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- We show you 8 of the best websites to sell and lease your music online
- Broken down into both corporate and creative opportunities
- Find out which platform is best suited to your style of production
- Also check out our ultimate guide on the best Fiverr gigs for music promotion/marketing.
Music producers today are essentially content creators. Whether they know it or not, they are creating an element that most of today’s events and content would feel empty without.
Audio is being bought and sold all around us, everywhere we look – we can literally hear the results of someone’s success. Think about your favourite film, and then think about the soundtrack. Someone got paid to make that happen.
Selling Your Beats Online (Fast)
Most veteran producers will have a back catalogue of sounds, songs, samples or tunes that they’ve made which are going nowhere, or serve no purpose to them directly, these songs are just sitting there essentially gathering digital dust on the digital shelf that is YOUR hard-drive.
Uploading these random (in your eyes useless or garbage) beats might easily net you a few hundred bucks or more per month.
Some of the websites I’ll mention in this article will be more suited towards corporate fields, while others will be more focused on selling compositions for profit to lyricists and other types of vocalists or producers.
- Corporate clients often have music prepared and may need sound effects, but in most cases, they will most likely have a reference track that they will provide to you as a guideline for what they want you to produce.
- Creative clients are more likely to be people who are solo vocalists, entrepreneurs, software developers or people who are working on a much smaller scale than say companies like Google or Microsoft.
Either way, it is important to be aware of what sort of client base you are looking for from the start, and if you cover multiple bases, then great – get yourself a free account on each of the 8 websites listed below and start hustling.
Looking to get into music production but don’t know where to begin? Start with these 5 Free DAWS.
1. Audiodraft
Audiodraft is a major player in the space and perfect for those of you looking to build a self-made audio brand in the corporate world.
Revenue Model
Prices are set individually by you, the user. However, their “Music Library” fixes prices. This contains a selection of handpicked exclusive music by their staff.
They have a pricing policy that is directly related to the duration of the license for the audio production:
- $400 – for 1 year exclusive license
- $600 – for 2 year exclusive license
- $1000 – for 5 year exclusive license
- $2000 – for perpetual exclusive license
They offer producers 70% of the revenue from the tunes sold.
Who Is Audiodraft?
Audiodraft has been around for many years and is considered one of the leading platforms for clients to source music and ideas for their more mainstream corporate and internal projects.
They are a network of 20 000 music producers, voice actors, sound designers and audio branding experts from 120+ countries.
Who Is Their Audience?
The projects found on Audiodraft are often for large clients organising events, or large tech or multimedia companies trying to source audio content for new devices or platforms. They also house producers looking for mastering engineers, vocalists looking for producers.
Audiodraft is heavily geared towards the commercial/corporate client sector.
Our Review
With over 20 000 music producers, voice actors, sound designers and audio branding experts from 120+ countries, Audiodraft have a large and already-established community for you to sell or license your beats on.
Audiodraft also opens the gateway to monetize your skills in sound design, co-production, voice acting, and more. There is money to be earned, but it will depend on how much work you put into getting verified so that you can obtain contracts with bigger clients.
2. Sellfy
For Those Who Want Full Ownership, Sellfy Lets You Manage Your Own One-Stop-Digital-Shop.
Revenue Model & Pricing
There are 3 pricing tiers: Starting Plan ($19 per month), Business ($49 per month) and Premium ($99 per month) and plans can be selected for monthly, yearly or two year (longer plans work out cheaper per month).
You set your prices, and they take 0% transaction fees across all tiers.
There’s a free trial available too.
Who Is Sellfy?
Sellfy isn’t just built for musicians and producers. It’s an e-commerce platform geared towards creators across all disciplines and fields. Similarly to Shopify, they charge a monthly fee to provide a hosted platform for you to sell your digital and physical products, including your beats.
Who Is Their Audience?
Unlike some of the other platforms on here, Sellfy does not come with its own community of buyers. Promotion is still entirely on you.
