Free Email Marketing Tools for Musicians | TAP
Free tools for music email marketing
By TAP Editorial Team
Quick answer
You can run a music mailing list for nothing. Kit, formerly ConvertKit, covers up to 10,000 subscribers on its free plan, Substack has no subscriber limit at all, and Brevo allows 300 emails a day. Mailchimp's free plan is now much smaller, so check the current limit before you commit to it. Capture addresses with a Carrd page or a Typeform, and keep consent explicit.
A mailing list is the only audience you own outright, and it can be built and sent to for nothing until it gets big. What follows covers the whole loop: where people sign up, what sends the email, what measures whether anyone read it, and where each free tier stops. Most artists outgrow the free limits somewhere past a few thousand addresses, which is a good problem and a cheap one.
Email marketing platform with automation, SMS campaigns, and CRM features specifically designed for creative industries. Includes pre-built music industry templates and audience segmentation.
Free tier: Free tier allows up to 300 emails per day with unlimited contacts, though this caps at 2,000 total contact records on free plan. Premium features like advanced automation require paid plan.
Best for: Artists who want a full featured platform without paying up front, particularly if you need consent handling that stands up under GDPR
Entry-level email marketing with automation, segmentation, and basic analytics. Owned by Intuit, widely used across creative sectors for campaign management and subscriber management.
Free tier: The free plan has shrunk repeatedly and now covers a few hundred contacts and a small monthly send allowance, so check the current limit before you build on it. Automation, A/B testing and most integrations sit on paid tiers.
Best for: Getting started with email capture. Simple to use, with lighter reporting than the alternatives
Newsletter platform optimised for creators with built-in subscriber growth tools, payment processing for paid tiers, and minimal friction for both sender and reader.
Free tier: Fully free to use with unlimited subscribers and send volume. Substack takes a cut only if you use paid newsletter features; email-only newsletters are completely free.
Best for: Writing to fans regularly with updates, studio notes or long-form pieces, with no subscriber limit to worry about
Creator-focused email platform with tagging, segmentation and automation built for building an engaged audience, plus the ability to sell digital products directly.
Free tier: The free Newsletter plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, forms and landing pages, with Kit branding on the emails and only basic automation. Sequences, A/B testing and deeper automation need a paid plan.
Best for: Moving beyond basic sends, with better tagging and automation than Mailchimp, though the free tier is small
Privacy-first analytics platform that tracks website visitor behaviour without cookies, fully GDPR-compliant and lightweight compared to Google Analytics.
Free tier: Free open-source version can be self-hosted on any server. Cloud-hosted version offers free tier with up to 3 websites and 10k monthly events.
Best for: Measuring fan engagement on artist landing pages or pre-release campaign websites where you need UK-compliant analytics without cookie consent dialogs.
Lightweight single-page website builder designed for simplicity: perfect for quick artist bios, EP landing pages, or email signup pages without coding.
Free tier: Free tier limited to 1 site with basic features and Carrd branding. Paid plan ($19/year) removes branding and adds advanced features like forms and integrations.
Best for: Creating fast, mobile-first pre-release landing pages or artist link pages that capture emails during campaign pushes without needing design skills.
Beautiful, conversational survey and form builder that tracks responses and integrates with email platforms. Much higher engagement than standard HTML forms.
Free tier: Free plan allows unlimited forms but limited to 100 responses per form per month. Advanced logic, branding, and integrations require paid subscription.
Best for: Running fan preference surveys, collecting playlist submission details, or creating interactive sign-up flows that increase email capture rates during campaigns.
Free event-tracking analytics platform that measures website traffic, user behaviour, and conversion funnels. Industry standard for understanding audience movement.
Free tier: Completely free for standard use. Enterprise reporting and higher data volumes require Google Analytics 360, which is paid.
Best for: Seeing how an email drives traffic to your site, which parts of the list engage most, and how a pre-release run is performing
Automation platform connecting apps without coding: routes data between email platforms, forms, analytics, and social media to reduce manual work.
Free tier: Free tier includes 100 task runs per month with basic automation. Most artist workflows fit inside the free tier once the setup is done.
