Beatclub Vs. Beatstars: An Honest Review

The audio production marketplace has undoubtedly made a huge impact on the music business in the most recent years. It’s easy accessibility and lucrative rewards has caused major heads to turn and sparked the interest of many industry heavyweights. 

The latest infiltration to the market is from multi-Grammy award winning producer and artist, Timbaland. Just launching the platform in July of this year, Beatclub offers a different spin from your traditional run of the mill beat selling websites. 

Beatclub is a premier global marketplace that connects the music creator community with record labels, music publishers, film & TV, brands, content creators, and other independent artists. What makes this platform stand apart from its competitors is that it offers independent music-makers the chance to use beats made by Timbaland himself, along with other VIP producers such as Mike Will Made It, J. Cole, Mike Dean, Dallas Austin, and many others. 

Beyond their impressive roster of A-list and B-list producers who sell their personal beats on the platform, they also offer songwriting services and have multiple Grammy award winning songwriters on board their team as well. Out of all the music production eCommerce sites on the web today, no other platform has delivered such an impressive roster of partners.

However, there is a catch in order to gain access to all of Beatclub’s amazing features — you must be invited to the platform. You can request an invite yourself, but just know there is a considerable vetting process you must go through before getting approved in order to maintain the highest quality of content on the website.

But don’t let that scare you away, Beatclub is still extremely new and the invite-only creator club is currently operating in beta-testing. With so much buzz surrounding the platform so early on, the submissions and invite requests are coming in hot and probably are being worked out as we speak now. 

Even though big name musicians are the face and focus of Beatclub, they still allow thousands of bedroom producers from all over the world to sign up to be a part of this. This is what makes Beatclub so attractive to members and what makes it so unique compared to other beat selling platforms on the market.

The reason they are able to get such diverse well-known names on board is not just because it’s Timbaland’s platform, but because they’ve figured out a way for those producers to retain publishing and royalties if they want to keep royalties on a beat or sample that they’re selling. 

Therefore, the platform will allow its creators to keep 100% of their music rights and revenue, create their own terms for rates and retain their publishing splits and royalties without taking any additional income from users. Which is a much different model than some of the other leading competitors like Splice and Airbit. 

Beatclub has also implemented many other features such as an A&R portal which has attracted major labels and large scale companies like NHL, Dreamworks, Serato, Paramount and many others to do business with them. Beyond that, Timbaland uses the leverage of his platform to uplift the music community in entirety.

One of the most recent ventures was teaming up with StockX to host an exclusive charity auction for Girls Make Beats — a non-profit organization that uplifts young women who aspire to be music producers, DJs, and audio engineers. 

As we mentioned above, the platform allows creators to keep 100% of their music rights and 100% of their revenue, set their own terms for pricing and retain their publishing splits and royalties, so the money generated from the platform will all be strictly based upon those agreements. 

As far as the actual membership goes and additional fees for subscribers, the platform doesn’t take any additional income from it’s users. It is free to join as long as you’ve been invited and approved.

If you are interested in partaking in music production conversations or want to learn more about the Beatclub platform itself, you should tap into some of their informative chats on the Clubhouse app at no cost to you. Or at $5 per month you can join the Beatclub Academy — where the company founders and highly knowledgeable industry vets share the resources, guidance, and mentorship any artist or producer needs to achieve their music goals.

Even though Beatclub is extremely fresh on the scene, it is already shaping up to be the next major creative hub of the music industry. With that said, it’s got a long way to go in order to surpass its main competitor who is an extremely established music marketplace, Beatstars.

Only ten years back, selling music beats to be placed on CDs was a cumbersome process. Even after introducing file sharing, it wasn't possible to automatically send beats to the customers. You had to check who purchased your music and then manually email the audio files. Many of today’s beat-makers can’t even imagine how laborious the process used to be because thankfully advancements in technology came along to soothe this burden for future musicians. 

In 2008, Beatstars was launched by Abe Batshon and became one of the first-ever digital marketplaces to buy and sell beats. 13 years later and the company is still going strong, arguably becoming the best place to buy and sell beats online. This fully established platform is now a multi-million dollar business and the world’s #1 digital music marketplace with over 2 million users.

