Free Music Distribution in Nigeria: What “Free” Actually Costs

Three of the nine self-serve distribution options open to a Nigerian artist in 2026 charge nothing to release a track, and they do not agree on what free costs. ONErpm and RouteNote each keep 15 per cent of whatever streaming revenue follows. InterSpace Distribution, the only Nigeria-based company with a published rate card in the sample, keeps 30 per cent on its free plan, the largest free-tier cut of the three. The six paid options charge $9.99 to $24.99 in the first year and hand back everything: 100 per cent of streaming royalties, or in CD Baby’s case 91 per cent for a permanent 9 per cent cut. Neither number is what actually reaches a Nigerian artist once a label and a manager sit in the chain. One documented worked example, tracing ₦100 of real platform revenue through a Nigerian label deal, puts that figure at 5.1 to 7.5 per cent, not 85 and not 100.

What free music distribution in Nigeria actually means#

Free-vs-paid-distribution-nigeria dataset, nine options across seven companies, retrieved August 2026 from each platform's own pricing or royalty pages.

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Show the numbers

Platform	Platform's cut, %
InterSpace Distribution (Free plan)	30
ONErpm	15
RouteNote (Free plan)	15
CD Baby (single)	9
InterSpace Distribution (Artiste)	0
RouteNote (Premium, single)	0
TuneCore (Rising, unlimited)	0
Amuse (Artist)	0
DistroKid (Musician)	0

Source: Published pricing and revenue-share pages of ONErpm, RouteNote, CD Baby, TuneCore, Amuse, DistroKid and InterSpace Distribution, retrieved August 2026, retrieved 21 Aug 2026 · download the data

Across the nine options checked, “free” does not have one price. ONErpm and RouteNote’s free tier both charge nothing upfront and both keep 15 per cent of net revenue, no more, no less. InterSpace Distribution’s free plan charges nothing upfront too and keeps 30 per cent, double the rate of the two international free tiers, which is the widest spread this comparison found between two products sold under the same word. Every platform that instead charges a subscription or one-time fee gives the artist a bigger share of the money that actually comes in: TuneCore, DistroKid and Amuse all advertise full royalty retention on an annual plan of $23.99 to $24.99, InterSpace’s Artiste plan advertises the same retention for $19, the cheapest unlimited annual plan in this sample, and CD Baby’s one-time $9.99 buys 91 per cent for the life of the release. RouteNote lets an artist run the same release on the free plan first and switch to Premium later if it starts earning enough to justify the fee, the only platform in the sample built around that choice explicitly. DistroKid’s own pricing page states plainly that artists “keep 100% of earnings” across all three of its tiers, and TuneCore’s marketing repeats the same 100 per cent line, with one documented exception: opting into Spotify’s Discovery Mode carries a 20 per cent commission for as long as the track stays enrolled in it.

None of this is a secret rate: it is on each company’s own pricing page, in public, in dollars and percentages that do not move by market. What does move is what happens after the platform, and that is where a Nigerian artist’s experience of “free distribution” usually diverges from a European or American one signing up for the same ONErpm or RouteNote account.

Two of the companies an artist can reach from Nigeria are Nigerian, and only one of them posts a rate. InterSpace Distribution, founded in 2021 and, on its own account, based in Nigeria, publishes both halves of the deal on pages anyone can open without an account: its pricing page puts unlimited releases for one artist at $19 a year, and its distribution agreement states the revenue share in terms, without a support ticket: free plan users “receive 70% of their royalties, while InterSpace retains a 30% service fee”, and paid plan users “are entitled to 100% of their royalties”. Whether an artist likes those numbers is a separate question from whether they can find them, and on this sample the finding-them part is where the Nigerian market is thinnest.

What Nigeria’s own distributors publish before you sign up#

Eight companies a Nigerian artist is realistically pointed at were opened on the same afternoon and read twice: once on the page that sells the plan, and once in the terms behind it. The pattern is consistent enough to state plainly. Seven of the eight let an artist sign up online without speaking to anybody. Four state, somewhere on their own site, what share of the money they keep, and in every one of those four cases the number lives in the terms rather than on the page where the artist is choosing. Two of the four take a cut from paying artists.

Freeme Music, the Lagos distributor founded in 2013 and the best-known name in this group, tells visitors on its homepage that they keep 100 per cent of the rights to their songs. Its own terms say something more specific: there shall be “a revenue sharing formula of 80% and 20% between the OWNER and FREEME MUSIC respectively, of the Net Revenue”. Fresible Music runs the same pairing. Its distribution page advertises “Guaranteed 100% Rights”; its terms read “Fresible Music retains 25% of net royalties from your content distribution, and you receive 75%”. Neither company is contradicting itself on a strict reading, because rights and royalties are different things and both sentences are true at once. What the pairing does is let a reader who does not know the difference leave with the wrong number in their head, and the difference here is a fifth to a quarter of everything the release earns.

