Soundrop Alternative: Label Infrastructure, Not a Per-Track Release Service

Short answer: Soundrop sells a per-track release service to self-releasing artists. You pay $4.99 per track plus 15% of the revenue those tracks earn, there is no subscription, and their homepage promises “Your songs stay up—forever”. Ours is blunter on that last point: if a LabelGrid subscription lapses for more than 60 days, we may withdraw the content, on any plan. For one artist releasing a handful of tracks, theirs is the cheaper and simpler buy. LabelGrid sells the layer a label or a distributor runs on: multi-label accounts, a documented REST API, a portal under your own brand, and automated splits with per-artist statements from Basic up and on every API tier. Every Soundrop value in the table below comes from one of their own published pages.

What does the licence cover?

The distribution licence LabelGrid takes is global and non-exclusive, so the same recording can go out through someone else at the same time, and no exclusivity survives termination. Soundrop’s grant is written the other way round: it “shall be exclusive as to the Third Party Distribution” authorised in your Soundrop account, while participation in those channels is, in their own words, “optional and based on the settings authorized by you”, and physical formats and direct-to-consumer sales sit outside the grant. On their paper the scope of that exclusivity is something you set yourself, store by store; on ours there is no exclusivity to set.

3

Products on one backend

4

DDEX ERN versions

7

Free-trial days on self-serve distribution plans

2017

Founded

SOURCED FROM THEIR PAGES

What each company publishes

Every Soundrop value below is quoted or summarised from one of their own published pages, linked beneath the table with the date we read them. Where their pages do not state a dimension, or where our own public documentation cannot answer it in kind, the row is left out rather than guessed at.

Feature LabelGrid Soundrop
What the company sells Three products on one backend: self-serve distribution, Imprint the white-label portal, and Engine the REST API. Labels per plan: Solo 1, Basic 3, Pro 5, Custom Distribution 50; on the API tiers the limit counts registered labels — 5 on Starter, 25 on Growth, 100 on Scale, unlimited on Custom API. ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 are supported. Their captured material describes a per-release artist service
What you pay and what you keep A subscription plus a share that falls as the plan rises, with every plan and API tier priced on the website: you keep 85% on Solo, 85% on Basic and 90% on Pro, and on Custom Distribution and the API tiers, which carry a yearly platform fee and a track allowance, you keep 95% of standard-DSP royalties earned through LabelGrid's deals and 100% of what you earn on your own DSP deals. Solo and Basic are the same 15% Soundrop keeps. $4.99 per track plus 15% of revenue
What it costs to start Self-serve plans start with a 7-day free trial, then the plan's subscription; there is no indefinite free tier. Free account; you pay when you distribute
If you stop paying If a subscription lapses or goes unpaid for more than 60 days, LabelGrid may remove or withdraw the content and may suspend the account, on any plan. Songs stay up with no recurring payment
YouTube Content ID Content ID and UGC revenue is split 80% to the artist with a 20% fee on the revenue LabelGrid's own deals earn — five points less than Soundrop pays through. 85% of net Content ID revenue to the artist
Splits with collaborators Automated splits from Basic up and on every API tier, with per-artist statements and payouts in the platform; Solo and GATE carry neither. Collaborator splits included at no charge
Cover songs The customer buys and holds their own licence through Easy Song Licensing, with Songfile named as an alternative; LabelGrid surfaces the link and neither obtains the licence nor pays the mechanicals. Soundrop obtains and administers the cover-song mechanical licence
What the licence covers The distribution licence LabelGrid takes is global and NON-EXCLUSIVE: the same content may be distributed elsewhere at the same time, and no exclusivity survives termination. Exclusive for the stores you switch on; you choose which
Who owns the company Label Grid, LLC, Denver, Colorado, formed 2017. Part of Downtown Music Holdings

Each of the 9 Soundrop values above is sourced from their own published pages, read 2026-09-23: soundrop.com/, soundrop.com/downtown, soundrop.com/music-services-agreement, soundrop.com/splits-licensing, support.soundrop.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005087223-Song-Licensing-What-Do-We-Cover. Dimensions we could not source from one of their primary pages are omitted rather than guessed.

