You finished a song. The mix is done, the master sounds right, and you're ready to start sharing it. Simple enough.
Except “sharing it” is actually five different jobs.
Your guitarist lives across town and needs to learn her parts before Saturday's practice. So you upload the track to Google Drive, copy the link, and drop it in the band group chat.
Your producer wants to hear the final master to compare against the rough mix he worked on. You could send the same Google Drive link, but he's already got 40 of your files in a shared folder and nothing is labeled well. You throw it in a WeTransfer instead.
A music blog said they'd consider premiering the track if you send them an advance. You don't want to send a Drive link because that looks amateur. You upload it to SoundCloud as a private track and send the secret link over email. You're now quietly hoping nobody else finds it.
A label A&R you met at a show last month texts asking to hear new stuff. Do you send the same SoundCloud link you sent the blog? If you do, and the A&R shares it, that blog premiere is blown. So you create a second private SoundCloud link. Or maybe a separate upload. You're not sure if SoundCloud even lets you have two private links for the same track. (It doesn't, really.)
And then the song comes out. Now you need a public link for fans. You add it to your Linktree with a Spotify button, an Apple Music button, a YouTube button. That private SoundCloud link is still floating around. The Google Drive link still works. The WeTransfer expired three days ago, which is actually fine because you didn't want that one out there anyway.
One song. Five tools. Five links. Zero of them connected to each other.
This is a workflow problem, not a feature problem
The tools themselves aren't broken. Google Drive is great for file storage. SoundCloud works for sharing audio. Linktree does what Linktree does. Each one handles its specific job fine.
The problem is that sharing music isn't one job. It's a spectrum. The same track needs to be private on Monday, semi-private on Wednesday, and public on Friday. The audience changes, the access level changes, but the music stays the same.
No single tool in most artists' toolkits handles that spectrum. So you end up duct-taping together a workflow from products that were never designed to work together. You become the integration layer. You're the one keeping track of which link went to which person, which one is still active, which one needs to be taken down, and which one needs to go live next Tuesday at midnight.
And the kicker: when the song finally drops, none of the work you did sharing it privately carries over. You don't get to flip that press advance link into a public fan page. You start fresh. New tool, new link, new setup.
Every release cycle, you rebuild the whole thing from scratch.
What this should actually look like
What if the link you sent your producer during mixing was the same one your fans tap on release day?
Think about it. You share the song with your bandmates early on, password-protected so only they can hear it. A few weeks later, you add a handful of press emails to an allowlist so those bloggers can stream it. Then the single drops and you flip the page to public. Same URL the entire time. The blog that premiered your track can link their readers to the same page. Your producer can pull it up again and hear the finished version. Your fans find it in your bio and they're listening in seconds.
Nobody had to download a file. Nobody got a dead link. You didn't have to set up anything new on release day. The song just graduated from private to public, and every link you'd already sent still works.
That's not a fantasy feature list. That's just what sharing music should feel like.
This is what Gatefolded does
I built Gatefolded specifically around this workflow. One page per release. You upload your tracks or paste streaming links. You set the access level.
Password-protected for collaborators and early listeners. Share the password with your bandmates, your producer, whoever needs it.
Email-allowlisted for press and industry. Only people on your list can access the page, and they verify their email before they hear anything. No forwarded links, no accidental leaks.
Public for fans. Streaming links, full artwork, tips, the works. The page looks great and the music plays right there.
The key part: it's the same URL the entire time. You shared it with your producer during mixing? That link still works when the song goes public. You sent it to a blog for an advance listen? That same URL becomes the page their readers land on. No rebuilding. No starting over.
$49/year. All features included. 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
The real cost of the duct-tape workflow
The tool juggling isn't just annoying. It costs you in ways that are easy to miss. You're spending an hour every release cycle setting up links across multiple platforms when you could be writing music or reaching out to blogs. A Google Drive link in a pitch email tells a label exactly how seriously you take your presentation. (Not very.) Your analytics are scattered across five dashboards that don't talk to each other -- SoundCloud shows play counts, Linktree shows click counts, Google Drive shows nothing, and none of it adds up to a coherent picture of who's actually engaging with your music. And every separate link you send out is another thing to manage, expire, or worry about leaking.
One song shouldn't require a tech stack. It should require one link.