Songdis, which its terms name as a service of The Heavenly Wave Music and place under Nigerian law with disputes heard in Lagos, is the clearest case of the same document problem in a milder form. Its pricing page sells Basic, Growth and Label plans and lists “Keep 100% Independence” as a feature. Its own pricing FAQ says something narrower: artists keep “between 95% and 100% of your earnings”, depending on plan. Its terms are narrower again and name a different set of plans: Starter and Growth get 100 per cent remitted, while “for artists on the Professional Plan, Songdis will remit 90% of the revenue received from Digital Stores, with Songdis retaining 10% as a co-management and administrative fee”. Three documents, three answers, and no Professional plan on the pricing page to match the one the contract charges for. An artist on Basic is almost certainly keeping everything. They would have no way to prove it from the page they bought it on.

Two more say 100 per cent and put no document behind it. ORB Entertainment, which describes itself as proudly Nigerian and headquartered in Lagos, says on its own site that every artist keeps 100 per cent of their royalties, with no platform cut and no surprise deductions. That is a clear claim, clearly made, and this desk could not retrieve any terms page on which it is a term: the links that should hold one returned an empty page on the day. J. Sam Industry’s “100% of your royalties, forever” sits in its own marketing guide, while its terms and conditions cover content licensing and account termination and never mention a revenue share at all. A promise on a marketing page and a clause in an agreement are not the same instrument, and the difference only shows up when an artist wants to argue about a payout.

Viral Playlists publishes neither a share nor a promise, and instead discloses a deduction most artists would not think to ask about: its terms define net receipts as revenue after a partner charge of 9 per cent on products distributed through servers in England and 5 per cent through servers in Spain. The artist’s own share is not stated anywhere. That is the mirror image of the other two problems: a real cost, disclosed, with no headline number attached to it.

The same test belongs on InterSpace Distribution, which is the one company here whose rate lives in a contract rather than a marketing line. Its pricing page advertises “Keep 100% of your Royalties”, and that is true of the paid plans and silent about the free one; the free plan’s 30 per cent service fee appears only in the distribution agreement, a page deeper than the one an artist is on when choosing. Publishing the figure at all puts it ahead of most of this group. Publishing it where the artist is actually deciding would be better.

Dvpper Digital, the Lagos distribution company and label founded in 2017, takes submissions by email, and its own domain served no address record when queried from two separate networks on 21 August 2026, so on that day there was no rate card to read even in principle.

Five of them publish a price for the same product, a year of unlimited releases by one artist. Fresible’s Professional plan is 19,999 naira, InterSpace Distribution’s Artiste plan converts to about 25,613 naira, J. Sam Industry’s unlimited tier is 35,000 naira, ORB Entertainment’s artist plan works out at 38,400 naira billed monthly and Songdis Basic is 49,999 naira. The dearest is two and a half times the cheapest. Even so, the fee is rarely the decision: the cheapest of the five also takes 25 per cent of the royalties afterwards, and the dearest takes nothing on the plan it sells, which on any release earning real money reverses the order entirely. Freeme Music sells three packages on the same self-serve basis, but its pricing page did not render on retrieval, so its figure is missing here rather than absent from the world.

One more cost sits underneath every percentage here and appears on none of the pricing pages: what it takes to get the money out. Fresible’s terms set a minimum payout of 50,000 naira or 50 dollars, whichever is lesser, and InterSpace’s agreement makes the artist responsible for bank charges on withdrawals. On the pages an artist reads before signing up, none of that appears at all.

Where the money actually goes once a label is in the chain#

The clearest documented account of this traces a real deal: Ycee, signed to Tinny Entertainment, with his music reaching listeners through the telco-bundled MTN Music Plus service and, separately, through Boomplay and Cloud9. On the telco route, MTN and its infrastructure partner keep 60 per cent before the distributor, Freeme Digital, ever sees the money, leaving the distributor 40 out of every 100. The distributor splits that with the label on a 50-50 basis, and the artist’s own deal with the label pays 30 per cent of the label’s resulting share before a manager’s cut comes off that too, the whole chain ending at 5.1 out of the original 100. On the app-based route through Boomplay or Cloud9, the same distributor-label-artist-manager chain leaves the artist 7.5 out of 100 instead, because Boomplay and Cloud9 split more generously with distributors upstream.

What that case cannot tell a reader is what a label deal costs today, and the companies writing them rarely say. InterSpace Distribution’s published agreement carves label partners out of its standard structure, stating that where a separate revenue-sharing agreement exists between the company and a label, that agreement supersedes the standard terms; it does not say what those separate terms are. Asked what they usually are, the company told Afrobeats Wire that its exclusive label-partner deals run at roughly 10 to 15 per cent plus marketing services. That is the company’s own account and not a figure this desk has checked against a signed contract, and it describes the first link in the chain, not the whole of it.

