You’ve created some music in GarageBand and you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself. Now you want to know how you can get your creation onto Spotify and other music platforms like Apple Music and Amazon Music. These are the steps I took to do just that. 

1. Export your song or music in GarageBand

You’ll want to export your track from GarageBand using the highest quality setting. 

Go to Share > Export song to disk > Choose the MP3 option and use the ‘Highest Quality (256 kBit/s)’ setting. Find a suitable file location and give your track a suitable name. Click ‘Export’. Woop! First step complete. 

2. Import your music or song MP3 file into Apple Music

This is a slightly frustrating but important step for those of us using software like GarageBand. This is because, unfortunately, GarageBand doesn’t allow exporting at a higher quality than the 256 kBit/s that you’ve just exported your track at from GarageBand. For distribution purposes, you may need higher quality. There’s no way of actually improving the sound quality of your music track, but you can change it to a higher quality file type to satisfy music distributors. 

First, you’ll need to check your import settings and check your import preferences.

In Apple Music, go to File > Preferences > Files > Import settings. Make sure the settings are as follows:

Import Using: MP3 Encoder

Setting: click on Custom >  Change the Stereo Bit Rate to 320 kbps and click OK.

Then, In Apple Music, go to File > Import > choose your song MP3 file.

3. Convert your music or song MP3 to high quality 320 kpbs using Apple Music

Find your imported music track in Apple Music. Convert it to the higher quality setting by clicking on the track so it’s highlighted, go to File > Convert > Create MP3 version. This creates a duplicate track at 320 kbps quality. You can check that this has worked and that you’re looking at the newly converted version of the track by clicking on the track and checking out the settings using the three dots on the track itself in Apple Music. Click on ‘Get info’ and select the ‘File’ tab. It should say 320 kbps. Your track is now ready for submitting for distribution!

4. Using RouteNote for distribution for free

I chose to use RouteNote for free music distribution. It was pretty easy to sign up. RouteNote will distribute your music to many music platforms including Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music, Deezer, Resso and others. You can even get your music onto social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. 

I actually found RouteNote to be very easy to sign up with and use. They do all the hard work. Your hard work has already been done by composing the song or music track in the first place. So it seems quite fitting that RouteNote would do a lot of the hard work for the distribution! I chose to go down the free version of the account where they take a slice of the royalties, but you can pay for the service and get all of the royalties if you’re that way inclined! 

You will need to fill in all the information about your music including artist info, music titles and other information. Also, don’t forget to upload a great image for the album cover to go with your great music creations! The next blog will be about how I created my own music album covers using some online tools. 

5. Sit back and wait for your music to appear on Spotify!

Once you’ve completed creating your release in RouteNote and selected all the partners that you want RouteNote to distribute to on your behalf, you now just need to wait for it to go live in Spotify! This can take some time as RouteNote will take some days to review your work. After this, it will take some more time to appear on Spotify. 

And you’re done! Congratulations on getting your music from GarageBand to Spotify for free!