HOW THE PRICE MOVES

What the price does as the catalogue grows

A per-track fee and a subscription are two different meters, and the gap between them only opens at scale. With Soundrop you pay $4.99 per track plus 15% of the revenue those tracks earn, and their own migration guide applies the same per-track fee to a catalogue you bring over: “Each track will cost $4.99 USD, and if you have covers, that’s included too.” Multiply that by a back catalogue and you get a real number. That arithmetic is ours rather than a claim of theirs, and they publish the procedure for moving out as openly as the one for moving in.

Our meter moves the other way. You keep 85% of standard-DSP royalties on Solo, 85% on Basic and 90% on Pro; on Custom Distribution and the four API tiers, which are priced as a yearly platform fee with a track allowance, you keep 95% of standard-DSP royalties earned through LabelGrid’s own deals and 100% of what you earn on your own DSP deals or your own Merlin membership. The 95% and the 100% belong to Custom Distribution and the API tiers; Solo, Basic and Pro do not carry them. Solo and Basic are the same 15% Soundrop keep, by the same mechanism, so the entry rate is not the argument. What changes is that the share rises with the plan, and the catalogue is metered by an allowance rather than priced per release: Pro charges $0.15 per track per year past its limit, Custom Distribution $0.25 up to 10,000 tracks and Custom API $0.025 per track per month, while Starter, Growth and Scale carry no track overage at all, and crossing the limit there opens a tier-upgrade conversation.

The limit, said plainly: none of this makes LabelGrid the better buy for one artist releasing a few tracks.

What you can check today

Published prices

Every distribution plan and every API tier is priced on our pricing page, Custom tiers included.

ERN versions

We support DDEX ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 for delivery on every distribution plan.

Open-source tooling

Our MCP server is MIT-licensed on npm and listed on the public MCP registry, with a companion CLI.

The licence itself

Our live Terms state that the distribution licence is non-exclusive, so you can read it before signing.

YOUR CATALOGUE, YOUR SITE

Your releases on your own domain

LabelGrid Tools is in the WordPress plugin directory, free to every account and needing no API plan: it syncs releases, artists and download gates every six hours, and builds smart-link landing pages, Spotify pre-saves and gated downloads on your own domain. For accounts on an API tier, the same landing-page and short-link endpoints sit on the public API, alongside an open-source MCP server and a companion CLI.

FOR LABELS AND ARTISTS

Running a roster on a plan

The plan you pick is sized by labels and tracks rather than by releases. Solo carries one label, Basic three, Pro five and Custom Distribution fifty, and each label holds its own logo, default genres, P-line and C-line, outlet settings and its own column on the royalty statement. Reaching the label limit on Solo, Basic or Pro moves you up a tier instead of adding a per-label charge.

Automated splits with per-artist statements and payouts run from Basic up and on every API tier, so Solo and GATE do not carry them. Dolby Atmos mixes and hi-res masters are delivered on every distribution plan and every API tier at no extra charge, ISRCs and UPCs are assigned free and stay yours if you leave, and streaming analytics is on every tier. YouTube Content ID registration is available on all distribution plans, with the artist keeping 80% of the Content ID and UGC revenue earned through LabelGrid’s deals and a 20% fee. Every release on a distribution plan is read by a person for quality, metadata and rights before it goes out, unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals, and self-serve plans open with a 7-day free trial.

What the plan decides

Labels per plan

Solo 1, Basic 3, Pro 5, Custom Distribution 50, each with its own settings and statement lines.

Royalty retention

You keep 85% on Solo, 85% on Basic, 90% on Pro, then 95% on LabelGrid’s standard-DSP deals and 100% on your own from Custom Distribution up.

Splits and statements

Automated collaborator splits and per-artist statements from Basic up and on every API tier.

Included in delivery

Dolby Atmos, hi-res masters, ISRCs and UPCs, human release review and analytics on every distribution plan and every API tier.

FOR WHITE-LABEL OPERATORS

Whose account is it?

Account structure is the part of this comparison that decides whether a platform can carry your business at all, and the two companies publish different shapes.

