it, changed it, hated it, fixed it, and eventually decided it was ready for somebody else to hear.
That is the music we want Tapedeck to be built around. There will always be easier ways to manufacture more content, we would rather make more room for artists.
Backed by Zedge
Tapedeck is backed by Zedge, a public company that has spent years helping independent creators earn from their work. Since 2017, we have paid artists millions of dollars in royalties.
We aren’t starting from zero. We already know how to build products that pay creators at scale and you know you’re working with a reliable partner.
FAQ
No. There are no annual fees, subscriptions, or flat upload charges to release directly on Tapedeck.
Yes. You can release on Tapedeck and optionally send the same music to Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and more than 25 other platforms.
You pay nothing upfront. Tapedeck distribution is designed to be risk-free, so if the release makes no money, there is no distribution charge.
For direct Tapedeck sales and streams, you keep 80% and Tapedeck keeps 20%. For wider distribution, Tapedeck takes 12.5% of royalties only when revenue actually comes in.
Yes. You keep your masters while using Tapedeck to release and distribute your music.
Because it combines direct-to-fan sales, better artist economics, and optional wider distribution in one place. You can earn on Tapedeck itself while still reaching the major platforms.