How to upload beats to BeatStars

What you need before you start

Have these ready before you open the upload form. BeatStars will let you start without them, but you will lose work if you discover halfway through that your tagged version is not exported.

• Master WAV: 24-bit, 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz. This is the file paying customers will receive after a lease or exclusive.
• Tagged WAV or MP3: a separate render with your producer tag layered over the beat. This is the preview the public hears. If it does not have a producer tag, your beat will be ripped within hours.
• Stems .zip (optional but expected for higher license tiers): drums, bass, melody, FX as separate files inside a single zip.
• Cover art: 1400x1400 PNG or JPG, square, under 5 MB. BeatStars displays it in the marketplace grid, on the player widget, and inside the buyer's download. Soft or stretched art tanks click-through. If you would rather skip designing a 1400x1400 from scratch, JDTB takes one source image and renders the BeatStars cover (plus YouTube, SoundCloud, Airbit, TikTok, and Reels variants) automatically.
• BPM, key, and genre: BeatStars treats these as structured filters. Wrong key is the single most common reason a buyer requests a refund.

Step by step: uploading a beat to BeatStars

1. Open the upload form

Log in, click your avatar in the top right, and choose Upload. You can also navigate to studio.beatstars.com/upload directly. The first thing the form asks for is the audio file. Drop your tagged preview here, not the master. The master is uploaded later as part of the licensing block.

2. Fill in the basics

Title, BPM, and key are the three fields most buyers filter by. Spell the title how producers actually search: Drake Type Beat ranks better than drk_type_v3_FINAL. BPM accepts decimals; round to the nearest whole number unless your beat is genuinely between two values. Key has a dropdown of standard scales, including minor and major variants. Pick the actual key, not the relative one.

3. Tags (the chip input trap)

The tags field is the most common place to lose ranking. BeatStars uses a chip-based input: you type one tag, press Enter or Tab, and the tag becomes a coloured chip. Repeat for each tag. A lot of producers paste a comma-separated string ("trap, dark, hard, drake") and end up with one chip containing the whole string, which is unsearchable.

Aim for ten to fifteen tags. Mix three categories:

• Sound-alike tags (Drake type beat, Travis Scott type beat). These dominate BeatStars search.
• Mood and tempo tags (dark, hard, melodic, 140 bpm).
• Genre tags (trap, drill, hip hop, RnB). Keep these consistent with the genre dropdown.

4. Genre, mood, instruments

These are dropdowns. They drive the marketplace filters more than they drive search ranking, but the wrong genre will hide your beat from buyers using the filter. Pick the most specific genre that fits (Drill rather than Hip Hop if it is genuinely drill).

5. Description

BeatStars gives you a generous text field. Use it. Mention the inspiration, two or three artists who would fit, the tempo, and the mood. Buyers paste a chunk of this into Google when they want a similar beat, so the description is genuinely useful for discoverability.

6. Pricing and licensing

BeatStars defaults to a layered licensing model: Basic (MP3 lease), Premium (WAV lease), Trackouts (WAV plus stems), and Exclusive. You can edit the prices per track or set defaults in your storefront settings. The exclusive price is the one that buyers negotiate hardest, so leave headroom.

7. Master and stems upload

With pricing set, BeatStars will prompt for the actual deliverables: the untagged master WAV (Basic and Premium tiers) and the stems zip (Trackouts and Exclusive). Buyers receive these automatically after checkout, so make sure the file inside the zip is exported cleanly, named sensibly, and free of anything you would not want a stranger to see (no project files, no random samples).

8. Cover art and release date

Upload your 1400x1400 cover. The release date field controls when the listing becomes public. Leaving it as today publishes immediately. Setting it to a future date schedules the release.

9. Publish

Click Publish. BeatStars takes a few seconds to process the audio and generate the player widget. Once it is live, copy the public URL and use it as the canonical link from your YouTube description, Instagram bio, and SoundCloud track description.

Things BeatStars does not tell you on the upload form

Three behaviours of the platform are worth knowing because they are not mentioned in the BeatStars UI:

1. The first 24 hours matter for ranking. BeatStars search weights recency and engagement together. If you upload at 3am and no one sees it for a day, your beat is buried by then. Upload when your audience is active.
2. Bulk uploads are limited. Free accounts can upload a handful of tracks at a time. Pro accounts have far higher caps but still throttle if you push hundreds of files in one go.
3. Tag suggestions are biased toward popular searches. BeatStars autosuggests tags as you type. It will steer you toward high-volume artist tags. Use them, but do not let them replace specific tags that match your beat.

The faster way: skip the BeatStars upload form

Doing the BeatStars form once is fine. Doing it every release, alongside the same metadata in YouTube Studio, SoundCloud, Airbit, TikTok, and Instagram, is two to three hours per beat. Just Drop The Beat collapses that into one upload.

BeatStars has no public upload API, so JDTB drives the BeatStars upload form for you through our Chrome extension. You drop the master, the tagged preview, the stems, and a single source image into JDTB once. We render the 1400x1400 BeatStars cover, fill in the title, BPM, key, genre, mood, tags, and description, set the licensing tiers from your defaults, attach the master and stems, and publish, while fanning the same beat out to YouTube, SoundCloud, Airbit, TikTok, and Instagram. The free tier covers ten uploads a month and includes BeatStars.