What you are sold that is free somewhere else

Paying for placement is prohibited by the major services, and placements sold this way are frequently driven by artificial streams. The penalty lands on the artist, not the seller. Flagged streams earn nothing, do not count toward your public numbers or the charts, and do not feed the recommendation systems. Since 2024 Spotify has also charged distributors a fee of around ten euros per track where flagrant artificial streaming is detected, and distributors pass that on to you. Tracks with a high proportion of fraudulent streams get removed across every platform, and you cannot re-upload them afterwards.

The free version: editorial consideration through the Spotify for Artists dashboard, pitched before the song comes out. It costs nothing and it carries the most weight. Curators worth reaching also take submissions directly and for free.

Publishing administration is a real service and genuinely earns its keep on international collection, which is difficult to do alone. What is being charged for domestically, though, is largely the registrations in section three, and those are free.

Before you sign one: check whether the term is limited or permanent, whether it covers your entire back catalogue automatically, and whether rights revert when you leave. A percentage is a fair trade for ongoing work. A percentage forever, for a one-time filing you could have done in an evening, is not.

Paying to submit to a label, a sync library, a supervisor, a blog or a curator. The business model earns whether or not anything happens to you, which means volume of submissions is the product and your success is incidental.

The test: does this person make money when you do? A library that takes a share of placements is aligned with you. One that charges to look at your song is not.

Buying tickets up front to resell, or paying a fee for a slot on a bill. Framed as exposure, structured so the promoter is paid by the artists rather than by an audience.

The free version: local venues, open mics, opening slots and house shows, which pay little or nothing but also cost nothing and put you in front of people who chose to be there. Collect email addresses while you are in the room.

Bought engagement is detectable, it distorts the recommendation systems you actually need working in your favour, and on the streaming services it can trigger withheld payments and takedowns. It also makes your own data useless, so you can no longer tell which songs are working.

Publicity is a legitimate business and good publicists are worth their fee. Nobody can promise coverage, however, because they do not control the outlets.

Ask for: the last three campaigns they ran for artists at your level and what specifically came out of them. A publicist who cannot or will not answer that is selling activity rather than results.