Where to Sell Beats Online: BeatStars, Airbit, SoundClick or TrakTrain

Sooner or later every producer asks the same thing: where to sell beats online without giving away half of each sale. The usual answer is a list of four marketplaces — SoundClick, BeatStars, Airbit and TrakTrain — and a table of commissions. The problem is that the table stopped being true a while ago. Commissions fell, subscriptions took their place, and comparing the platforms by the percentage alone now leads you to the wrong decision.

This is the honest version: what each one takes, what it gives you back, and which one fits a catalogue like ours after eight years of selling on all four.

First, the change nobody mentions

Two years ago the maths was simple: the platform kept a slice of every sale. That is no longer the norm. Airbit dropped marketplace commission to zero in 2023, BeatStars and TrakTrain both sell at 0% commission on the seller side, and the money moved somewhere else: monthly or yearly subscriptions, and fees added on the buyer's side at checkout. SoundClick, the oldest of the four, is now the odd one out — it still takes a cut on sales unless you pay a monthly plan to reduce it.

What that means for you: a platform can advertise 0% and still be the most expensive option if you never sell enough to cover the subscription. And a platform that keeps 30% can be cheaper than a subscription if you sell two beats a year. Check both numbers, always.

SoundClick: the veteran

SoundClick has been around for close to three decades, and it shows in both directions. Its audience is real — a lot of producers and buyers still browse there out of habit — and its interface feels like it was designed in a different era. The fee structure is the old model: 30% of your sales on the free account, 10% on the Premium plan ($10/month) and 0% on the Ultimate plan ($20/month), with PayPal or Square transaction fees on top.

Who it suits: producers who already have an audience there, and anyone selling genres the big marketplaces ignore. It is also the cheapest place to be listed if you sell very little, because on a free account you pay nothing until something sells. What it does not give you is discovery: traffic is smaller than BeatStars and the algorithm is far less generous.

BeatStars: the biggest shop

BeatStars is where most buyers look first, and that is its whole argument. Seller commission is 0% on every plan, including the cheapest one. The catch sits at checkout: on Marketplace purchases the platform adds a 12% service fee to the buyer's total (you can choose to absorb it yourself instead). That fee does not apply on your own Pro Page or on embedded players. Plans run from Starter at $19.99 a year to Professional at $179.88 a year, and the paid tiers are what unlock the custom domain and the store that looks like yours instead of theirs.

What you get for it: by far the largest audience of the four, the strongest search and discovery, and contracts and delivery that work without you touching anything. What you give up: your listing lives inside a very loud marketplace, and the buyer-side fee is a small friction at the exact moment they are deciding.

Airbit: the zero-commission one

Airbit made the loudest move of the four: 0% commission on every plan, including the free one, since 2023. The free Basic tier caps you at 20 beats on your Marketplace profile; Platinum, around $19.99 a month or about $95.88 billed yearly, adds a custom domain, split payments with co-producers and YouTube Content ID support.

The honest caveat is traffic. Airbit's marketplace exists and works, but discovery there is a secondary channel compared to BeatStars — most producers use it as the store they send people to, not as the place people stumble into. If you already move your own audience from social media, that is exactly what you want. If you are hoping the platform will find buyers for you, it will not.

TrakTrain: the curated one

TrakTrain takes 0% commission on MP3 sales and lets you upload unlimited MP3s for free, with a 10 GB storage cap and three kits. The limitation is not the fee but the licence types: exclusives and the bigger licences (WAV, trackout, unlimited) need a paid plan — around $9 a month, or $19 for the unlimited tier. The only costs on top are PayPal or Stripe. They also make a point of saying they do not train AI on your music, which in 2026 is worth more than it sounds.

Who it suits: producers whose catalogue is mostly leases, and anyone who wants a smaller, curated marketplace instead of a firehose. It is also the easiest of the four to keep tidy, which matters once you are uploading beats by the hundred.

What matters more than the percentage

• Where your buyers already are. Traffic beats fee maths. A 0% platform with no visitors pays you nothing.
• Which licences you can actually sell. Leases everywhere; exclusives and trackouts depend on the plan, and an exclusive can only be sold once.
• How and when you get paid. Payout thresholds, currency and processing time decide when the money lands, not the headline commission.
• Whether the audience is yours. A mailing list or your own catalogue keeps working when an algorithm changes; a marketplace profile does not.
• The break-even. One $30 lease covers a $20 yearly plan. If you sell less than that, stay free until you do not.

So which one is the best?

If you sell: use more than one, lead with the marketplace where your buyers already search, and keep the free tiers of the rest as extra shelves. That is what we do — the same catalogue sits on all four, and the licences are the same everywhere.

And if you buy? Honestly, the best platform is the one we built ourselves. Not because of a fee table, but because you get the whole catalogue in one place, organised by style instead of by whoever paid for placement, with licences written in plain English and no hunting through four marketplaces to find the beat you heard. If you want an example of how it reads, start with a boombap instrumental or dig through the trap side. We are biased, obviously. We also had to use the other four for years to know what we wanted to fix.

Frequently asked questions

Can I sell the same beat on several platforms at once?

Yes for leases. Non-exclusive licences are exactly that: the same beat can be leased to several artists on several platforms. An exclusive is the opposite — once it is sold, it has to come down everywhere else, so keep track of which beats are still available.

Is 0% commission really free?

Rarely. The platforms that dropped commission replaced it with subscriptions or a fee added on the buyer's side, and payment processing (PayPal or Stripe) is always charged separately. Read the two lines together: what the platform keeps and what you pay to be there.

Which platform pays the most per sale?

Per sale, the ones with no seller commission and no buyer-side fee. Over a year, the one where your beats actually get found and bought. Those are two different questions, and the second one is the one that pays.

Pick the shelves, price your licences once, and let the catalogue do the rest.