The artist’s own account

What Soundrop publish is an account belonging to the person who owns the music: releases priced per track, splits to collaborators, statements, and a payout threshold the artist sets. Their 17 distinct captured pages, read 23 September 2026, do not mention a white-label portal or a reseller programme, so their published material describes that single account rather than a tier of accounts somebody else administers. For an artist, one account is the right number.

A workspace per customer

Imprint is our white-label portal: your brand on your domain, with every end customer in their own workspace rather than a row inside yours. Each workspace has its own logins and the same capability as any other, composed by you rather than inherited down a tree, and an artist who wants their own label can sign up on your domain and become their own end customer. Access is by waiting list, and Imprint is scoped and quoted at onboarding rather than priced on the site.

When the ladder runs out

The published plans are a floor rather than a ceiling. Custom Distribution starts at 2,000 tracks by default and the cap is raised inside the deal; on the API tiers the published limit counts registered labels on the account, at 5, 25, 100 and unlimited, and that one number is the whole allowance rather than the first of two: each standard API tier can extend it once through support, by a pack fixed to the tier, five more on Starter, ten on Growth and twenty-five on Scale. Past that single pack the answer is the next tier or a custom deal, and custom numbers stay between us and the customer.

Our model has a cost worth naming: a label releasing only its own catalogue pays for account structure it will never use, and Solo exists for exactly that reader.

FOR API BUILDERS

Building on the distribution layer

The API documentation is public and readable without a login or a sales call, and the four API tiers are priced on the site. The sandbox is a different thing: LabelGrid enables it as part of the API upgrade, so it opens once the plan is active rather than before you buy. DDEX ERN import, either a one-time catalogue load or a continuous feed over SFTP or S3, runs on the four API tiers and on Custom Distribution, with a one-time setup fee wherever it is enabled, and it is not on Solo, Basic or Pro. The supported versions are 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 in both directions.

The meters are worth reading before you commit. Each tier carries a track limit, a label limit, and a cap on the value of royalties it processes in a month: $35,000 on Starter API, $115,000 on Growth API, $350,000 on Scale API; sustained excess opens a tier-upgrade conversation rather than an overage invoice, and Custom API sets its own cap with a per-track overage. Their 17 distinct captured pages, read 23 September 2026, contain the string “API” once, inside their Sync Distribution Addendum’s list of the contexts their licensees license music into, which is a licensing context rather than a product page of theirs.

What the API tiers carry

Public documentation

Read the endpoints and the published tier prices before anyone at LabelGrid knows your name.

Sandbox timing

The sandbox is enabled with the API upgrade, so it opens once the plan is active.

DDEX import

ERN import over SFTP or S3 on the API tiers and Custom Distribution, with a one-time setup fee.

Labels and caps

Registered labels at 5, 25, 100 or unlimited, with a monthly royalty-processing cap per tier.

WHERE SOUNDROP WINS

Where Soundrop is the better choice

Three places where their answer beats ours, and a fourth worth naming here: on cover songs Soundrop obtain the mechanical licence, notify the publishers and keep paying the mechanicals, where our customer buys and holds their own licence through Easy Song Licensing. Theirs is the more convenient side of that.

One artist, a few tracks

Their help centre states it in one line: “You pay $4.99 per track.”, with 15% of the revenue those tracks earn on top, no annual fee and, in their words, “Soundrop is not a subscription based service, so there are no recurring fees!” For someone putting up an EP and getting on with the next one, that is a smaller and simpler commitment than any LabelGrid plan, and the money only leaves when a release does.

Nothing to keep paying

Their homepage feature list reads “Your songs stay up—forever”, and with no subscription there is nothing to lapse. Ours is the blunter policy and it is ours to disclose: if a LabelGrid subscription lapses or goes unpaid for more than 60 days, we may remove or withdraw the content and may suspend the account, on any plan. An artist who wants to release once and walk away is better served by their model.

More of the Content ID money

Under their Sync Distribution Addendum the artist receives “an amount equal to eighty-five percent (85%) of the net amount attributable to the use of Your Authorized Content” for Content ID monetisation on UGC networks. With LabelGrid the artist keeps 80% of Content ID and UGC revenue, with a 20% fee on the revenue LabelGrid’s own deals earn. Eighty-five is more than eighty, and if UGC income is the thing you are optimising for, that is their row.