Our Review
We’re fans of Sellfy’s simplicity and no hidden fees. Simply sign up for an account, upload your beats, write a description and start getting paid.
Other neat features that we really liked:
- Detailed analytics of your customers
- Built-in email marketing
- Brand customization for your store
- Ability to embed anywhere
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Discount functionality
- Instant payouts.
While the service does not come built-in with its own community of buyers, the platform succeeds at doing one thing very well: giving you total ownership of your beats.
Think of it as a one-stop-shop exclusively for selling your beats on. If your primary focus is to have a place to host your beats on with a seamless buyer experience, Sellfy is one of the best options to sell your beats online.
As they also allow the sale of physical products, you could also use it as a place to sell your merch on too, which is a huge added bonus.
Find out more about selling beats, merchandise and other features through Sellfy here.
3. Traktrain
Perfect for music producers looking to sell their instrumentals directlyto another artist. They are home to 30,000+ registered producers and have 200,000+ beats uploaded.
Revenue Model & Pricing
Their memberships exist on a tiered basis, starting with a free basic account through to paid options of $9 and $19 a month – affording users additional benefits such as extra uploads. They offer a 0% fee on producer sales.
Who Is Traktrain?
Traktrain is a service that gives producers a huge open window into the market of vocalists and rappers out there, who are all looking for music to use in order to convey their ideas and carry their content. Trakstars is an invite-only service and requires you as a user to receive an invite from a currently signed up member, OR request an invitation using the form that can be found on their website.
Who Is Their Audience?
Traktrain boasts an audience size of 190,000+ monthly visitors per month. They are primarily focused on the Hip Hop niche, and have worked with the likes of, Lil Yachty, Young Thug, etc.
Our Review
Besides the free basic account, there are 2 plan-based options to pay for extra features like more uploads and scheduled posting of tracks. As well, it offers financial things like allowing the seller to be able to split sales between themselves and another artist.
Traktrain also allows you to modify pricing on individual tracks and gives separate leasing options to artists for stems, mp3’s, wav’s and bundles of both wav’s and stems, based on the prices you set yourself.
The FREE plan breaks down as follows; 15 track upload limit, keep 100% of your mp3 sales, keep 75% of your wav and stems sales, auto-tag your mp3’s with metadata and access to a download link.
The other two plans are 9USD per month/99USD per year, 19USD per month/204USD per year. The full listing of the 2 other membership options and their full list of benefits can be found HERE.
4. Soundclick
Soundclick is highly suited for rappers and vocalists looking to source Hip Hop oriented projects.
Revenue Model & Pricing
There are 3 tiers: Free, Silver and Gold, priced at FREE, $8, $15 per month respectively.
- Single/Album purchases: Free and Silver take a fee of 15% per single/album, while the Gold takes 0%.
- Beat Licensing: Free and Silver take a 30% fee, while Gold takes 0%.
Who Is Soundclick?
Soundclick has been around for as long as I can remember, having officially gone live in 1997. Even I have memories of perusing their offerings dating back 10+ years. Soundclick is always recognised as one of the more established ‘beat leasing’ websites, these guys have been around the block and most definitely know their business.
Who Is Their Audience?
Soundclick typically tends to cater for the Hip-Hop and rap community, with a heavy concentration of its users being rappers looking for a ‘type beat’ (Drake type beat, Lex Luger type beat, Aarab Muzik type beat, etc).
This site caters particularly well to the producer with a more mainstream focus or someone who is on-trend and interested in exploring the more modern aspects of hip-hop and trap music, although there is definitely plenty of old school MPC vibes and boom-bap for the true heads out there.
Our Review
Soundclick offers users a FREE no-obligation option to sign up, allowing the time and freedom to allow the platform to go to work for the user.
The free option allows for an unlimited number of track uploads. As a free user you are also allowed to do batch uploads, sell singles + albums, license beats, and provide instant delivery to clients via the website’s portal.