Just like Beatclub, Beatstars offers the ability to sell with a non-exclusive license. This means that you are not limited to selling a certain beat only once to a single artist. You can get as many artists to buy your beat as you like. This is advantageous for the producer because beats respond entirely differently under different artists. And of course, a producer can earn many times by working once for a beat.

Beatstars aim to benefit the producers to the maximum potential. It eliminates the culture and need of a middleman for a producer to sell his beat, which has excellent room for exploiting the producer. With Beatstars, producers and artists have come together on a common platform to negotiate terms and exchange work.

Among everything else, the Beatstars platform is slammed full of incredible features that really give it the step ahead of its competition. The first feature to mention is it’s Blaze Pro player. This is an embeddable and customizable stand-along music player and store where users can showcase their productions and easily convert listeners into customers. It’s format allows it to be easily plugged into certain social media platforms, blogs, and websites to make it super accessible for others to find and purchase your tracks. 

Another highly notable and newer feature of Beatstars is its distribution service. By signing up for their distribution plan at an extremely attractive $1.99 per month, Beatstars will distribute your music worldwide to over 30 different music streaming and downloading platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, YouTube, SoundCloud, Pandora, Tidal, Audiomack and more.

And the best part of this feature — they take on the hassle of collecting all of your royalties for you, but you get to keep 100% of the earnings. Pretty great right? Well it gets even better… Beatstars also allows you an unlimited number of releases, so you never have to worry about paying per track ever again.

Plus, you are also able to add collaborators to your tracks for free. They celebrate collaboration with other artists, producers, engineers, labels, managers, publishers to the extent that they even add their splits to the tracks and albums you release, then automatically pay them when your releases earn money!

If you’ve ever read any of our previous articles discussing music analytics, you know how big of a game-changer it can be to have that knowledge available to you. Most recently, Beatstars has launched an integration with Google Analytics for Pro pages and players. Users can now track music sale conversions as well as website activity, new followers, connections, top fans, listener demographics, and much more. 

Among some other great features Beatstars offers is it’s promotion services, marketing campaigns, a community forum where Beatstars members can chat and connect with one another, the Fan Connect SMS marketing integration, music publishing, mixing and songwriting services, a plethora of tutorial videos, producer tips, an informative blog, and much more. 

Beatstars lets the beat-makers keep 100% of their revenue, but this is only for those who have the Pro membership. For free users, the platform will take up a 30% commission from all the income that your beats will have generated as commission. Considering all the benefits the platform has to offer, that percentage seems to be fair.

The saying is true, you get what you pay for. If you are putting out a lot of music, it seems most logical to purchase one of their higher tier plans. Also, if your song blows up and starts generating a ton of royalties, you’ll wish you had bit the bullet sooner and opted to pay the membership fee in order to keep 100% of your earnings.

The Marketplace Plan will cost you $9.99 a month, offering a significant amount of features. Then there is the Pro Plan, which allows users to take full advantage of all the site's incredible features at $19.99 per month. There are also added features and services you can purchase aside from your monthly membership such as the Distribution plan we mentioned above, with your first month being free and then costing you only $1.99 after that. 

Beatstars is compared with other music selling platforms regarding payment methods, conversion rates, and user interface. One thing that Beatstars does the best is to help you sell your beats. Beat-makers and producers prefer Beatstars due to its extensive network of distributors and excellent user interface. They let you keep the power, allowing you to control the sale of your beats.

We hope that this review gave you a better understanding of both the Beatclub and Beatstars platforms. Each of these music selling marketplaces are highly respected in the industry and can benefit you and your future career greatly. 

If you are a producer and have a computer full of music, you should definitely be taken advantage of websites like these so you can earn revenue and get your music heard. If you request a Beatclub membership, we hope that you are accepted to this amazing and innovative platform. In the unfortunate event that you don’t get accepted, you always have the option to sell with Beatstarts — the #1 most used beat selling platform in the world.