What Run is, and how distribution works here
Run puts your releases on the stores worldwide, checks them before they ship, and brings streams and earnings back into your workspace.
Run is a music distribution service. You build a release in your workspace: the audio, the artwork, the credits, the dates. We check it against what the stores require, then deliver it to every major platform worldwide. Streams, listeners and earnings come back into the same workspace.
You keep your masters. The agreement you accept is non-exclusive, so you can leave and take your catalog with you. Run charges a subscription and keeps a share of what the stores pay for your recordings: on either paid plan you keep 92% of it, and on Free you keep 70%. Publishing, live, merchandise and sync never pass through Run at all. See Plans and what they include and Your royalty split.
Run is also your single point of contact. Nobody further down the chain deals with you directly, so questions, problems and takedowns all go through your workspace.
Where your music goes
Every release goes to the major stores: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, SoundCloud, Pandora, Beatport, iHeartRadio, Audiomack, Napster and NetEase Cloud Music, among others.
Two things are worth knowing before your first submission.
- Worldwide only. Run does not collect per-territory availability, so a release goes out everywhere. There is no country picker to fill in and nothing to get wrong.
- Every store is on by default. You can switch individual stores off before you submit. Content ID, the fingerprint networks run by YouTube and Meta, is the exception: it stays off unless you opt in and confirm you own the recording outright. See Stores and Content ID.
How a release travels
- Draft. You create the release and fill it in over as many sittings as you like. Drafts are the only editable state, and nothing leaves Run while a release is a draft. See Create a release.
- Submit. You confirm you own or control everything on the release, and it locks.
- Checks. Automated checks run first: the metadata, the audio file itself, the cover, and content matching that compares each track against music already released. See What review checks.
- Review. Anything flagged goes to a person. If a release is sent back, it comes back with reasons you can act on, and you reopen it, fix it and submit again. See Rejection reasons.
- Delivery. Once a release is cleared it goes out to the stores in under 24 hours, on the release date you set.
- Live. Each store confirms separately, and the release page shows which ones have.
That last step is the one Run cannot put a clock on. Delivery is the part Run controls. What each store does with a delivery after that is its own process: some publish within hours, some take days, and none of them tells us in advance. Tracking delivery explains what each state on the page means.
What comes back
Analytics. Streams, listeners, saves, skips, shares and completion rate, broken down by country, age and gender. Platform reporting covers Spotify and Apple.
Earnings. Reported release by release, for each reporting period, as the platforms report them, and exportable as CSV. Attribution is per release and per period, never per track: that is the level the stores report at. See How earnings work.
Both arrive on a delay set by the stores’ own reporting, not by Run. A release that went live this week will not have a statement this week.
What Run expects from you
Run is open about AI: AI-assisted and fully AI-generated music is welcome, with disclosure, and at least one credited contributor has to be a human. What is refused is impersonation: voice clones, soundalikes, and anything trading on somebody else’s name. The full rules are in the AI policy and Prohibited content.
The other expectation is rights. You are stating that the recording and the song behind it are yours to release, or that you hold the paperwork that lets you release them. Covers, samples and remixes are all welcome with the right document attached: see Covers, remixes and samples.
Onboarding, step by step covers setting the account up, and Your first release is the shortest correct path from there.