How do you sell beats without BeatStars?
you have three real options: a general digital storefront, a rival beat marketplace, or a site on a domain you own with checkout in your own account. they differ less in price than producers expect and more in what you keep when you stop paying. pick on ownership, not on the headline rate.
what are the real alternatives?
three shapes, not thirty. a general digital-goods storefront such as Gumroad, which will happily sell a beat, a licence PDF and a sound kit without knowing what any of them are. a rival beat marketplace, which trades one shopfront for another. or your own site, on a domain you registered, with the checkout wired into your own payment account.
the first two are quick and the third is the only one that leaves you holding anything. Studio Raine builds the third, and still tells producers to keep a marketplace listing running while the owned property earns its audience.
what does a general storefront charge?
Gumroad charges 10% plus $0.50 per transaction on a direct sale, with no subscription underneath it. that rate covers sales through your profile or a link you send a customer, and it rises to 30% per transaction when a new customer finds you through its Discover marketplace instead. so what you pay depends entirely on who did the finding, which is the same split every marketplace makes in one form or another.
for a producer sending their own traffic, the direct rate is the one that applies. the discovery rate only ever applies to a customer you did not have.
sources, each checked on the date shown: gumroad.com/pricing (2026-09-05).
Unlike other platforms, Gumroad doesn't charge you a monthly fee. Instead, our fees are deducted as a small percentage of every sale, so we only make money when you do.
sources, each checked on the date shown: gumroad.com/pricing (2026-09-05).
what do you actually give up by leaving?
discovery, and nothing else that matters. a marketplace is a room full of people already shopping for beats, and no site of your own reproduces that on day one. what you do not give up is your catalog, your licences or your customers, provided you were collecting email addresses rather than letting the platform hold them.
the honest sequence is to add before you subtract. Studio Raine has never advised a producer to delete a listing that still brings buyers, only to stop treating it as the only door.
sources, each checked on the date shown: BeatStars help centre, Marketplace service fee (2026-09-05).
which option fits which producer?
no catalog yet, no audience yet. a Gumroad link costs nothing up front and takes 10% plus $0.50 on a direct sale, which is the cheapest way to find out whether anyone will pay you at all.
you already sell, and most buyers arrive through discovery. keep the listing, take the introductions, and start moving repeat customers onto a list and an address you control.
a real catalog, repeat buyers and licences going out every week. a site on your domain with your own checkout stops the percentage entirely and keeps the customer relationship where you can use it again.
sources, each checked on the date shown: gumroad.com/pricing (2026-09-05).
what does owning the storefront change?
who the customer belongs to. a sale on somebody else's platform is a transaction; a sale on your own site is a transaction plus an email address, a payment record and a visitor you can advertise to again. the second one compounds and the first one does not.
it also changes what happens on a bad day. terms change, rates change and categories get reorganised. a producer whose whole business is a profile page finds out about it the same morning as everyone else. rates in this post were read on the drafting day: spot an outdated number, tell the studio.
Studio Raine builds these as owned properties: the domain in the producer's name, the store on their own payment account, the licences generated per sale rather than emailed by hand. what it costs is quoted in the scope, because a forty-beat catalog and a four-hundred-beat catalog are not the same job.
none of that is an argument for deleting a marketplace account. it is an argument for the marketplace being one of several doors into a place you own, instead of the building itself.
what should a producer do first?
register the domain, before anything else. it is the cheapest part of the whole exercise and the only part that gets more expensive the longer you wait, because the name you want is being taken by somebody while the decision sits. everything else can be moved later; the address cannot be recovered once it is gone.
after that, start collecting email addresses on every sale you already make, wherever you make it. a producer who arrives at studioraine.art with a list and a domain already in hand is months ahead of one who arrives with a profile page and a screenshot of their sales.
a beat store on your own domain, with the checkout in your account and the licences generated per sale.
the questions people actually search.
best way to sell beats without beatstars?
for most producers it is a site on their own domain with a general storefront underneath it while the catalog is small. Gumroad charges 10% plus $0.50 on a direct sale with no monthly fee, which makes it a cheap way to start taking money before a full build exists. the reason to move to an owned property later is not the rate, it is that a marketplace or a storefront holds the customer relationship and you cannot advertise to a list you do not have. keep whichever marketplace still sends you buyers.
sources, each checked on the date shown: gumroad.com/pricing (2026-09-05).
is it cheaper to sell beats on my own site?
usually yes on a per-sale basis, and not immediately. an owned site removes the platform percentage entirely, so a producer paying 10% plus $0.50 per direct transaction keeps that on every future sale. against it sits the build and a payment processor's own charge, which no arrangement avoids. the crossover depends on volume rather than on principle, so the honest answer for a producer selling a handful of beats a month is that ownership is worth it for the list and the address, not for the arithmetic.
sources, each checked on the date shown: gumroad.com/pricing (2026-09-05).
should i delete my beatstars account if i build a site?
no. a marketplace listing is a discovery channel, and switching it off removes buyers who were never going to find your domain on their own. the useful change is to stop treating the profile as your only address: send new customers to your own site, collect the email on every sale, and let the marketplace do the one job it genuinely does well. Studio Raine builds owned properties on that assumption rather than asking a producer to burn a channel that still works.
what do i need before a beat store can be built?
a domain, the audio in a consistent format, the licence tiers you intend to sell, and a payment account in your own name. the licence tiers are the part producers underestimate: deciding what a lease includes, what exclusivity costs and which files each tier delivers is a business decision rather than a design one, and no build can finish without it. Studio Raine treats that set as the intake for a store engagement, which is why the work is quoted in the scope after those answers exist rather than before.
read next.
What are the BeatStars fees on a beat sale?
what BeatStars charges a producer, what it adds to the buyer's total instead, and the one place on the platform where the service fee does not apply at all.
read itDo music producers need a website?
the short answer, what a producer site does that a beat store link cannot, and three real builds: Jake Angel Beats, Mixed by Isolation, Burn County.
read it
written by Studio Raine, published september 7, 2026. the studio builds direct-to-fan platforms for record labels, their rosters and their catalogs.