GUIDE

Where to sell your beats: BeatStars, Airbit, TrakTrain or your own store

Choosing a selling platform looks like a technical decision — commissions, plans, licence options. It is first a decision about dependency: you hand a third party your catalog, your prices, your licence contracts and the address you will paste into every YouTube description for years. Here is what actually separates the four options, and the maths that settles it.

01What a platform actually does for you

A beat platform provides three services, and it helps to separate them because they are not worth the same. The first is hosting: storing the master, the tagged preview and the cover art, then serving a player that does not hand over the file you sell. The second is the transaction: taking payment, generating the licence contract matching the tier bought, delivering files automatically. The third is the shop window: being a place where people come looking for beats.

The first two are real, measurable and nearly identical everywhere. The third is the one people choose their platform on, and that is almost always a mistake. A marketplace search engine runs on the same tags as yours, ranks what already sells, and pushes what already has plays — that is, what receives traffic from somewhere else. Being visible inside it is a consequence of your sales, not their cause.

In practice: a producer starting out makes their first sales from YouTube, Instagram or a direct message, and the platform acts as the till and the notary. It recruits nobody on your behalf. That is good news, because it makes the choice far less serious than it looks.

02The four questions that actually decide it

1. 1How does the money reach you?Two models coexist. Direct payment: the buyer pays into your own PayPal or Stripe account, you are credited instantly, the platform never touches the money. Intermediated payment: the platform collects, then pays you out on a schedule and sometimes above a minimum threshold. The second is not outrageous, but it adds a delay, the risk of a frozen account, and withdrawal fees that are often higher than the advertised commission. Above all, check that the payment method is available in your country: it is the only criterion here that can eliminate a platform outright.
2. 2Who writes the licence contract?On every sale, the platform generates a PDF that binds both of you. Look at three things: can you edit the wording of each tier (stream counts, commercial use, exclusivity), can you add a clause of your own, and can you export contracts already issued. That last point sounds trivial right up until you sell an exclusive and the buyer asks for the list of non-exclusive licences already granted on the same beat.
3. 3What do you take with you when you leave?Your files, always. Your buyer list, sometimes only partly. Your plays, reviews, internal ranking and platform followers: never. That is where the real dependency sits, and it is why a platform should be chosen while imagining the day you leave it — not while hoping you never will.
4. 4What does the free plan cost?A free plan is always paid for, just not in cash: commission on every sale, a cap on how many tracks stay online, restricted licence tiers, and sometimes adverts for other producers displayed on your own page. That last one is the most underrated: you are paying in buyers diverted at the exact moment they were ready to buy.

03BeatStars: the default, and for real reasons

BeatStars is the largest beat marketplace, and that size produces two concrete effects. The first is familiarity: a BeatStars link needs no explaining to a rapper, they know what they will find and how to pay. On a remote sale to a stranger, that trust is worth more than a few points of commission. The second is the ecosystem: full licence tiers, a hosted store, promotion tools, distribution and rights management on streaming platforms.

The trade-offs are the exact reverse of those advantages. Your page looks like everyone else’s, because it is standardised. The marketplace is saturated, so internal visibility is won with external traffic. And the free plan is markedly more limited than the homepage suggests: it is a place to start, not a place to stay once your catalog grows.

Who it fits: most producers, and especially those whose main channel is YouTube. It is the platform whose checkout buyers already know, and the one that needs the least explaining inside a video description.

04Airbit: the store stays on your side

Airbit plays the other card: rather than pulling you into its own shop window, it gives you a store you place on your own site, with payments landing directly in your account. You keep the commercial relationship, the address and the money, with nobody in between. For a producer who already has a channel, a site or a mailing list, that is structurally the best margin-to-control ratio available.

The trade-off is symmetrical: the internal audience is smaller and the name less recognised by casual buyers. If the marketplace itself is your only channel, you are giving up what little free discovery exists. Airbit rewards producers who bring their traffic and punishes those who wait for it.

Who it fits: producers who already own a channel and want the sales page to live on their domain rather than someone else’s.

05TrakTrain: small, filtered, and not for everyone

TrakTrain long made gatekeeping its main argument: you apply, and not everyone is in. The result is a smaller but less diluted marketplace, with an internal audience made up more of artists genuinely looking for an instrumental. It is the only one of the three where internal discovery still counts for something in early sales.

The downside is obvious: volume. A smaller marketplace means fewer buyers overall, and a whole catalog sitting there and nowhere else is capped low by design. Treat TrakTrain as an extra point of sale and a networking channel, not as the main house — unless placements with artists are your first goal, in which case the filtering works in your favour.

