Boost Collective Alternative: Infrastructure for Labels and Rosters

Short answer: Boost Collective sells promotion, and distribution rides inside the subscription that sells it. Their help centre defines Boost Collective Pro as their “premier subscription” for “music distribution functionality and music promotion perks”. LabelGrid sells the infrastructure a label, a roster or a platform runs on. For an artist buying a playlist campaign and putting out their own single, Pro is built for exactly that and LabelGrid is not. Their pricing and legal pages did not load for us on 23 September 2026, so this page compares only what their public help centre publishes.

Their help centre, read 23 September 2026, states that on cancelling Pro “Any music you distributed through your Boost Collective account will be taken down from all stores and platforms”, with link-in-bio links stopping and earnings and trends analytics hidden. LabelGrid is no sanctuary from that risk: if a subscription lapses or expires for more than 60 days without renewal, or the subscription fee goes unpaid, we may remove or withdraw the content and may suspend or terminate the account, on any plan. The difference is a grace period and a modal, 60 days and “may” against immediate and “will”, and it is worth knowing before you build a catalogue on either.

Products on one backend

DDEX ERN versions

Yours on your own DSP deals, on Custom Distribution and the API tiers

Free-trial days on self-serve distribution plans

Every Boost Collective value below comes from their own public help centre, linked beneath the table with the date we read it. Thirteen further pages on their marketing site, pricing and the distribution agreement among them, returned HTTP 429 behind a security checkpoint that day, so anything those pages would answer is missing from this comparison rather than settled by it. Where our own published material says nothing about a dimension, the row is left out instead of filled in from one side.

Each of the 7 Boost Collective values above is sourced from their own published pages, read 2026-09-23: help.boost-collective.com/hc/en-us/articles/20263712164763-Can-I-get-Youtube-Content-ID-for-my-release, help.boost-collective.com/hc/en-us/articles/20762464176411-All-about-royalty-payouts-how-to-withdraw-your-earnings, help.boost-collective.com/hc/en-us/articles/27166798220187-What-is-Boost-Collective-Pro, help.boost-collective.com/hc/en-us/articles/27168628923163-What-happens-when-I-cancel-my-Boost-Collective-Pro-subscription. Dimensions we could not source from one of their primary pages are omitted rather than guessed.

Their help centre describes the Pro trial as something a customer “may receive … when you purchase a music promotion campaign”. Keep their modal in mind. The trial they publish is contingent on buying a campaign, and their signup flow sits on the marketing pages that did not load for us, so whatever else that funnel offers is unread here rather than absent.

LabelGrid’s self-serve distribution plans start with a 7-day free trial that is attached to no purchase. You can also read the commercial shape of the whole thing first: every distribution plan and every API tier price is published on the pricing page, and the Engine API documentation reads without a login, so you can size the integration work before you spend anything.

The limit, stated plainly. That trial covers self-serve distribution only. It opens neither API nor sandbox access; the sandbox is enabled once a paid API plan is active rather than before you buy, and Custom Distribution, Custom API and Imprint are scoped and quoted per deal rather than sold from a price list.

Free trial

Self-serve distribution plans start with a 7-day free trial, attached to no purchase.

Published prices

Every distribution plan and API tier price sits on our pricing page, with no form in front of it.

Public API docs

The Engine API documentation reads without a login, before any conversation with us.

Sandbox timing

The sandbox opens once a paid API plan is active, and the free trial does not include it.

LabelGrid Tools, our plugin in the WordPress directory, syncs releases, artists and download gates into your own site every six hours and builds release landing pages, Spotify pre-saves and gated downloads on your domain. Every LabelGrid account can use it at no extra cost and it needs no API plan. For accounts on an API tier, our MCP server is MIT-licensed on npm and listed on the public MCP registry, and the companion CLI wraps the same public API.

