BeatStars Community Forum

For a community-oriented company like BeatStars, extraordinary growth can be a blessing and a curse – the blessing is being able to support the aspirations of millions of additional creators around the world, and the curse is the growing pains that come with scaling properly to provide that support. As we move aggressively forward in our mission to empower music creators worldwide, including new features and capacity to match the needs of our growing community, we’re also balancing the realities of what it takes to scale our platform at such a breathtaking pace.

Over the last few months, we have begun investing heavily in our platform to upgrade to a whole new technology stack that powers the BeatStars Marketplace and Studio. We acknowledge that this transition has caused some unacceptable product quality lapses that have let you, our community members, down. We also acknowledge that these product quality lapses have overwhelmed our support staff right when community members need answers most. Rest assured that we are fiercely committed to improving product quality going forward. In fact, we have been making fundamental changes to our product development process so that we can sustain improved product quality from now on. 

BeatStars has been blazing new trails and serving the creator community since 2008, and every year we’ve significantly increased the supply of beats on our marketplace without adding additional fees. Now, to support the stunning growth we’ve experienced over the past few years, we’ve instituted a marketplace service fee that helps us offset the costs associated with storing tens of millions of additional high definition audio files on our platform. The marketplace service fee also allows us to invest in building a world class shopping experience for everyone on our marketplace. You’ll learn more about these upgrades, and see more new features to enhance your experience, in the months to come. It is important to note that the 12% marketplace service fee, which is added to the total purchase price during the check-out process, does not apply to purchases on Pro Page sites or in Blaze players.

We’ve also heard your concerns about the elimination of Stripe as a payout option, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. PayPal remains the primary payout option where you’ll continue to keep 100% of your sales. Please note that our new PayPal integration processes credit card payments directly in the cart with collaboration payments, unlike Stripe. It also enables more payment options than Stripe (such as Venmo, Pay Later, and more global options). To be clear, customers can still purchase using a credit card even without PayPal. To learn more about the payment methods available to customers, please visit our support article here.

Finally, we’ve heard some misinterpretations regarding the pricing of our new subscription plans. To clarify, we’ve reduced the price of our former Marketplace plan, lowering the cost from $95.88 per year to just $19.99 per year, which works out to significantly less than $2 per month, while keeping all the benefits of the old plan and adding no-cost Publishing as well as Seeds by Lemonaide. Although we’ve kept the pricing of our new Professional plan the same as the former Pro Page plan, we’ve again kept all of the prior plan’s benefits while adding access to free PROkits from top producers – along with over $120 worth of value in the form of credits and discounts for Promote and Beat ID. All of this follows up on our reduction this past spring in the price of Beat ID, from $10 to just $2 per scan. We have not raised the price of any plans or features.
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Our commitment to you, the creator community, runs deeply through every member of the BeatStars organization. Your success is our success, that’s our mindset. As your collaborator and partner, we appreciate hearing from you, whether in the form of compliments or criticism. Keep sharing your concerns with us, and we’ll continue doing our best to support you. 

Thank you again for being a part of this incredible community, and allowing us to support you in your musical journey.

For more information on our new subscription plans, visit: www.beatstars.com/studio

Sincerely,

The BeatStars Team