Beat licence matrix
Can I put a song on this beat on Spotify?
Free (tagged) licence
On the Free (tagged) tier, distribute to spotify and apple music is not permitted as these agreements are ordinarily written. Commercial distribution is the core grant of a paid lease. What varies is not whether you may distribute but how many streams you may accumulate before the licence lapses and must be renewed or upgraded.
The trap
A free download is almost never a commercial licence. Distributing on it is the single most common way independent artists end up with an unlicensed release.
What to check in your agreement
Find the stream and sale caps, and find what the agreement says happens when you cross them.
The same question on every other tier
| Licence tier | Distribute to Spotify and Apple Music |
|---|---|
| Basic (MP3) | Permitted up to a cap |
| Premium (WAV) | Permitted up to a cap |
| Trackout / Stems | Permitted up to a cap |
| Unlimited lease | Permitted |
| Exclusive rights | Permitted |
What this tier is
A promotional lease. The producer tag stays in the record and commercial use is usually not granted at all. Typical price: $0.
Scope limit. This models the STANDARD form of each tier. Any individual agreement overrides it. Where a cell says 'depends', the answer is genuinely contract-specific and no general resource can resolve it.
Part of the Beat Licence Checker and
an open dataset published under CC-BY 4.0. Reuse it, including commercially, with attribution.
Last reviewed 2026-08-12.