Search for song pitching tools and you mostly find services — companies that pitch on your behalf for a fee, or platforms that forward your songs to a list. This page is about the other thing: software that helps you decide which of your own songs to send, which is the step that actually determines whether a pitch lands.
I write for sync and publishing and I built Pitchkit, so I have an interest here. The section on what software cannot do is the honest part.
You pay a fee, or a percentage, and someone forwards your songs to supervisors, A&R contacts or playlist curators. Quality varies enormously. The useful questions are whether they have real relationships or just a mailing list, whether the fee is charged regardless of outcome, and whether you keep your rights.
These solve access. If your problem is that nobody is listening, this is the category — but be sceptical, because it is also where most of the money wasted in this industry gets wasted.
Nobody pitches for you. Instead the tool indexes your catalog and answers the question you face every time an opportunity appears: out of everything I have written, which five songs fit this? That is a search-and-ranking problem, and it is the one that scales badly in your head past a few hundred songs.
Almost never at the email. The common failure modes are:
Every one of those is a retrieval problem, not a songwriting problem.
Point it at your music folder. It reads tempo, key, energy, brightness and danceability directly from the audio, and optionally transcribes lyrics with Whisper, so nothing needs tagging by hand. Then you paste the opportunity — a sync brief, an A&R note, an artist description, a co-writer asking what you have in a lane — and it ranks your whole catalog by fit.
Tempo ranges are honoured precisely. Artist references like “in the Chappell Roan lane” are translated into musical characteristics before matching. Alternate versions and duplicates are filtered out so you are ranking actual pitchable masters. Tick what you want and it copies those exact files into a named folder ready to send.
Sync briefs are the most structured case, which is why they get the attention, but the mechanic is the same whenever someone describes what they are looking for in words:
| Opportunity | What you paste |
|---|---|
| Sync brief | The brief text, tempo range and references included |
| Label A&R looking for artist cuts | The A&R's description of the artist and direction |
| Artist or manager asking what you have | Their reference artists and the vibe they described |
| Publisher requesting songs for a pitch sheet | The pitch sheet entry itself |
| Co-write prep | What the other writer is known for, as a reference |
| Playlist or DSP pitch | The playlist's description or its most-played artists |
It is software that indexes your own catalog and helps you work out which songs fit a given opportunity, whether that is a sync brief, an A&R request, an artist looking for material or a publisher's pitch sheet. It is distinct from song pitching services, which take a fee or a percentage to forward your music to contacts on your behalf.
The distinction matters because the two solve opposite problems. A service is about access — getting someone to listen. Software is about selection — sending the right song once someone is listening. Buying the wrong one is the most common way songwriters waste money in this area.
Start from the constraints the opportunity actually states, because those are non-negotiable and easy to check: tempo range, key, vocal or instrumental, duration, explicit genre or mood language. Songs outside a stated tempo window are usually dismissed regardless of quality. Then narrow on the softer signals — lyrical theme, energy arc, and how closely the production sits to any artist references given.
Only then does taste come in, and it should be spent on a shortlist rather than the whole catalog. The failure mode almost every songwriter recognises is sending the songs they happened to remember, which biases hard toward whatever was written most recently rather than whatever fits.
Any of them. Pitchkit matches text describing what someone wants against your catalog, and it does not care whether that text is a sync brief, an A&R note, an artist's description of the record they are making, a publisher's pitch sheet entry, or a co-writer telling you what lane they are in.
Artist and A&R requests actually lean harder on the artist-reference matching than sync briefs do, since they are usually phrased as comparisons — 'something in the Sabrina Carpenter lane, mid-tempo' — rather than as tempo and mood specifications. Adding your own Anthropic or Gemini API key extends reference matching from a built-in list of roughly 200 artists to effectively any artist.
Below roughly a hundred songs, probably not. You can hold a catalog that size in your head, and a folder of well-named files plus your own memory genuinely works. Spending money to solve a problem you do not have yet is not a good trade.
The threshold is not really a song count, it is the first time you remember the right song after the deadline. That moment tends to arrive somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand songs, and once it starts happening it keeps happening. Pitchkit's free version indexes 100 songs precisely so you can find out where you actually sit rather than guessing.
Some do and many do not, and the difference is whether they have real working relationships or simply a distribution list. Questions worth asking before paying anyone: who specifically receives the music, what happens if nothing places, whether the fee is charged regardless of outcome, whether they take a percentage of any placement, and what rights you sign over.
Be especially careful with anything charging a per-submission fee, since that is revenue for them whether or not you ever place. None of this applies to software you install and run yourself, which is a one-time cost with no rights implications at all.
Sync briefs are usually specific and constraint-heavy: a tempo range, a mood, a duration, sometimes a key, and a deadline measured in days. They reward precision, speed and having a properly indexed catalog, because the person reading is comparing your five songs against fifty other writers' five songs.
Artist and A&R pitches are looser and more relational. They arrive as comparisons rather than specifications, the timeline is vaguer, and the decision is as much about the artist's direction and the room's politics as about the song. What the two share is the retrieval step: someone has described what they want in words, and you have to find your closest matches before anyone can judge them.
The free version is the whole Mac app with the catalog capped at 100 songs — brief matching, artist references, lyric transcription and pitch folders all included. No account, no card, no expiry. $49 once removes the cap.
Download free — 100 songs →