06Your own store: 100% of the margin, 0% of the discovery

Selling from your own site is within anyone’s reach: a standard online store or a digital-goods seller is enough to take payment and deliver. What is missing is not the till, it is the four things the platform was doing without you noticing.

• —The player with a tagged preview and an unreachable master: on a generic store, a badly protected file is one right-click away.
• —Automatic generation of the licence contract at the correct tier, and its archiving.
• —Delivery of heavy files: a stems ZIP quickly reaches several gigabytes, and not every store host accepts that.
• —VAT and digital sales taxes: some sellers act as the merchant of record and handle them for you, while a self-hosted store leaves them entirely on your plate.

So the right moment to make the move is not "when the commission starts annoying me", but when that same page already receives recurring traffic and you sell regularly enough that the fixed cost of a store drops below what you leave behind in commissions. Before that point, running your own store is mostly an elegant way to stop selling altogether.

07The comparison, criterion by criterion

08The maths that settles free versus paid

The question "should I take the paid plan?" has an arithmetic answer, and it depends neither on the platform nor on the year. A paid plan removes or reduces the commission in exchange for a fixed cost. The break-even point is therefore the yearly plan price divided by the free plan commission rate. Below that annual revenue, free is cheaper; above it, paid is.

Two corrections to that calculation. First: a paid plan often unlocks limits that have nothing to do with money — how many tracks stay online, which licence tiers exist, whether competitors’ adverts appear on your page. If your catalog exceeds the free cap, there is no break-even left to compute, you are past it. Second: pay monthly while your sales are irregular. An annual commitment is for revenue you already have, not revenue you hope for.

09Selling on several platforms without losing your week

Nothing stops you being on two or three marketplaces at once, as long as you are not selling exclusives. The cost is not the uploading, it is the drift: six months in, the same beat carries three slightly different titles, two inconsistent prices and an outdated cover. A buyer who finds two prices for the same track does not negotiate, they leave.

• ✓One platform is declared canonical: it is the only link that goes into your YouTube descriptions and bios. The others are safety nets, not shop windows.
• ✓Prices are identical everywhere, to the cent, including during promotions.
• ✓Titles and file names are strictly the same across platforms, otherwise you will no longer know which file matches which sale.
• ✓A tracking spreadsheet lists which exclusives were sold and on which beat. It is the only document that matters the day two platforms sell the same track exclusively.
• ✓One professional email address, the same everywhere.

10What moving costs you, and how to limit it

Switching platforms does not break your catalog — you own the files. It breaks everything that pointed at the old address: links in hundreds of YouTube descriptions, shares on social media, links a blog or a directory published, and the pages Google had indexed. Your plays, reviews and internal ranking do not transfer at all.

1. 1Never publish the platform URL itselfPublish an address you own — yourdomain.com/beats — that redirects to whichever platform you are on. The day you switch, you edit one redirect instead of reopening four hundred YouTube descriptions one by one. It is the cheapest and highest-return decision on this page, and it is taken before the first video, not after.
2. 2Export before you close, never afterBuyer list, issued licence contracts, sales history: all of it becomes unreachable the moment the account closes, including for your bookkeeping obligations. Run the export while the subscription is still active.
3. 3Keep a complete local copy of the catalogFor each beat: master, tagged preview, full-resolution cover, stems, and one spreadsheet row with the title, BPM, key, tags and prices. That file is what makes a move tedious instead of impossible.
4. 4Run both accounts in parallel for a monthLong enough to confirm that payments arrive, that file delivery works and that your links point where you think they do. Closing the old account is the last step, not the first.

11The mistakes that cost the most

• Selling the same beat exclusively on two platforms without pulling the other listings. That is the mistake that ends in a dispute, and it is nearly always accidental.
• Leaving an abandoned store online with old prices: it keeps showing up in Google and keeps selling licences you no longer honour.
• Choosing a platform on the advertised size of its marketplace, when internal discovery is almost never the source of early sales.
• Signing an annual commitment before selling anything, "for motivation". Motivation cannot be bought by subscription.
• Putting the raw platform link in every YouTube description, then discovering no tool lets you fix them in bulk.
• Not checking that the payment method works in your country until a hundred tracks are already uploaded.

12The checklist before opening an account

• ✓The payment method works in my country, and I checked withdrawal fees, not just the advertised commission.
• ✓I can export my licence contracts and my buyer list.
• ✓My licence tiers are written down before the first upload, not improvised during it.
• ✓The link I will publish is an address I own that redirects, not the platform URL.
• ✓I have decided which platform is canonical and which ones are secondary.
• ✓I can name the channel that will bring my first ten buyers. If I cannot, the platform is not my current problem.