Concede the obvious one first. Their Pro inclusion list carries “Distribute unlimited releases” and “Unlimited artists”. LabelGrid self-serve plans are metered instead: a track limit and a label limit size the plan, Solo and Basic move up a tier when they reach theirs, Pro adds $0.15 per track a year above its limit, and Custom Distribution starts at 2,000 tracks, raised in the deal up to unlimited, with a $0.25 per track a year overage up to 10,000 tracks. For one artist with three singles a meter reads as the worse deal. For a roster of four thousand tracks it reads as a bill you can forecast, because the figure is published and the overage is per unit rather than a share of what you earn.

Label limits are the second meter: one label on Solo, three on Basic, five on Pro and fifty on Custom Distribution. Each label carries its own logo, default genres, P-line and C-line, outlet settings and its own line on the royalty statement. Automated royalty splits and per-artist statements run from Basic up, and Solo carries neither. Every distribution plan includes manual review of each release for quality, metadata and rights before delivery unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals, Dolby Atmos and hi-res masters at no extra charge, ISRC and UPC codes at no extra cost, and YouTube Content ID registration.

Retention by plan

You keep 85% of standard-DSP royalties on Solo, 85% on Basic and 90% on Pro.

Content ID share

On a distribution plan you keep 80% of the Content ID and UGC revenue LabelGrid’s own deals earn, the same 80% Boost Collective publishes.

Splits and statements

Automated splits and per-artist statements run from Basic up; Solo carries neither.

Release review

Every release on a distribution plan is reviewed before delivery unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals.

Once your customers need their own logins, their own branding and their own statements, the question stops being which subscription to buy and becomes what your accounts are shaped like.

Their help centre, read 23 September 2026, describes Pro as one artist’s subscription with a link-in-bio artist website builder, and the free account as a place to buy promotion campaigns and view order history. Their distribution product pages and their pricing did not load for us that day, so we are not going to characterise what Boost Collective does or does not put in front of a reseller. Ask them, and hold the answer next to what follows.

Imprint is the LabelGrid white-label portal: your brand on your own domain, with every end customer in a workspace of its own rather than a row inside your account. Each workspace has its own logins, and an artist who wants their own label can sign up on your domain and become their own end customer. Imprint is scoped and quoted at onboarding, and it runs on the same backend as the rest of this.

The published plans are the floor of a conversation rather than its ceiling. A custom deal is normally for a business the published ceilings do not fit: too many tracks, too many labels, or too much monthly royalty income for a listed tier. Caps, platform fees and bespoke packaging are negotiable, and bulk label pricing for an operation running thousands of single-label artists is a familiar shape. The negotiated numbers stay between us and that customer.

One thing our model costs you, since you should hear it from us. A LabelGrid label is a catalogue container with its own settings and statement lines, not a supervised tier of artist accounts. If every artist has to hold their own login, that is an end-customer workspace in Imprint or on an API tier, and it is priced on a different ladder.

Engine is the LabelGrid public API, documented openly without a login, on four tiers: Starter API, Growth API, Scale API and Custom API. What those tiers meter is not your own labels but your end-customer portals, at five on Starter API, twenty-five on Growth API, one hundred on Scale API and unlimited on Custom API. That is a different meter from the label limit on a distribution plan, and treating the two as one number is the quickest way to buy the wrong tier.

The second meter is a monthly cap on royalties processed, measured in US dollars: $35,000 on Starter API, $115,000 on Growth API and $350,000 on Scale API. Sustained excess starts a tier conversation rather than an overage charge. On every API tier and on Custom Distribution you keep 95% of standard-DSP royalties earned through LabelGrid’s deals, and you keep 100% of what you earn on your own direct DSP deals or your own Merlin membership through SOBO, which Custom Distribution and the API tiers carry and the self-serve plans do not.

DDEX ERN import, either a one-time catalogue load or a continuous feed over SFTP or S3, runs on the API plans and on Custom Distribution, and not on Solo, Basic or Pro. We support ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 in both directions. The sandbox is enabled when the paid plan goes active.

Portals per tier

Five on Starter API, twenty-five on Growth, one hundred on Scale, unlimited on Custom API.