Soundclick will take a fee of 15% per single/album sold and takes 30% of overall pricing on licensing deals. Having the free account will stop you from customising your page layout, and also cause there to be ads on your page, but if that doesn’t bother you then this might potentially be the best of the free deals.
The silver package is 8USD per month and has no ads, allows for profile customisation and has a slightly larger maximum single-file upload size across the varying file types, with commissions and percentages remaining the same as the free account.
The gold account at 15USD per month is almost identical to the silver bundle, except that ALL fees and commissions are removed from all of your sales, meaning you could wind up saving money and earning more by paying for the best possible plan, depending on your success.
5. Beatstars
Beatstars is perfect for bedroom producers looking to make money via collaboration, streaming and leasing.
Revenue Model
Pro and Unlimited members keep 100% of all their music sales. Free members keep 70%.
Who is Beatstars?
Beatstars is up there as one of the best places to sell or lease your music online. Beatstars has a focus on bringing together directors, videographers, songwriters and musicians to collaborate and create.
Beatstars is also the only service in this list to offer an app and combined streaming services for artists to earn money per play by posting their finished songs and having them streamed by listeners.
Who Is Their Audience?
Beatstars was made with the intention of serving every aspect of the creative industry; proudly stating that they exist to help generate income for the writer, the performer, the beatmaker, the producer, the publisher, the videographer, etc.
Beatstars, therefore, has a much wider and less generic user base than some other leasing/selling sites. This site is more for the producer with a wider array of compositions or someone who works across multiple genres.
Our Review
Beatstars is a fantastic website for leasing and selling beats but also has a function that nothing else has had in this list so far; Streaming.
It has the option for users to sign up to sell or license their music, while also being a launch platform for singles and albums – working in a similar way to Spotify, paying the artist for downloads and individual plays or streams on their songs.
Similarly to some of the other sites on this list, Beatstars has a FREE, and then two paid options; one at 9.99USD per month and one at 19.99USD per month, with a 20% discount on the total cost if you choose to pay yearly. The full breakdown of the pricing structure can be found HERE.
6. Premium Beat
Premium Beat is suited for producers and sound designers interested in creating stock library samples and soundtracks for use in film/tv and commercial marketing projects.
Revenue Model & Pricing
There is not a lot of transparency from their end. For buyers, PremiumBeat offers two flexible license options: Standard ($49), and Premium ($199).
Currently, we are unsure of what percentage is allocated to beatmakers. It appears that they will work out a deal with you in private once you’ve submitted your music and been accepted.
Who is Premiumbeat?
Premiumbeat has been around for quite a while now. It offers its users the opportunity to take advantage of the much wider reach brought to the platform by its affiliation with Shutterstock, and it’s easily understandable ‘2 price’ licensing system.
Who Is Their Audience?
Premiumbeat has a significant network and internal infrastructure thanks to its parent company being Shutterstock.Companies such as Vogue, Amazon, Billboard, National Geographic and Google have all used Premiumbeat on their projects.
See Also
10 Best Music Promotion Services On Fiverr (Use These Gigs!)
This means your music could not only wind up being bought or leased for use, but it could wind up being used in something iconic or viral.
Our Review
Premiumbeat keeps things much simpler on the sales side by only offering two leasing options. One is 49USD and the other is 199USD – depending on whether the license is to be used locally or globally, and on what scale the content will be broadcasted. A full and detailed breakdown of the licenses and what conditions they entail can be found by clicking HERE.
As far as each of these listed websites goes, Premiumbeat is probably the best mix of corporate and creative in terms of the projects and opportunities that can be found through their website.
7. Audiojungle
Suited for producers and sound designers aiming to lease or sell stock music to a wide array of corporate and creative marketing companies.
Revenue Model
Your commission is split into 2 tiers, depending on whether you join as an exclusive or non-exclusive author.
Non-Exclusive Author Fee:55%
Exclusive Author Fee:12.5% – 37.5%
There is also the opportunity to have your % commission increased if you become a high volume seller.