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

WHICH ONE FITS

Choosing between the two

Choose Soundrop if you are releasing your own music and the account only ever has to hold your catalogue. Their shape suits an artist who wants a one-off cost per track rather than a renewal date, who wants somebody else to obtain the cover-song licence and keep paying the mechanicals, who is optimising for YouTube Content ID income, or who intends to put a record out and leave it up without thinking about the platform again.

It also suits anyone who would rather settle the exclusivity question with a setting than with a clause, since their grant is exclusive only as to the distribution channels switched on in the account, and participation in those is theirs to describe as optional.

The switch is worth costing either way. Their migration guide tells you to sign the catalogue up with them first, keeping the same metadata, ISRCs and UPCs, then ask the previous distributor to issue removals, and each track carries the $4.99 fee with the 15% share applying to what it earns from then on.

Choose LabelGrid if

More than one label

You run three, five or fifty labels and need each to carry its own settings and statements.

Other people’s releases

Your customers need their own workspace and their own portal login under your brand.

Delivery by machine

You want a documented REST API on an API tier, ERN import over SFTP or S3 there or on Custom Distribution, and an open-source MCP server.

Statements across a roster

You need per-artist statements and a statement column per label, on Basic and up or on any API tier.

QUESTIONS TO ASK

Seven questions for any platform

Ask these of us as readily as of anyone else. The answers are the comparison; the marketing is not.

01Ask what the bill is metered by, whether that is releases, tracks, labels or royalties processed, and what happens at the moment you cross the meter rather than a year later.

02Ask whether you can read every price, including the largest tier, without a call or a qualification form, and whether the price you read covers the things you will actually need.

03Ask what the percentage is a percentage of, and find the sentence in the agreement that defines the base and lists what comes off it before the split is worked out.

04Ask what the licence you grant covers: whether it is exclusive, what exactly it is exclusive as to, and whether any part of it survives the day you terminate.

05Ask what happens to live releases if you stop paying, or if you stop releasing, and take the answer from the agreement rather than from a feature list.

06Ask which DDEX ERN versions the platform delivers, whether it can ingest ERN as well as send it, and what enabling ingestion costs as a one-time fee.

07Ask whether there is a sandbox, exactly when in the process it opens, and whether the tooling around the API is open source and readable before you buy.

Questions people ask

Soundrop’s Music Services Agreement is a contract with “Audio and Video Labs, Inc. dba Soundrop”, their site footer reads “©2026 Audio and Video Labs, Inc. d/b/a Soundrop.” and their legal notice gives the address as “9600 NE Cascades Pkwy Ste 180 Portland, OR 97220”. On corporate ownership their own page says “Soundrop is part of Downtown Music Holdings (Downtown)” and describes the group as “the world’s largest music services company”, which is their wording rather than ours. The agreement they publish carries “Last Updated – June 30, 2023”. LabelGrid customers contract with Label Grid, LLC, based in Denver, Colorado and formed in 2017, and LabelGrid is independently owned, with no major-label or DSP parent.

Soundrop’s help centre answers the first half: “You pay $4.99 per track.”, which their pricing page pairs with a share of the earnings, “All this for $4.99 per track, plus 15% of the revenue your tracks earn”. There is no subscription, and they state “We don’t charge any annual fees.” Their own pricing FAQ dates the current figure: “On August 1, 2025, track pricing increased from $0.99 to $4.99.”, which is worth knowing if you meet an older number in a third-party review. For one artist with a handful of tracks, that is cheaper than any LabelGrid plan. With LabelGrid you pay a subscription and keep a share that rises with the plan: you keep 85% on Solo, 85% on Basic and 90% on Pro, then 95% of standard-DSP royalties earned through LabelGrid’s deals and 100% of what you earn on your own deals from Custom Distribution and the API tiers up. Solo and Basic are the same 15% share Soundrop keep, so which is cheaper depends on how many tracks the $4.99 is multiplied by.

