BeatStars gives you a built-in marketplace of millions of buyers but takes a 12% service fee unless you pay for a Pro Page subscription. Airbit charges 0% commission on every plan, including the free tier, but you have to bring your own traffic to your store. The right pick depends on whether you’re counting on platform discovery or already driving your own audience from YouTube, Instagram, or type beat channels.
- What is BeatStars?
- What is Airbit?
- Pricing and commission compared
- Where BeatStars wins
- Where Airbit wins
- Which one should you choose
- FAQ
What is BeatStars?
BeatStars is a beat marketplace and licensing platform where producers upload instrumentals and sell non-exclusive, exclusive, and stem licenses directly to artists. It’s the largest platform in the space by user count, and its free Marketplace listing is how a lot of newer producers get their first sale without running any ads or building an audience first. An artist can browse by genre, mood, or BPM and land on your beat without ever having heard of you, which is the entire value of a shared marketplace over a private store.
The free plan lets you upload beats and sell through the open Marketplace, but BeatStars applies a 12% service fee on those sales. You can choose to absorb that fee yourself (you keep 88%) or pass it to the buyer at checkout (they pay 12% more, so a $30 lease becomes $33.60). To sell without that fee, on your own branded Pro Page or embedded on your own site, you need the Professional plan at $19.99 a month, or $179.88 billed annually. A cheaper Starter plan exists at $19.99 a year, but it caps you at 4 active custom licenses and 20 messages a month, and it doesn’t unlock Pro Page access, which means Starter subscribers are still capped by the same 12% service fee on every sale (source: BeatStars pricing help center).
In practice, this means the true cost of “free” on BeatStars is the 12% you or your buyer pays on every single transaction, forever, unless you’re paying the $19.99 monthly Professional fee to escape it. For a producer doing a handful of $20 to $30 leases a month, the math is close. For someone doing real volume, the Professional plan pays for itself within a few sales.
What is Airbit?
Airbit is a beat-selling platform built around your own storefront (they call it an Infinity Store) rather than a shared marketplace. You set your own licenses, contracts, and pricing, then link out to that store from wherever your audience already is, whether that’s a YouTube description, an Instagram bio, or a Linktree.
Airbit’s headline difference: 0% commission on every sale, on every plan, including the free Basic tier. That change removed a 40% commission that used to apply to free accounts as recently as 2024, and Airbit now frames zero commission as a permanent feature rather than a promotion (source: Airbit’s official announcement). The free Basic tier lets you list up to 20 beats on your Marketplace profile. The paid Platinum tier runs $19.99 a month, or roughly $7.99 a month if you pay annually (about $95.88 a year), and adds a custom domain for your store, co-producer split payments, and YouTube Content ID support (source: Airbit official site).
The catch with Airbit’s 0% commission is that it only pays off if buyers actually find your store. Airbit does have its own Marketplace profile page, but it’s a smaller pond than BeatStars, so the platform functions more like checkout infrastructure for traffic you already generated than a discovery engine in its own right.
Pricing and commission compared
| Criterion | BeatStars | Airbit |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan commission | 12% service fee on Marketplace sales | 0% commission |
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter, $19.99/year | Platinum, $7.99/month billed annually |
| Plan that removes the service fee | Professional, $19.99/month or $179.88/year | Not applicable, 0% on every plan |
| Built-in buyer traffic | Large open Marketplace, millions of monthly visitors | Marketplace profile exists but is a secondary discovery channel |
| Custom store domain | Pro Page on Professional plan | Included on Platinum |
| License and license limits on entry plan | 4 active custom licenses on Starter | 20 beats on free Basic tier |
| Co-producer splits | Available | Available on paid tiers |
| YouTube Content ID | Available through add-ons | Included on Platinum |
Verified September 2026 from the official BeatStars pricing help article and the official Airbit site. Prices and plan names change; check both platforms directly before committing to an annual plan.
Where BeatStars wins
BeatStars wins on raw discoverability. A brand new producer with zero following can list a beat on the Marketplace and get found by an artist searching tags, genres, or moods, something Airbit’s smaller storefront model doesn’t replicate. BeatStars also has the deeper ecosystem: playlist placements, a larger base of working artists, and more third-party tutorials and communities built around it, which matters if you’re learning the licensing and business side from scratch.
Where Airbit wins
Airbit wins on take-home percentage the moment you have any traffic of your own. If you’re already sending buyers to your store from a YouTube channel, Instagram, or a type beat page, 0% commission on every plan means more of every sale stays in your pocket, without paying $19.99 a month just to avoid a service fee. Airbit is the better fit for a producer who treats beat selling as owning a storefront rather than renting a space in someone else’s marketplace.
Which one should you choose
Choose BeatStars if you have no existing audience and need marketplace discovery to make your first sales, or if you want the biggest community and the most tutorials to learn from. Choose Airbit if you already drive traffic from YouTube or social and don’t want a service fee cutting into sales you generated yourself. Choose neither, at least not yet, if you haven’t finished a batch of beats worth licensing: platform choice doesn’t fix a catalog that isn’t ready to sell. That’s a production problem, and it’s usually solved by tightening your sound design and arrangement before worrying about where to list the file (see our guide on making beats that actually stand out).
Plenty of working producers run both: a free BeatStars Marketplace listing for discovery, and an Airbit store linked in their YouTube description for the audience they already built. Since neither platform locks you into exclusivity, there’s no real cost to testing both on a handful of beats before picking one to focus on.
FAQ
Is Airbit actually better than BeatStars?
Not universally. Airbit is better on commission if you already have traffic. BeatStars is better on discovery if you don’t. Neither is objectively superior; they solve different problems.
Why is Airbit’s commission lower than BeatStars’?
Airbit removed commission entirely in 2025 to compete on take-home earnings rather than marketplace size, while BeatStars still applies a 12% service fee on Marketplace sales unless you’re on the Professional plan (source: Airbit’s commission announcement).
Can I sell the same beat on both BeatStars and Airbit?
Yes, as long as you’re selling non-exclusive licenses on both, or you remove the beat from one store once you sell an exclusive license through the other. Neither platform requires exclusivity to list.
Do I need a big following to sell beats on either platform?
No for BeatStars, since the Marketplace itself brings buyers. Yes, practically, for Airbit, since its storefront model depends on you sending your own traffic.
Does the platform I sell on affect what plugins or sounds I should use?
No. Platform choice is a distribution decision, separate from production. What matters for getting beats sold is having a catalog that sounds finished and on-genre, which is a bigger factor in conversion than which storefront hosts the file. Tools like Pendora address the production side; the platforms above address distribution.
Bottom line: match the platform to your traffic, not the other way around. If you’re stacking a beat catalog worth selling on either one, browse Tiger Sounds’ drum kits and sound packs or check Pendora Lite for a lower-cost way into the same preset engine.