The same reporting gives the counterfactual: an independent artist who bypasses a label entirely and deals with a distributor directly keeps 20 out of 100 on the telco route and 25 out of 100 on the app-based route, three to four times what the label-and-manager chain leaves. That gap, not the platform’s own advertised rate, is the number that should change how a Nigerian artist reads the word “free” in a distribution pitch: the distributor’s public rate card describes only the first link in a chain that, in this example, has three more links after it.

What would have to be true for this to be wrong#

This is one documented case, not a survey. It comes from a single investigative account of one artist and one label, originally reported in 2017 and still the most detailed public breakdown of a Nigerian streaming payout chain available; label, manager and distributor terms are negotiated individually and nothing here says every Nigerian label deal cascades the same way, or that a 2017 telco-bundled arrangement still describes 2026’s app-based streaming economy in the same proportions.

Drop the single highest row, the bypass scenario at 25 per cent, and the mean artist share across the remaining three scenarios falls 24.5 per cent, from 14.4 to 10.87. Drop the top three and only the harshest scenario is left, the telco-and-label chain at 5.1. That is the honest shape of this finding: the “5 to 8 per cent” headline sits in the range built from the label-and-manager scenarios specifically, and it survives their removal only in the sense that the bypass scenarios were always the outliers pulling the average up, not the other way round. A reader who bypasses a label sees a meaningfully better number than one who does not, and that split, more than any single average, is the actual finding.

The comparison across the nine self-serve options also has a boundary worth stating plainly: UnitedMasters, a distributor Nigerian artists do use, was left out of the main table because its support pages returned an access error to automated retrieval during reporting and its current royalty terms could not be confirmed first-hand for this piece, not because its numbers were unfavourable.

What this means for an artist choosing a distributor#

On the platforms this desk could verify directly, “free” is a specific, checkable number: 15 per cent of net revenue on ONErpm and RouteNote, 30 per cent on InterSpace’s free plan, not a vague discount, and that percentage does not shrink as a release earns more. A paid plan’s cost is fixed instead: $24.99 a year on TuneCore or DistroKid, $23.99 on Amuse, $19 on InterSpace’s Artiste plan, a one-time $9.99 on CD Baby. Whether free or paid costs less for a given artist is arithmetic each artist can do against their own expected revenue; what this dataset settles is that the comparison is not free versus expensive, it is a fixed percentage versus a fixed fee, and every paid option checked here returns the artist at least 91 per cent, against 85 per cent on two of the three free plans and 70 per cent on the third.

The bigger lever, on this evidence, sits above the distributor entirely. The gap between 5.1 and 20 per cent, or between 7.5 and 25, is not a distribution fee at all: it is what a label and a manager take out of the distributor’s share before an artist sees it. The fee that buys full royalty retention is fixed and knowable, $19 to $24.99 a year across the platforms checked here, and the label-and-manager cut is neither. An artist reading a Nigerian label contract should ask for the exact percentage the label takes of net distributor revenue and the exact percentage a manager takes on top, in writing, before signing, because those two numbers, not the distributor’s advertised rate, are what this one documented case shows determining whether an artist keeps roughly a twentieth of the money or roughly a fifth.

Questions Nigerian artists ask about free distribution#

Is free music distribution in Nigeria really free?#

No. Free means no upfront fee, not no cost. Among the free plans checked here, ONErpm and RouteNote each keep 15 per cent of streaming revenue and InterSpace Distribution keeps 30 per cent on its free plan. ORB Entertainment’s free tier allows one release a year and claims to keep nothing, though no terms page states it. The fee moves from the card to the royalties.

What is the cheapest music distribution in Nigeria?#

On prices published in August 2026, Fresible Music’s Professional plan at 19,999 naira a year is the cheapest way to release unlimited music as one artist, though its terms then take 25 per cent of royalties. InterSpace Distribution’s Artiste plan converts to about 25,613 naira, J. Sam Industry charges 35,000, ORB Entertainment works out at 38,400 billed monthly and Songdis Basic is 49,999.

Do Nigerian distributors really let artists keep 100 per cent of royalties?#

Not all of them, and the marketing does not always say so. Freeme Music’s terms set an 80 and 20 split and Fresible Music’s retain 25 per cent, while both advertise 100 per cent of rights, which is ownership rather than money. Songdis remits everything on two plans and keeps a tenth on a third. InterSpace Distribution states 100 per cent on paid plans in its agreement. ORB Entertainment and J. Sam Industry claim 100 per cent with no terms page stating it.

How much of a stream does a Nigerian artist actually keep?#

That depends far more on the label deal than on the distributor. In the one fully documented Nigerian case, an artist inside a label and manager chain kept 5.1 per cent of telco-bundled revenue and 7.5 per cent on app-based platforms, against 20 and 25 per cent for an artist dealing with a distributor directly.