Beats
Beat and sample licensing, read from the terms
Every answer on this page was read from the platform's own licence, terms or help centre, and where a platform publishes nothing readable the answer says UNKNOWN rather than guessing. That happens more than anyone admits: 26 of 50 answers about the 5 beat marketplaces are UNKNOWN, and only 2 of 5 publish a default licence template you can actually read.
So the honest headline is not a comparison table. It is that half of this market does not publish its own terms, and the guides that rank for these questions are written by the platforms themselves, by distributors, or by companies selling contract templates. We sell none of those.
All figures derived from the dataset at build time, read 2026-08-13. Nothing on this page is a hand-typed count.
The finding under the finding
4 of 5 marketplaces will not tell you who owns the publishing
Publishing is the single most-asked term among working producers and artists. Across the question corpus behind this desk it appears more than any other deal concept, by a distance.
Only one of the five marketplaces states a publishing convention at all. BeatStars says 50/50 composition, and says it identically for the non-exclusive and the exclusive, which means the most expensive product on the platform does not move the split. The other 4 publish nothing: not a default, not a convention, not a sentence.
That is not an oversight and it is not our gap. On three of five platforms the licence is authored by the individual producer, so there is no platform answer to publish. Which means the question "who owns the publishing on a beat I bought" has, for most of this market, no answer that exists anywhere except inside one seller's own paperwork.
The questions, answered
What each platform actually says
Each row is a question producers ask about a named platform, with the answer read from that platform's own document. Links go to the source, not to a review.
| Platform | The question | What their own terms say |
|---|---|---|
| BeatStars | Does the unlimited lease ever expire? | Yes, at ten years. It is in the default template. |
| BeatStars | Does buying the exclusive get me the publishing? | No. Composition stays 50/50, the same split as the lease. |
| BeatStars | Does the exclusive clear the beat? | No. Earlier leases survive and you waive claims against them. |
| Airbit | Is YouTube Content ID available? | Yes, live, 80/20 to the creator. It swapped sides in 2026. |
| Traktrain | Is the 0% commission permanent? | It is disclaimed inside Traktrain's own terms. |
| SoundClick | What does the free tier cost? | 30%, the highest take in this set. |
| Soundee | Does an exclusive stop earlier buyers using the beat? | No, and Soundee is the only platform here that says so. |
| Splice | Does the licence say royalty-free? | Not in the grant. Only in the marketing. |
| Loopmasters | Is the licence perpetual? | It never says so, and it is expressly revocable on breach. |
| Output Arcade | What happens to my files if I cancel? | You keep the licence and lose access to content already on your disk. |
| Tracklib | Is there an AI clause? | None at all, verified across 100,939 characters. Silence, not permission. |
| Tracklib | What does clearance actually cost? | 2 to 35% of master and publishing, forever, with six-monthly reporting. |
Check a specific tier and use → Work out your publishing split → Read the full investigation →
Across every platform
6 things that are true of the whole market
- CONTENT ID SWAPPED SIDES IN 2026. BeatStars' Content ID is DEAD (submissions closed 2025-12-08, tracks removed by 2026-01-14) while Airbit's is LIVE at 80/20. Any comparison written before 2026 has this exactly inverted, which is most of them.
- 'UNLIMITED' IS A VOLUME WORD, NOT A TIME WORD. BeatStars' unlimited lease expires at 10 years.
- THE AI CLAUSES ARE NOT EQUIVALENT. Splice: flat ban. Loopmasters: broadest, reaching 'enhancing' AI-generated content. Output: ban with a written-consent carve-out. Tracklib: no clause at all, silence, not permission.
- THE WORD 'ROYALTY-FREE' IS USUALLY IN THE MARKETING, NOT THE GRANT. Only Output Arcade puts it inside the operative sentence. Splice and Loopmasters do not.
- CANCELLING MEANS SOMETHING DIFFERENT AT EVERY SERVICE. Splice: keep everything unless you delete the account. Loopcloud: keep downloads, lose points. Arcade: keep the licence, LOSE ACCESS TO FILES ON YOUR DISK. Tracklib: keep issued licences only while you keep reporting.
- THE UNKNOWN COUNT IS THE FINDING ON BEAT MARKETPLACES. Only BeatStars and Soundee publish a readable default template. Airbit, Traktrain and SoundClick publish a UI schema or nothing, so on three of five platforms 'the platform's licence terms' is a category error.
Put it on your own site
The checker is embeddable, free, and stays free
If you run a site producers read, you can put the licence checker on it with one line of code. No signup, no API key, no tracking script on your page, and it reads your page background so it renders light or dark to match. The dataset underneath is CC-BY 4.0, so you can also just take the data and build your own.
Studio software
This desk exists because a lot of what producers and artists believe they own turns out to be leased, capped, revocable or silent in the paperwork. If you would rather own the tools as well: AutoSear is a suite of 32 studio plugins, FLWR is a DAW, and KINESIS is a lyric and music video editor. None of them is ranked, rated or compared here, and none has any position on a question this page answers.
Method and limits
Every cell sourced to the platform's OWN terms, licence template, help centre or pricing page. No blog, review or comparison site was used as the source for any cell. Where a platform publishes no answer, the cell reads UNKNOWN rather than being inferred from a competitor or from marketplace custom. Absences in the sample-service rows were confirmed by exhaustive occurrence counts across the full terms text, so they are verified absences rather than failed searches.
- Licence terms change. Every cell carries the date it was read; a stale cell here costs a reader money.
- On beat marketplaces the licence is usually SELLER-AUTHORED. Only BeatStars and Soundee publish a readable default template; Airbit, Traktrain and SoundClick largely publish only a UI schema whose values each producer fills in. So 'the platform's terms' is a category error on three of five platforms, and that is itself the finding.
- Airbit's help centre is sign-in gated and could not be read at all. That is the single largest gap in this dataset.
- BeatStars is a client-rendered SPA; its licence text is reachable only through the rendered checkout preview, not from any public help URL.
- This dataset covers what a licence GRANTS AND COSTS. It does not rank platforms or recommend one.
UNKNOWN means the platform has not published an answer. It does not mean no. Several UNKNOWN cells are probably governed by seller-set terms rather than platform policy.
Licence terms change and a stale cell here costs a reader money. Every answer carries the date it was read. If one has changed, tell us and the correction is dated and the original stays visible. Nothing on this page is affiliate-linked; outbound links to commercial parties carry rel="nofollow" so they pass no ranking benefit.