Pricing & Earnings

We’re happy to announce that paid downloads and royalties are now live on FreeMix.

Putting your music up for sale involves two decisions you make right in the upload flow: what to charge for your tracks, stems, and samples (as a bundle) — i.e. the “price”; and what royalty downstream remixers pay you when they create a new work from your music, i.e. the “royalty rate”. They sit on the same screen because they’re two halves of the same idea — you’re setting the value of what you made, and your stake in whatever it grows into.

Two different ways to get paid:

Pricing - When a bundle of tracks, stems, and samples is sold at the price you set. Pricing is based on your work, not the work of others.
Royalties - When a remix, mashup, or edit based on your original is sold and earns a royalty based on the royalty rate you set. Royalties are based on the work of others starting from your original.

In most cases, tracks, stems, and samples are sold as a bundle: a package that contains the original track and the building blocks to create something new. This applies to an original track, and any remix/mashup/edit that builds on it. A remix can be built from the original’s stems but also will often include new stems, samples, and other building blocks. By uploading stems and samples with every track — both originals and remixes — you’re adding another link to the chain and providing the tools for others to build on. In this way, an original work can birth new remixes and remixes of remixes, and so on.

Each creator sets a price for their work, along with a royalty rate that applies to any remixes, mashups, or edits that are created from their work.

Let’s take the two main decisions one at a time:

Pricing your work: what to charge

This applies to the price of your music. With FreeMix you are in control and can set the price of your tracks and bundles at whatever price you want — or give it away for free. You also have the option to allow buyers to name-their-price above your stated price (optional) — even for free tracks + bundles..

With name-your-price, the market ultimately decides what your music is worth — but where you start that conversation is up to you, and we’d gently encourage you to start it higher than you might think.

Here’s how we see it:

We believe music has value. For years, the going rate for a track on most download sites has drifted toward two dollars or less. We think that sells everyone short. FreeMix is built on the idea that people will pay for quality — so price your music like it’s worth something, because it is.

Tracks with stems and samples are worth more than a single track. When you include stems and/or samples, you’re not just offering a song — you’re handing another producer the raw materials to make something new. That’s genuinely more valuable than a single stereo file. Price it that way.

Price your work at what you think it’s worth. Not what you think you can get away with, and not what the race-to-the-bottom sites have trained everyone to expect. What it’s worth. You made it, you know what went into it. People will pay for quality.

There’s no magic number. We’re not going to hand you a formula, because there isn’t one — a bundle with 12 high-quality stems versus one with a few quick loop aren’t the same thing, and you know the difference better than we ever could. What we can tell you is that we built FreeMix believing people will pay fair prices for real music. Price like you believe that too.

Setting a royalty rate

Here’s the part that makes FreeMix different.

When someone remixes your track and their version sells, you get a cut based on the royalty rate you set. Automatically. And it keeps working no matter how far down the chain your music travels — a remix of a remix of your track still pays you. We call it the royalty cascade, and it’s one of the core reasons FreeMix exists.

By uploading a track and its building blocks with a license granting others the ability to remix your music along with a royalty rate, you now have an interest in whatever new works that get created from your original. This applies to remixes too: every creator is free to set their own price and royalty rate (subject to the halving rule — see below). Everyone in the chain gets compensated fairly, and the original creator is always respected.

The one rule you need to know: the halving rule

Every creator sets a royalty rate on their track. And here’s the whole mechanic in one sentence:

Each remixer can set a rate up to half of what the person they remixed set.

That’s it. If you set 20% on your original, the person who remixes you can set up to 10%, and the person who remixes them can set up to 5%. It halves at every step.

Why halving? This keeps the math simple and ensures that each link in the chain is compensated fairly. But also because it’s the most fundamental ratio in all of music — an octave halves the frequency, and the cascade halves the royalty. For a music platform, that just feels right.

Who earns what

Here’s a real-world example of how the halving rule works.

Meet the chain. Maya makes an original track and uploads it with stems, setting her royalty at 20%. Leo grabs her stems and builds a remix. Sara takes Leo’s remix and makes her own. Now there are three separate tracks — Maya’s, Leo’s, and Sara’s — and every one of them is for sale on its own.

The key thing: the royalty rate you set only applies to derivatives of your work — never to your own sale. When your own track is bought, it’s simple: you earn from your music. The cascade only kicks in when someone sells something built on top of your work.

Watch what happens depending on which track sells. (Every sale is $10, and everyone set their maximum rate.)

