How Much Should I Charge for a Beat? Lease vs Exclusive Pricing in 2026

Beat pricing looks arbitrary from the outside, and mostly it is: producers copy whatever the last page they visited was charging. That's why you'll see the same MP3 lease at $20 and at $80 with no discernible difference in the beat. The price isn't tracking quality. It's tracking confidence.

What you're actually selling at each tier is a bundle of rights plus a bundle of files, and once you see it that way the pricing stops being guesswork.

The standard tiers, and what each one should include

• MP3 lease — $20 to $50. Tagged or untagged MP3, non-exclusive, capped distribution (commonly 5,000-10,000 streams or units), no radio, no music video or a limited one. The beat stays for sale.

• WAV lease — $50 to $150. Untagged WAV, higher or uncapped stream caps, video rights included. Still non-exclusive.

• Trackout / stems lease — $100 to $300. Individual stems so the artist can properly mix. This is the tier where a serious independent artist lands.

• Exclusive — $300 to $3,000+. The beat comes off the store. Nobody else can license it. Price varies enormously with your profile, and this is the tier where negotiation actually happens.

• Custom production — $500 and up, plus points. You're being commissioned, not shopped. Different job, different contract, and usually where producer points enter the conversation.

The cheap-lease trap

The instinct when nobody's buying is to drop the lease to $15. It rarely works, for a reason worth understanding: at $15 you have not made the beat more attractive, you have signalled that you don't rate it. Buyers of beats are buying a piece of their own record. Confidence is part of the product.

The bigger cost is downstream. A $15 non-exclusive lease sold thirty times to thirty artists means thirty records built on the same beat, each of which devalues the others, and none of which can ever be exclusively licensed for real money. You sold $450 and destroyed the asset.

If you need volume pricing, run limited-time bundles rather than permanently cutting the floor. Bundles move inventory without repricing your catalogue.

What the exclusive price should actually reflect

An exclusive isn't priced on the beat. It's priced on what you're giving up: every future lease of that beat, forever. If a beat reliably sells four WAV leases a month at $80, its exclusive floor is not $300 — you're handing over an income stream.

Producers with no lease history price exclusives at $300-500 because that's the going rate for an unknown. Producers with a track record price them at what the beat earns, and they're right to.

Every tier needs its own written terms

The single most expensive mistake in beat sales is selling tiers without a document that says what each tier permits. When an artist who bought a $30 MP3 lease has a song that takes off, the argument about stream caps and whether they owe you an upgrade is one you will lose if the only record is a PayPal receipt.

Each tier needs its own agreement stating: exclusive or not, stream and unit caps, video rights, radio and sync permissions, credit requirements, and what happens when a cap is exceeded — usually an upgrade at the difference in price.

Price it, then paper it

Musavise's agreements tool generates beat lease and exclusive agreements in plain language, with the caps and rights spelled out where a buyer will actually read them, and e-signs them free. The beat lease agreement guide walks through each clause and why it's there.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.