As a beatmaker, one of the hardest things to do is finding platforms for your beats. Thankfully, it’s easier than it used to be. These days you can make money selling beats online with tons of different platforms.
In this article, we’re going to compare Airbit vs Beatstars to find out which beat store is best for selling beats online.
Both Airbit and Beatstars are online beat selling platforms that give beat producers access to a MASSIVE audience of willing buyers in the music industry. Throughout this article, we’re going to go over both Airbit and Beatstars and help you decide which of these beat selling business platforms will bring you the most value.
Airbit vs Beatstars: A Quick Overview
We’ll start off with a quick overview of each platform. From there, we’ll go into more detail on the specific features of each. Finally, we’ll get a deeper look into the stand-out features Airbit and Beatsatrs bring to the table.
Airbit
Airbit is one of the world’s most popular digital platforms when it comes to beat sales. Unlike a lot of other platforms, Airbit gives producers and beatmakers a lot of different ways to connect with lots of users and potential buyers.
It’s an older platform, but it still gets a lot of monthly users. Not only that, but Airbit also makes it easy for you to customize your experience. Likewise, it features an automated file delivery system to allow your customers an easy way to access your beats.
Still, what you’re most likely wondering about the most is the question: Is Airbit good for selling beats?
With a consumer-friendly and user-focused pricing scheme and payment plans, the answer isn’t surprising. To put things another way, don’t be surprised if an Airbit review mentions the EASE with which you make profit selling beats online with the platform.
Pros
- Keep 100% of the revenue from beat selling.
- Easy to incorporate Airbit into your social network
- Can exchange beats for a person’s email address
- Easy to run promotions and bulk discounts
Cons
- An older platform that has been around for a while
- Fewer features than newer competitors and other digital marketplaces
Beatstars
Beatstars is the newest digital marketplace for beat selling to show up. It’s also one of the biggest online platforms around. The success of this Texas-based market and hosting service has allowed it to easily gain a strong foothold among beatmakers, recording artists, producers, and other users.
This success with beat sales isn’t unwarranted either. The platform has been able to make a name for itself for good reason. Beat makers are able to sell their beats and music content with a seller-friendly and consumer-focused non-exclusive license. It’s a social platform so users are able to freely communicate with each other. This allows beat producers to sell beats and collaborate with their fellow beat makers.
Finally, the Beatstars marketplace has a large selection of monetization schemes. Up to 5 different membership plans can be created for your customers. The platform allows you to price and sell beats and content at whichever amount you believe they are worth.
A large selection of subscription plans also ensures that you and the beat producer are able to find the perfect monetization for your beat-making business.
Pros
- Large selection of payment and monetization options for your customers
- Has a large community to easily network and build connections with other beat makers
- Integrated with Printful allows producers to sell Merch
- HTML player is customizable with a lot of features
Cons
- A lot of established music producers and beatmakers make it hard to break-in
- Free subscriptions let Beatstars take 30% of the revenue from your beats
Airbit and Beatstars: Feature Comparison
Price and Affordability
Price, for both you and your customers, is paramount for any beat maker. Selling a beat for a lot doesn’t amount to much if most of the profit ends up going to the platform’s subscription instead.
Airbit
Airbit offers you a wide variety of subscription plans. Their most expensive plan lets you upload an unlimited number of beats. The mid-tier plan limits it to 50 and also allows you to upload custom voice tags. Finally, the low-end plan is free and lets you upload 10 beats with access to as many websites as you want.
Beatstars
With Beatstars, you get the choice of three tiers of plans. At the bottom, the free-tier limits you to 10 beats and blocks you from many of the features offered on the higher plans. The unlimited plan, for instance, allows you to upload as many beats as you want. You also get access to a multitude of helpful features.
Winner: Airbit
Both platform’s more costly plans are of similar quality. The tie-breaker ends up being the free plan. Although both platform’s free plans lack many of the features seen in the higher-tiers, the features that are there, give Airbits the winning edge.
Commission on Sales
Like sub fees, how much commission a platform takes can be a real deal-breaker when it comes to choosing a high-quality marketplace that will allow your beat business to get off the ground.
Airbit
Airbit allows beat makers to keep 100% of the revenue from their beats. That includes both of their paid plans and also their free plan. So no matter which plan you’re on, you’ll be sure that your money will end up in your pocket.
Beatstars
For their paid plans, Beatstars doesn’t take any commission. The money that your beats make is all yours. Unfortunately, users on the free plan will need to deal with a steep 30% percent commission from all income made using the platform. And that’s on top of the lack of features in the free plan too.
Winner: Airbit
Both Aritbit and Beatstars’ paid plans are commission-free. Once again, the tie-breaker falls to the free plans. And this time, the results aren’t even close. Beatstars 30% commission doesn’t compare to the amount of money you can get from your beats on Airbit. Airbit is the clear winner here, and by a long shot too.
Customization
Being able to customize how you sell goes a long way in letting your customer buy how they want. From being able to easily change the price to making it easy for customers to give you their hard-earned money — customization is king.
Airbit
Airbit gives you a lot of ways to give the customer a sense of satisfaction when buying your beats. They make it effortless to run promotions and change your prices on the fly. You can make custom coupon codes for clients and even give them bulk discounts to further increase their satisfaction with your beats.
Beatstars
Beatstars has a lot of features to make it easy to sell to your customers. You can add up to 5 different membership plans to your page. Your customers will be able to buy your beats in whichever way benefits them most. Likewise, the Beatstars HTML players are easily customizable to further allow you to give your customers ways to buy your beats.