Someone buys Maya’s original track — $10


What’s being sold	Maya’s original track
Royalty in play	None — Maya’s 20% only applies to remixes of her track, not her own sale
Who gets what	Maya earns the full $10.00, minus FreeMix’s platform fee
Why	Nothing was built on top of this sale. There’s no one upstream to pay. Maya earns from her own track; no one else is in the chain.

Someone buys Leo’s remix — $10


What’s being sold	Leo’s remix of Maya’s track
Royalty in play	Maya’s 20% (the rate she set on her original)
Who gets what	Maya earns $2.00 (20% off the top). Leo earns the $8.00 that’s left, minus FreeMix’s platform fee on his share
Why	Leo’s remix only exists because of Maya’s track, so her 20% applies. She’s paid first, off the full sale price. Leo earns the rest.

Someone buys Sara’s remix — $10


What’s being sold	Sara’s remix of Leo’s remix
Royalty in play	Maya 20%, then Leo 10% (half of Maya’s rate)
Who gets what	Maya earns $2.00 (20% off the top). Leo earns $0.80 (10% of the $8.00 that’s left after Maya). Sara earns the $7.20 that remains, minus FreeMix’s platform fee on her share
Why	Two creators came before Sara, so both get paid. Maya first, off the full price. Then Leo, on what remains. Sara keeps the rest.

Three things worth pulling out of that:

Everyone can earn from their own work. Earning isn’t something only the original creator gets to do. Maya, Leo, and Sara each have a track for sale and can set their own price(s) and royalty rate(s). A remixer can charge more — or less — for their remix than the original, but the royalty rate must respect the halving rule.

The original creator always gets paid first, off the top. Maya earns her full 20% of the whole sale price whenever a track downstream of her sells — $2.00 every time, whether it’s Leo’s remix or Sara’s. Her stake is sticky. It follows her work everywhere it goes.

The creator of the track that’s bought earns the most. No matter how long the chain gets, they always walk away with the majority. Everyone upstream shares in it, but nobody gets squeezed. This is the halving rule in action.

Setting a lower rate is a feature, not a sacrifice

You can always set your royalty lower than your maximum — right down to zero. And there’s real strategy in it: a lighter royalty makes your work more appealing to remix.

The halving is calculated on the rate you actually set, not the max you could have set. So setting 5% instead of your allowed 10% means everyone below you starts from a lower number too. Restraint ripples downward.

Sometimes the most generous move is also the smartest one. That said — don’t sell yourself short.

What about samples and stems?

Samples are royalty-free. Always. A sample is a building block — the creative value lives in what someone makes with it, not the raw piece. So samples carry no royalty, no exceptions. Use them freely, and let others use yours the same way.

Stems carry royalties — but only if they’re attached to a track. Here’s why: to pay a royalty, the cascade needs to know what a remix was built from. A stem attached to a track has that connection, so it flows through the cascade like anything else. Standalone stems with no parent track have nothing to attribute back to, so it doesn’t cascade — it’s simply shared or sold on its own. (If the stem-vs-sample line is fuzzy, the Stems section breaks it down.)

Good to know

Royalties only trigger on sales. Give your music away for free and nobody owes anybody anything — free downloads carry no royalty obligation at all. The cascade is purely about sharing revenue when money actually changes hands.
Once you set a royalty rate, it’s final. That’s what makes the whole system trustworthy — the numbers can’t move under anyone’s feet after the fact. (Set it wrong? Delete the track and re-upload.)
Everyone sees the full split. Every person in a chain can see exactly how a sale breaks down. No mystery math, no hidden cuts.
Our platform fee comes out of the earnings of the creator whose track was bought — never the royalties. FreeMix takes a flat 12.5% of the price —the same rate for everyone, always. And it’s only ever taken from that creator’s earnings — never skimmed off the money flowing upstream to the creators who came before. Royalties are sacred. We don’t touch them. You’ll see the exact rate and the full breakdown before you set a price.
Royalties wait for you. If your work earns a royalty before you’ve set up payouts, that money is calculated and held — then paid automatically once you onboard. Nothing is lost because you haven’t set up payouts yet. Learn more about payout setup

The Royalty Cascade = ❤️

FreeMix runs on a simple, beautiful idea: music is a conversation, and every track is a reply to the ones that came before it. Every time your work travels further down the chain, you’re still part of it — credited, connected, and paid. You put something into the world, and it keeps giving back to you as long as people keep building on it. Release your stems, share your work, price it at what it’s worth, set a royalty rate — and good things will happen.