Seller Onboarding

Selling on FreeMix runs on real money rails, which means there’s one setup step before you can take payment: connecting a payout account through Stripe, our payments partner. It takes a few minutes, you only do it once, and after that you’re ready to get paid.

Here’s the important part up front: onboarding is only about selling. Sharing your music for free needs none of this — upload, share, remix, and give your work away with nothing to set up. It’s the moment money enters the picture that Stripe does too.

Why this step exists

When someone buys your track, that’s a real financial transaction — actual dollars moving from a buyer to you. To handle that legally and safely, we use Stripe Connect, the same infrastructure behind a huge chunk of the internet’s marketplaces.

Stripe handles the parts you want handled by professionals: verifying identity, moving money, staying compliant with financial regulations in your country. FreeMix never sees or stores your bank details — that all lives with Stripe. Payments are always safe and secure.

What onboarding involves

When you’re ready to sell, you’ll head to the Payouts link in your account and then click ‘Set up payouts’ to start the Stripe setup. You’ll be handed off to Stripe’s own secure onboarding flow, where you’ll:

Confirm your identity (this is standard “know your customer” verification — required for anyone receiving payouts)
Add the bank account or debit card where you want your earnings to land
Provide the basic tax and business details Stripe needs in your region. You don’t need to have a company or a website — individuals can sell too!

When you finish, Stripe sends you back to FreeMix and your account flips to verified. That’s it — you’re set up to sell.

Here’s the one rule that trips people up

You can put a price on a track before you’ve onboarded — but no one can actually buy it until you’re verified.

If someone tries to purchase a priced track from a seller who hasn’t finished payout setup, the sale is stopped before any money changes hands. The buyer sees a “not yet available” message, and nothing is charged.

Why block it rather than just hold the money? Because a charge with nowhere to land is worse than no charge at all — it’d leave a buyer paying for something whose payout is stuck in limbo. Thus, we don’t let the sale happen until we know we can pay you.

The takeaway: if you plan to sell, onboard first. You’ll see a dismissable nag message on your account page until you’ve set up your seller account. It’s easy and only takes a few minutes and then you’re ready to sell and earn.

Getting paid, and the self-healing status

Once you’re verified, sales pay out to your connected account automatically — no thresholds to hit, no manual withdrawals.

And if you ever finish onboarding but FreeMix seems to still think you’re mid-setup, don’t worry about it. The status check reconciles itself with Stripe every time it runs — so the moment Stripe confirms you’re verified, FreeMix catches up on its own. No stuck states, no support ticket required.

One nice thing about the cascade

Here’s a detail worth knowing: you don’t have to be onboarded for the royalties to start adding up.

Say your track gets remixed and that remix sells, but you haven’t set up payouts yet. The sale still goes through (the seller is onboarded — that’s what made it possible), and your share of it is calculated and held, waiting for you. The moment you finish onboarding, everything that accrued while you were away pays out automatically.

So royalties never slip through the cracks because you were slow to set up. They wait for you. But — you do have to onboard eventually to actually receive them, so if money’s been piling up, that’s your nudge.

Questions

Payout setup runs entirely through Stripe, so if you hit a snag during their verification flow, Stripe’s support can help directly. For anything on the FreeMix side, reach out any time to help@freemix.fm