They also offer a referral program that allows you to receive 30% commission for referring new customers.
Who Are Audiojungle?
Audiojungle is a part of the Envato umbrella. Similar to Shutterstock or GettyImages, Envato is what we would refer to as a ‘digital asset’ company – meaning they acquire digital assets or content such as audio, video and imagery and then sell or lease them on behalf of the producer.
Who Is Their Audience?
Audiojungle caters more towards corporate and marketing-based jobs, with a lot of the focus being on branding, sound design, foley, and other audio/visual related markets.
Currently, to date, there have been over 58 million transactions taken place through Audiojungle totaling over $800 million USD in community earnings. This demonstrates that a significant amount of money and business goes through this website.
Our Review
Audiojungle operates on a slightly different basis than the other websites, offering you the option of exclusive licensing at a higher profit margin on the uploaded content, and non-exclusive licensing at an accordingly lower profit margin, but with the exclusion of any sort of lock-in contract on any particular item of content uploaded.
Audiojungle requires the user to either set up their international taxation information or sacrifice providing that information for a 30% fee on all sales or leases. Payment is linked to PayPal and Payoneer services with and a minimum of $50USD required to withdraw and withdrawals to be requested and paid monthly.
For those using SWIFT; a minimum balance of $500USD is required before any withdrawals can be processed. This could be looked at as a positive thing in terms of the fact that when you eventually earn enough money for a withdrawal, it’ll be a pretty decent amount.
8. Pond5
Suited for musicians and producers looking to monetise their content across a wide variety of both corporate and creative client bases.
Revenue Model
Prices can be set by the user, 65% goes to the seller, 35% goes to Pond5.
Who Are Pond5?
Last but certainly NOT least on the list is Pond5, which began the first royalty-free video marketplace, specializing in the leasing and sale of stock video footage and clips.
Since receiving significant investments in the business, Pond5 rapidly expanded to audio, and remain as one of the largest and most successful stock media companies in operation. With a huge infrastructure and a massive staff, Pond5 has quickly become a mainstay in the industry.
Who Is Their Audience?
Pond5 deals more primarily with a ‘corporate audience’ and the clientele would appear to be seeking content a majority of corporate or film and tv projects, with 36 distinct categories for you to help both the artist and the buyer find what you are both looking for.
These categories include titles like; Action, Acoustic, Dark, Funny, Happy, Patriotic, World, etc.
The site strikes a balance between corporate and creative clientele, with tracks that are created to appeal to a variety of use-cases from corporate presentations, to action videos, to travel vlogs and more. This gives the seller a wider audience and exposure, and for those with multiple types or genres of content, this platform suits a variety of producers regardless of the genre.
Our Review
Pond5 is really for everyone looking to lease or sell any kind of audio content, they have the ability to broach a wide audience of both creative and corporate clients and give you the ability to set your own pricing for sales and leases, giving you more control over the perceived worth of your content, with a fairly priced service breakdown. Pond5 takes a flat rate of 35% commission on sales, meaning the more you earn, the more they earn.
Pond5 also offers its own in-house service called ‘Pond5 Publishing’, which is an optional free music publishing service that collects further performance royalties for you automatically on your behalf. Pond5 pays you on the 15th of every month when your account has reached a balance of or above $25usd and payment is available through a variety of trusted services including PayPal.
Pond5 also now offers custom extended licensing options via their online portal on an individual and personable case-to-case basis. With easy uploading and pricing interfaces, it’s no surprise that they’ve become as successful as they are.
Be warned though — Pond5 also has a thorough verification process requiring you to submit a form of photo identification.
This service definitely bears consideration when looking to profit from your content creation skills and for those ‘triple threats’ out there – the same comparative services are offered for 3D, Video and Image content, making this a very good place to set up a potential online creative content business hub.
If you want to explore more options for making money, check out Best Places To Sell Music Gear Online