Where do I find labels accepting demos?

Saltado Sessions ships with a directory of more than 1,200 labels and outlets, tagged by genre, each with the story of who runs it, and with pay-to-play fees flagged. It is a place to start shortlisting, not a list of verified open inboxes: whether a particular label is taking demos this month is research, and the app gives you somewhere to keep what you find out rather than pretending to have checked for you. Known demo routes are unlocked on 130+ of them with Pro, and any route you research yourself is yours on any tier.

Does Sessions send demos to labels for me?

No. It opens the label's own submission route, a submit link or a pre-addressed email, and logs the send in the same click. You write and send the pitch yourself. Sessions is not a submission portal like LabelRadar or SubmitHub, has no relationship with any label, and cannot guarantee a response.

How does it know when a label replies?

It does not read your email. You record the reply when it arrives, and the app works out the timing from what you logged, showing it as "replied in N days". Anything with no reply after 30 days is flagged amber so you can see who to follow up with.

The label directory is completely free: 1,200+ labels and outlets, genres, label stories, pay-to-play warnings, and as many labels, contacts and research notes of your own as you like. The known demo routes on 130+ of the built-in labels, and the per-track submission tracking, send-and-log, statuses, stale flags and reply timings, are part of Pro, a $44 one-time purchase and never a subscription.

Does it work if I do not use Ableton?

Yes. Tracking a submission only involves a track, a label and a date, so it is DAW-agnostic. Sessions finds projects from ten DAWs, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic Pro, REAPER, Studio One, Bitwig Studio, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reason and GarageBand, and the submission side works the same regardless of which one a track came from.

How to submit a demo to a record label, and keep track of every send

Sending a demo is not complicated. Doing it well means picking labels that would plausibly release the track, using the route each one actually asks for, and writing down what went where. That last part is the one everybody drops, and two months later you cannot answer the simplest question about your own career: who did I send this to, and did any of them ever reply? Saltado Sessions keeps that record attached to the track itself.

This is the part of releasing music no DAW touches. Ableton knows your arrangement; it has no idea you emailed this bounce to a label on the 3rd and heard nothing back.

How to submit a demo to a record label

The mechanics are the same everywhere, and none of it is a secret:

Send a finished track, not a promising loop. One track, the best one, not a folder of nine for them to choose from.
Pick labels that would actually release it. Work from what a label has been putting out, not from how big its name is. A small imprint whose last four releases sit next to your track will listen; a famous one whose roster you do not fit will not.
Use the route the label asks for. A demo address, a form on their site, a LabelRadar or similar page. Sending to the wrong inbox, or attaching a 60 MB WAV to a cold email, is the most ordinary way a demo goes unheard.
Send a private streaming link rather than a file, unless they say otherwise. It plays on a phone and it does not clog an inbox.
Keep the message short. Who you are in one line, the track, the link, and why this label rather than any other. Nobody reads paragraph three.
Write down what you sent, to whom, on what day. Skipping this is free today and expensive in six weeks, when you cannot remember whether this label already has the track.

The first five are yours to do, exactly as you would have done them anyway. The sixth is what the rest of this page is about, because it is the one that quietly falls apart.

Why demos vanish from your own records

Nobody sets out to lose track. It happens because sending is never one thing. A private link here, a LabelRadar upload there, a contact form that gives you no receipt at all, an email typed on your phone at 1am. None of those leave a consistent trail, and a few weeks of it produces questions you cannot answer: which version went out, was it this label or their sub-label, and is it fair to follow up or did I already nudge them twice?

Silence makes it worse. A rejection at least closes the loop, even though it usually arrives with no feedback attached. The far more common outcome is nothing at all, forever, and silence looks identical whether they passed, never opened it, or you sent it to a dead address. Without dates you cannot even tell how long you have been waiting.

The demo submission spreadsheet, and why it slips

Almost every producer who has been at this a while ends up building the same thing: a demo submission spreadsheet. Label, contact, date sent, track, a status column with color coding, a notes column for what they said. It genuinely works, right up to the week you stop updating it.

The failure is structural rather than lazy. The spreadsheet is a second place. Sending happens in your browser or your mail client; logging happens in a different app you have to remember to open afterwards. Every send is a chance for those two to drift apart, and once the sheet is a week behind you stop trusting it, and once you stop trusting it you stop filling it in. It also knows the title of your track and nothing else about it: it cannot play the bounce, does not know the BPM or key, and has no idea which project file it came from.

Where to find labels accepting demos

Before tracking anything you need somewhere to keep the labels themselves, and that part does not start empty. Sessions ships with a directory of more than 1,200 labels and outlets, so the shortlist for a track begins from something rather than a blank page. Each row carries the things you actually want at the moment you decide to send:

Genres, on a normalized set of tags, so you can pull up the labels that plausibly fit the track in front of you instead of scrolling the whole book.
The story of the label: who started it, where, and what changed since. Sorting a name you recognize from a name you half remember is most of the shortlisting.
A pay-to-play flag where a label charges to consider a demo. That warning is on the free tier deliberately, because it is worth nothing to the person who already paid.
Labels kept apart from outlets: radio shows, blogs and playlists are marked as such, so a magazine does not get pitched like an imprint.
Your own labels, contacts and research notes alongside the built-in ones, including the demo address you dug up yourself.

Be plain about what a directory can and cannot tell you. It is a place to start looking, not a list of open inboxes: labels close submissions, change policy, or say "closed" on the site while an A&R still listens to everything that lands. Whether a given label is accepting demos this month is research, not a field, which is why the app gives you somewhere to keep what you find out and never pretends to have checked for you.

