Tool

Who owns the publishing on a beat you bought?

Buying a beat and owning the song are different things, and on 4 of the 5 marketplaces we read, the platform does not tell you which you got. Only 1 publishes a composition convention at all, and it publishes the same split for the cheap licence and the expensive one.

This works out your share. Where the platform has committed to a number, it says so. Where it has not, it says that too, and tells you which words to look for in your own licence.

Read from each platform's own terms on 2026-08-13. The producer share is the only figure any platform in this set publishes.

The finding

The most-asked term in the market is the one nobody publishes

Publishing is the deal concept working producers and artists ask about more than any other. Across the question corpus behind this desk it outranks advances, recoupment and masters combined.

4 of 5 marketplaces publish nothing about it. Not a default, not a convention, not a sentence. On three of those the licence is authored by the individual producer, so there is no platform-level answer that could exist. On the others it simply is not addressed.

And the one platform that does publish a convention publishes the same split twice. BeatStars states 50/50 composition on the non-exclusive and on the exclusive alike, and its exclusive transfers the master as work-for-hire with the composition expressly excluded. So the most expensive product on the platform does not move the songwriting split at all.

The practical consequence is the one this tool exists for: for most of this market, the answer to "who owns the publishing" is not published anywhere except inside one seller's own paperwork, and the number everyone repeats is a custom rather than a term.

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Method and limits

  • The 50/50 producer split is marketplace CUSTOM, not a rule. Only 1 platform here publishes it. Where the tool applies it to a platform that publishes nothing, it says so in the result.
  • Your individual licence overrides everything on this page. A producer can write any split they like, and on three of these platforms that is exactly what happens.
  • This models the composition only. The master recording is a separate right on a separate document, and an exclusive that transfers the master often leaves the composition untouched.
  • Writer-share arithmetic assumes an even split among writers, which is the common default and is frequently not what was agreed. If your split sheet says otherwise, the split sheet wins.
  • Not legal advice. This is a reading of published terms, dated, with the unpublished parts marked as unpublished.

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