Winner: Beatstars
This time, both Airbit and Beatstars aren’t neck-in-neck. Although being able to run promotions is great for getting that last-second sale, the amount of customization Beatstars offers means that this time the winner is Beatstars by a hair.
Ease of Payment
It doesn’t matter how good your beats are. If the customer can’t easily buy them, they won’t. The ease at which a digital marketplace makes it to buy your beats is as important as anything else, if not more so.
Airbit
With Airbit, you can easily attach the platform to your emails. You can incorporate it into your social media accounts. You can pretty much give your customers a way to buy whichever way you can think of. Airbit, overall, makes it easy to send customers directly to your beat market from anywhere.
Beatstars
Beatstars has a few ways of giving your customers access to your beats page. The platform even provides Soundcloud, YouTube, and Audiomack monetization. The big one, however, is their HTML player. Easily embedded in any website, this player acts as an easily accessible storefront for your customers. If you can embed it, they can buy it.
Winner: Beatstars
Again, the clear winner here is Beatstars. The amount of ways the platform gives you to monetize isn’t something to gloss over. The big one, however, is their HTML platform. Giving your customers direct access to your storefront is a massive boon when it comes to getting that sale.
Marketing Features
You have your beat and you know who your customer is. But does your customer know who you are? Any digital marketplace worth its salt will give you ways to more easily market to both your customers and your potential audience.
Airbit
Airbit makes it easy to get new YouTube subscribers. It makes it easy to get new followers on your social media accounts. Even email collection is easy with Airbit.
How?
It’s easy because it allows you to exchange your beats for free. Airbit makes it easy to trade a beat for a person subscribing to you on YouTube. It makes it easy for a customer to give you their email address in exchange for a beat.
Overall, it helps you to build a strong relationship with your customers.
Beatstars
When it comes to marketing, Beatstars has quite a few ways to go about it. It allows you to embed widgets into your blog or website. These let you easily share your beats with your customers. Beatstars social platform also lets you network with fellow beat makers.
And finally, the HTML player can also act as a marketing tool by letting your customers lease beats, make offers or download free beats.
Winner: Airbit
It’s hard not to see the clear winner here. Sure, Beatstars provides you with a nice set of features to market your beats. But in the end, Airbit gets ahead with the number of useful features it provides instead. It’s especially true when it comes to social media.
Misc. Features
Some features aren’t easy to label. At the same time, these features can give you the edge you need to make your beats sell. Other features you can live without, but they can still make your life easier.
Airbit
Airbit allows you to add vocal tags to your beats. More than that, however, the platform makes it easy to add these tags to all your beats. Likewise, you can also easily change your vocal tags. Vocal tags are an important aspect of beat making and being able to apply them to all your beats is a welcome feature to have.
Beatstars
Any Beatstars review will tell you that Beatstars brings a lot to the table. Those same Beatstars review will also mention the lack of any smaller, quality-of-life features that the platform has.
Unfortunately, they aren’t wrong. Beatstars gives beat makers and music producers a lot of ways to sell and market their beats. They’re great at what they do, but that’s all they do.
Winner: Airbit
This time the winner is Airbit by a landslide. Vocal tags are an important feature for any up-and-coming beat maker. Any quality of life feature that makes it easier is worth the price. Although Beatstars also gives you ways to deal with vocal tags, they just don’t compare to what Airbit can give you.
Notable Features
Is Airbit good for selling beats? What about Beatstars? The features each brings goes a long way in making each platform a great place to sell beats online.
Both Airbit and Beatstars, however, have features that make them stand out from other beat-selling marketplaces. These are stand-out features that other platforms don’t have, or are of poor quality.
In the case of Airbit vs Beatstars, each brings to the field something that the other doesn’t.
Airbit
Airbit has quite a few stand-out features. But to make it fair, we’ll only focus on the biggest feature that any Airbit review worth its salt will mention.
Airbit’s ease of use.
More than anything else, Airbit makes it extremely easy for you to sell beats online. Everything from the design of the beat-selling platform to the different ways you can sell beats online — they all combine to form a beat-selling platform that is easy to use any way you look at it.
Even the built-in player is easy to use and helps Airbit to have a very good conversion rate. When you add in everything else that Airbit has, you have a very good deal in your beat-selling hands.
Beatstars
If there is one thing Beatstars is great at, it’s being able to let you monetize any way you want. From YouTube views to SoundCloud streams, Beatstars lets you sell beats any way you want. Combine that with a flashy player that is stylish to look at and you can easily convert your beats into money.
Airbit vs Beatstars: The Final Verdict
Both beat-selling platforms give you a multitude of ways to make money selling beats online. Depending on your needs as a beat producer, each provides ways to make your life easier.
Use Airbit If:
- You’re a newer music producer or beat maker
- You need social media, email, or website integration
- You wish to test the waters and sell beats online with a free plan while still being able to keep 100% of any revenue you make
Use Beatstars If:
- You’re a bigger producer with a large budget for advertising
- You need YouTube, Soundcloud or Audiomack integration
- You’re looking for a social media platform to network with other beat makers and producers
At the same time, there’s no reason to make this a battle of Airbit vs Beatstars.
Another valid option is to start with Airbit to build a base and get a few sales along the way. Build up your reputation and a marketing email list by giving away free beats and create a strong marketing funnel for your customers.
Once you’ve built up a decent base, move on to Beatstars, and use your large budget to grow your audience and your income.
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Changelog:
April 03, 2022 – Minor content edits
