How to Distribute Your Music Free in India

What does a music distributor actually do?

A music distributor is the licensed intermediary that delivers your finished recording, artwork and metadata to streaming stores, and collects the money those stores pay back. Streaming services do not accept uploads from individual artists — Spotify, Apple Music, JioSaavn and Wynk all ingest audio only through approved distribution partners.

Three separate jobs sit inside that one word. First, delivery: packaging your audio to each store's technical specification and pushing it through their ingestion pipeline. Second, rights administration: registering the recording so plays are attributed to you and not to an unknown rights-holder. Third, collection: receiving royalty statements from every store in every currency, consolidating them and paying you. A distributor that only does the first job leaves money on the table.

How much does music distribution cost in India in 2026?

Distribution in India ranges from genuinely free to roughly ₹2,000 per year for unlimited releases. The pricing model matters more than the headline number: per-release fees punish prolific artists, annual fees punish artists who release once, and revenue-share models cost nothing upfront but scale with your success.

T9music's Free plan carries no upload fee and no release cap, with a 90/10 revenue split in the artist's favour. The Pro Artist plan at ₹1,999 per year returns 100% of royalties. On both plans the artist keeps 100% of the music rights — ownership and royalty percentage are two different things, and any distributor that blurs them deserves a second look. The full breakdown sits on the pricing page, and the honest comparison against global services is in our plans comparison.

What do you need ready before you upload?

You need five things before a release can be accepted: a mastered WAV file, square cover art, complete credit metadata, a release date at least 14 days ahead, and confirmation that you hold the rights to everything in the recording. Missing any one of them is the most common cause of a rejected delivery.

Audio file

Deliver a mastered WAV, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz — the universal store standard. A 24-bit/48 kHz master is accepted by most stores and is worth supplying if you have it. Do not upload an MP3 that was exported from another MP3; lossy artefacts compound and every store will serve the damaged version. Leave headroom of about 1 dB below full scale so store-side loudness normalisation does not clip your peaks.

Cover art

Supply a 3000 x 3000 pixel square JPG or PNG in RGB. The art must not contain a website URL, a social handle, a price, or any store's logo — these are the most frequent artwork rejections. Text must be legible at 200 pixels, because that is roughly the size a listener actually sees on a phone.

Metadata

Metadata is the layer most Indian artists rush, and it decides whether your song is findable. Get these right at upload:

• Primary artist name — spelled identically on every release, forever. Inconsistent spelling splits your streams across multiple artist profiles.
• Title and version — the base title in one field, and "(Live)", "(Remix)" or "(Instrumental)" as a separate version tag, never glued into the title.
• Featured artists and contributors — composer, lyricist and producer credits, which feed royalty attribution at IPRS and elsewhere.
• Language and script — critical for Indian regional releases; see our regional distribution guide for how to handle Ahirani, Marathi and Bhojpuri metadata.
• Explicit flag — mark it accurately. A wrong flag can get a release removed after it is live.

Identifiers

An ISRC identifies one recording; a UPC identifies one release package. T9music assigns both free at upload. If you have released before and already hold codes, reuse them rather than generating new ones — a fresh ISRC on an existing recording splits its historical play count in two.

What is the step-by-step release process?

The release process runs in five steps and takes about thirty minutes of your time, spread over a two-week lead time. The lead time, not the upload, is what most first-time artists underestimate.

1. Create your distributor account and verify your email and payout details before you have a deadline. Payout verification is the step most likely to delay your first payment.
2. Upload audio and artwork, then fill every metadata field rather than only the required ones. Optional fields are where playlist editors and search engines find you.
3. Choose a release date at least 14 days out. Editorial playlist pitching on Spotify closes well before release day, so a same-week release forfeits your best promotional lever.
4. Select your stores and add-ons — including CRBT caller tune delivery to Jio, Airtel, Vi and BSNL if you want the ringback revenue stream, and YouTube Content ID if you want your recording protected against re-uploads.
5. Submit and track. Streaming stores typically go live within 7 to 14 days. CRBT runs on its own telecom approval cycle of 6 to 14 business days.

Which Indian stores actually matter?

For an Indian release, the four domestic stores — JioSaavn, Wynk Music, Gaana and Hungama — often out-stream the global platforms in the first months, because they sit inside telecom bundles that hundreds of millions of subscribers already pay for. Many international distributors either skip them or deprioritise them.

The scale is not a marketing figure. India's total telephone subscriber base stood at 1,348.08 million at the end of June 2026, with Jio at 503.58 million and Airtel at 486.79 million wireless subscribers, according to TRAI subscription reports. Those two operators alone anchor the JioSaavn and Wynk ecosystems. Globally, paid streaming now accounts for 52.4% of recorded music revenue, and Asia grew 10.9% year on year, per the IFPI Global Music Report 2026.

The domestic stores also unlock CRBT caller tunes, a revenue stream that does not exist on Spotify or Apple Music at all. A caller tune earns per subscription rather than per stream, which is why it often outperforms streaming for regional and devotional releases. The mechanics are covered in the CRBT service page and step by step in the caller tune setup guide.

What happens after your song is live?

Once a release is live, three things need attention: claiming your artist profiles, protecting the recording, and reading your royalty statements. Artists who skip all three lose both audience and income they have already earned.

Claim your Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists profiles so you control the photo, bio and pitching tools. Enable YouTube Content ID so any re-upload of your recording generates revenue for you instead of for whoever uploaded it — the mechanism is explained in our Content ID guide. And read your monthly statements: knowing which store and which country actually pays you is what turns a release into a strategy. If the royalty lines confuse you, our royalties explainer walks through IPRS, PPL, streaming and CRBT income separately.