Best for: Automating list growth, for example passing Typeform responses into Brevo, or moving signups from social into your list without copying them by hand
Flexible database and CRM tool that acts as a spreadsheet but with relational database power. Tracks campaign performance, artist inventory, fan segments, and PR timelines.
Free tier: Free tier allows unlimited bases with up to 1,200 records per base and basic automations. Paid plans add expanded records and advanced features.
Best for: Keeping campaign records in one place, so coverage, sends and dates sit next to each other rather than in four browser tabs
Open-source analytics and reporting tool that connects to databases and visualises data without SQL knowledge. Self-hosted or cloud option.
Free tier: Fully free and open-source for self-hosted version. Cloud-hosted version offers limited free tier; most features available in self-hosted.
Best for: Building your own view of what email is doing, and lining it up against release dates
The usual working set is one sender, one capture page and one way to measure. Substack if you want to write regularly with no limits, Brevo or Mailchimp if you want segmentation and automation, a Carrd page or a Typeform to collect addresses, and analytics to see what the email actually did. Start there, and let the free tiers prove the habit is worth paying for before you pay for it.
Frequently asked questions
How do I ensure GDPR compliance when building an email list from UK fans during a press campaign?
Every signup needs an explicit tick-box consent to receive emails, and a pre-ticked box is not consent under GDPR. Use tools like Brevo or Mailchimp that include GDPR compliance templates, ensure your privacy policy is visible at signup, and keep records of when and how consent was collected. For podcast listeners or social media followers, use a double opt-in (confirmation email) rather than importing lists without consent.
How big can my list get before I have to pay?
It depends entirely which platform you pick, and the answer has moved a lot recently. Kit's free plan runs to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends but limited automation. Substack has no subscriber cap. Brevo caps daily sends rather than contacts. Mailchimp's free plan is now the smallest of the four by some distance. Check the current limits before you import anything, because moving a list later means re-earning consent.
How do I tell whether the mailing list is doing anything?
Email gives you numbers that press coverage never will: opens, clicks and what happened next. Track clicks through to your site or your streaming links, note which releases pull the most, and line that up against sales and pre-saves. Segment your site traffic by source in Google Analytics. Email traffic usually stays longer and bounces less than press referrals, which is what a committed listener looks like in a chart.
Should everything go to one list, or should I split it?
One list, segmented, is easier to run than several lists. Tag people by how they arrived, meaning a gig, a release, a video or a pre-order, and by what they have opened before. Then a tour announcement can go to the people within reach of the dates and a release can go to everyone. Splitting into separate lists tends to mean one gets maintained and the rest go stale.
What frequency of emails keeps fans engaged without causing unsubscribes in music marketing?
For emerging artists, once every 2–3 weeks performs well; for established acts with regular news, weekly emails are sustainable if content is valuable (release news, exclusive content, behind-the-scenes). Monitor unsubscribe rates (anything above 0.5% per send suggests over-mailing), and always include tour dates or limited pre-order windows to justify frequency: people stay subscribed when the email gives them something first, rather than asking again.
From the field
Proof points
- Best UK send window: Tue/Wed 09:00-10:00 UK (Across 60+ campaigns)
- Time to first WARM play after pitch: 1-3 weeks for 6 Music, same week for community (Across recent campaigns)
- Named contact reply rate vs studio@: 5x higher (Liberty Music PR campaign data, 2024-2026)
What actually happened
Eyes Glued, BBC Radio 6 Music: 153 plays across six weeks, accelerating in week four. Track-led pitch, single playable thirty-second moment. (2025-03)
Email is the spine of music promotion and most people treat it like a marketing channel. It is not. A pitch is a one to one note that happens to go to forty people. The send window matters: Tuesday and Wednesday between nine and ten in the morning is consistently best, and Monday afternoons and Friday after lunch are dead. Studio inboxes get nothing back. A named contact gets five times the reply rate of a generic alias. Everything else is decoration.
Chris Schofield, Radio plugger, Liberty Music PR
Related resources
Further reading
- TAP Blog — In-depth guides, comparisons and advice for independent artists running their own promotion.
- UK Music — The voice of the UK music industry, representing labels, publishers, and collecting societies.
- Music Week — Industry news, charts, and analysis for music professionals.
- The Music Network — Global music business intelligence and networking.
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