Royalty cap

Royalties processed per month: $35,000 Starter API, $115,000 Growth API, $350,000 Scale API.

DDEX ERN import

ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2, on the API plans and on Custom Distribution.

Open tooling

An MIT-licensed MCP server on npm and a companion CLI, both on the same public API.

Three axes go their way, and the first of them runs straight against our own published numbers.

Their Pro inclusion list publishes “Keep 100% of all your earnings”. A customer on LabelGrid keeps 85% of standard-DSP royalties on Solo, 85% on Basic and 90% on Pro. Our 95% and 100% rates belong to Custom Distribution and the API tiers, which is not what a self-releasing artist buys. On their published figure, an artist putting out their own music keeps more of their DSP royalties there than on any LabelGrid self-serve plan.

Their Pro list carries “Distribute unlimited releases” and “Unlimited artists”. Ours are counted, with a track limit and a label limit on every self-serve plan and per-track overages on Pro and Custom Distribution. If you release often and you would rather never think about a meter again, an uncounted allowance is simply the better fit, and no amount of forecasting language from us changes that.

Their payout article publishes the withdrawal thresholds: USD $25 for PayPal and USD $50 for bank transfer, with identity verification prompted at the point of withdrawal. LabelGrid may require a minimum payout threshold as well, and ours is shown in the dashboard rather than published anywhere. They are the transparent one on that axis. What we publish instead is the price of every distribution plan and API tier, which is a different kind of openness and not an answer to theirs.

We keep this section in every comparison we publish; a comparison you cannot trust is worth nothing.

Choose Boost Collective if you are one artist releasing your own music and promotion is the thing you actually want to buy. Choose them if a campaign, a link-in-bio page and a distribution route inside one subscription describes your month. Choose them if an uncounted release allowance matters more to you than a forecastable bill, or if a published withdrawal threshold is the number you want to see before you sign up at all.

The honest test is what you are running rather than what you feel about either company. One artist and one catalogue is a consumer purchase, and their product is built for it. Several labels, collaborators who need paying every month, or a platform that has to create releases from your own software is an infrastructure purchase, and that is the whole of what we sell.

Several labels

You run more than one label and want each to hold its own settings and statement lines.

Collaborators to pay

You need automated splits and per-artist statements, which run from Basic up and on every API tier.

Your own product

You want releases created from your software through a documented API on published tiers.

Direct deals of yours

You keep 100% of what you earn on your own deals or SOBO, on Custom Distribution and the API tiers.

Ask these of us, of Boost Collective, and of whoever else is on your list. The answers will tell you more than any comparison table, this one included.

01Ask what moves the bill as you grow. Does the price step with catalogue size on a published ladder, or does the share of your royalties change, and if a share is quoted, what exactly is it a share of?

02Ask whether you can read the full price before anyone knows your name, for every tier including the largest, and whether the figure on screen is the yearly price you will actually pay or a monthly equivalent of it.

03Ask whether a person reviews each release for metadata, rights and audio before it reaches the stores, whether that review costs extra, and what happens to a release that fails it.

04Ask what happens to your catalogue if you stop paying: how long the grace period runs, whether the takedown is discretionary or automatic, and whether your links and your analytics survive it.

05Ask which DDEX ERN versions the platform supports in each direction, whether catalogue import is available on the plan you are looking at, and what enabling an SFTP or S3 feed costs the first time.

06Ask whether there is a sandbox, at what point it opens relative to signing and paying, and whether the API documentation is readable by anyone before a commitment exists.

07Ask whether the AI and automation tooling is open source and installable today or described on a marketing page, then go and look it up in the package registry yourself rather than taking either answer on trust.

Every distribution plan and API tier price is published on the pricing page, and the Engine documentation reads without a login. If Imprint or a custom deal is what you need, tell us what you are running and we will scope it. Every Boost Collective value on this page comes from their public help centre, read 23 September 2026; their pricing, product and legal pages returned HTTP 429 behind a security checkpoint that day and are not represented here. If anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.