The directory is free: searchable, genre-tagged, stories and fee warnings included, with no cap and no trial clock. Known demo routes are part of Pro, unlocked on 130+ of the built-in labels, and a route you research and type in yourself is yours on any tier.

Sending and logging as one action Pro

Here is the piece that fixes the spreadsheet problem. When you send a track to a label, you pick the label and hit send once. Sessions opens that label's actual route, the submit link or a pre-addressed email, and records the send in the same click. You write the pitch and send it yourself, as always, in your own mail client or on the label's own form. The log is not a separate chore you might skip; it is a side effect of the thing you were already doing, which is the whole reason it cannot drift out of sync the way a sheet does.

A history that lives on the track Pro

Every track then carries its own per-label submission history, with five statuses that cover what really happens: sent, no reply, rejected, accepted, released. One track, one list, in order, with dates.

Two details do the heavy lifting. First, a send with no reply after 30 days turns amber, and the track shows a banner saying so, which turns "I feel like I am waiting on some people" into a specific list of who to chase this afternoon. Second, when you mark a reply, the wait is worked out for you and shown as replied in N days, so over a year you build a real sense of which labels answer in a week and which answer never.

To be plain about the mechanics: Sessions does not read your email. Reply status is something you record when the reply lands, and the timings are computed from what you log. There is no inbox scanning, and there is nothing watching your mail in the background.

The desk: what you sent, beside who is next Pro

Submissions is a two-pane screen, and the split is the useful part. On one side, the track you are working through and everything you have already sent for it. On the other, the shortlist: the labels you have decided to send to but have not sent to yet.

That second list is the thing a spreadsheet never manages to hold, because "I mean to send this to them" and "I sent this to them" look identical in a row of text, and the moment they blur you either double-send or lose the intention entirely. Here they are structurally different things. A shortlist entry is intent and nothing counts it as a submission. When you do send, that entry graduates by itself: it leaves the shortlist and becomes a real dated send, in the same action, so there is no state where a label sits on both lists.

Under the shortlist sit suggestions, ranked out of your own label book, minus everyone you have already sent to or shortlisted for this track, so the same five names do not keep coming back at you. Be clear about what the ranking is: it favours labels whose demo route you actually have, whose research says they are open, and that are still alive. It is not genre matching, and it is not pretending to know your track sounds like their catalogue, because a project file has no genre in it and inventing one would be the kind of confident guess this page exists to avoid. It is a way to stop staring at 1,200 labels.

Searching the book from here is ranked the same way, so typing two letters of a label name gets you the sendable ones first rather than alphabetical order.

Saltado Sessions with a project expanded in the library: waveform preview with live loudness and stereo meters, project folder and vitals, session files with collected status, and the project list behind it. — Submissions hang off the same library rows: the bounce, the BPM and key, and the send history for one track in one place.

Why this beats the sheet

The submission history is attached to the actual track in your library, not to a row of text about it. That means the moment a label finally replies asking for a different mix, you are one click from the bounce you sent, the BPM and key, the project file it came from, and the list of everyone else who has it. You can play the bounce without opening your DAW to check you are talking about the version you think you are.

And if the track you want to send is one of the old ones you half remember, the same library that tracks submissions is the one that finds every project on your drives. Shortlisting from your back catalogue stops depending on what you can recall.

When what you are pitching is an EP rather than a single, group the tracks into a release first. A release is a real thing in the library: a title, a type, a running order and a total running time, with each track's status rolling up so you can see at a glance whether the whole record is actually sendable or whether one track is still at mixing. Deciding that before you start writing emails is what stops you pitching a four-track EP on the strength of the two you finished. Reading your releases is free; building them is part of Pro.

How that runs inside Sessions

Step 1
Finish the track and mark it release ready in your library. The submission side works from the tracks you have flagged as sendable, so unfinished sketches stay out of the way.

Step 2
Shortlist labels from the directory: filter by genre, read the label's story and your own research notes, and add the ones whose route you actually have to that track's shortlist. Nothing is sent yet, and nothing counts as sent yet.

Step 3
Send. One click opens the route and logs it. Repeat down the shortlist.

Step 4
Record replies as they arrive: rejected, accepted, or eventually released.

Step 5
Come back in a month and work the amber rows. Follow up, or write them off and move on to the next batch with a clean conscience.

What this is not

Worth being blunt, because this corner of the industry is full of overpromising. Sessions does not submit anything on your behalf, does not guarantee that anybody replies, and is not a submission portal like LabelRadar or SubmitHub. It has no relationship with any label and no channel to them. It opens the label's own route and keeps your records straight, so your pitch travels exactly as it would if you had done it by hand, because you did. Nothing here promises you a signing. What it promises is that you will always know what you sent, to whom, on what day, and what came back.

Tracking demos is DAW-agnostic: a submission is a track, a label and a date, so it makes no difference which of the ten supported DAWs the project behind it came from, Ableton Live to GarageBand. And it is all local-first: no account, no cloud, nothing about your music leaving it. Your contacts and your send history sit on your own machine, which is where a list of who rejected you belongs.

What is free and what is Pro

Free: the whole label directory, searchable, with genres, label stories, pay-to-play warnings and as many labels, contacts and research notes of your own as you like, plus the full project library for unlimited projects.
Pro ($44, one time): the known demo routes on 130+ of the built-in labels, plus submission tracking, meaning send-and-log in one action, the per-track shortlist and its ranked suggestions, per-track and per-label history with statuses, the 30-day stale flag and automatic reply timings. A one-time purchase, yours forever, never a subscription.

There is a fuller breakdown on the features page, and the download and pricing live on the homepage. Start with the free directory: even without tracking, having somewhere real to shortlist from is most of the friction gone.