Monthly, on a published calendar. Soundrop “processes sales reports and creates an account statement snapshot at the beginning of each month before issuing payments in the middle of that month”, with “Payments will be made beginning on or before the 15th!” and payment following the statement email “within 1-2 days”. Payment is issued once the balance reaches a threshold the artist selects, “(minimum of $20.00)”, and their agreement fixes that floor at no less than $20. Valid tax forms must be on file: “You must also have valid tax forms on file in order to get paid.”, meaning a W-9 or the applicable W-8, which is ordinary United States withholding practice. LabelGrid pays monthly as well, on a different calendar: the statement is generated from the 21st, payment is initiated between the 3rd and the 14th of the following month, and the funds arrive 3–7 business days after that. On a floor, our Terms reserve the right to a minimum payout threshold shown in the dashboard, and as of 25 September 2026 none is set. Theirs is published and fixed where ours is discretionary, and on that the transparency is theirs. On what the share is taken from, both companies work from a figure net of the stores. Their agreement applies the percentage to “the Gross Revenue after a) the deduction of marketplace costs” and any mechanical licensing fees; LabelGrid’s accounting fees apply to net payable revenue paid to LabelGrid by the DSPs.

Soundrop, on the rate. Their Sync Distribution Addendum pays “an amount equal to eighty-five percent (85%) of the net amount attributable to the use of Your Authorized Content and actually received by us from our Licensees”; with LabelGrid the artist keeps 80% of Content ID and UGC revenue, with a 20% fee on the revenue LabelGrid’s own deals earn. Opting in with them appoints Soundrop or its licensees “the exclusive administrator of all so-called “Content ID” controls” for the term, which is how reference monetisation works: as their help centre puts it, “you can only use one company at any given time for YouTube Monetization services for a particular release”. Ownership is unaffected either way and they say so: “You always keep 100% of your rights. We just help you get paid.” Eligibility follows the same YouTube rule on both sides, exclusive rights to original content, with each company adding its own exclusions. Their page states “Public Domain and Cover Songs are not eligible and will not be delivered to YouTube.” and requires the release to be on YouTube Music; LabelGrid requires original content fully owned or controlled, so uncleared samples, unlicensed covers and type beats do not qualify.

Soundrop do the work. Their help centre says “Soundrop can help you obtain a mechanical license under U.S. copyright law, covering downloads in the United States.”, and their splits and licensing page lists securing the cover-song licence, notifying publishers and rights holders, and paying the mechanical royalties to the songs’ publishers on an ongoing basis. Two limits come from the same page: “The licenses you obtain from Soundrop are valid for releases within the United States only.”, with worldwide release needing additional agreements you arrange yourself, and “You will still need to get one through Soundrop because we aren’t able to accept outside licenses for cover songs.” With LabelGrid the arrangement is structural rather than better: when a track is marked as a cover and no licence is held, a link to Easy Song Licensing appears inside LabelGrid, with Songfile named as an alternative, and the customer buys and holds the licence and chooses its scope. On downloads their payments article also passes through the United States statutory rate, “a $0.131 mechanical royalty fee will be removed from each US download sale of a cover song with a run time of 5 minutes or less”, which is the rate the Copyright Royalty Board sets rather than a charge of theirs.

Soundrop invite you to “Get started today with a free Soundrop account.” and charge when you distribute, and because there is no subscription there is nothing to lapse. LabelGrid works the other way: self-serve plans open with a 7-day free trial and then the plan’s subscription, and there is no indefinite free tier. The consequence is ours to state plainly. If a LabelGrid subscription lapses or expires for more than 60 days without renewal, or the fee goes unpaid, LabelGrid may remove or withdraw the content and may suspend or terminate the account, on any plan. If releasing once and leaving the catalogue live without a renewal date is what you want, that is a reason to choose them.

Their grant “shall be exclusive as to the Third Party Distribution, including without limitation any service providers, distributors, social media platforms, Licensees, digital entertainment services, and other services, authorized in your Soundrop Account”, and by the same clause participation in those channels is “optional and based on the settings authorized by you”, with physical formats and direct-to-consumer sales outside it. So the exclusivity follows the stores switched on in the account. The term runs “unless and until terminated by either you or us, upon twenty-four (24) hours written notice”, sent to their support address naming the albums concerned. One consequence they state: “Any termination notice provided by you pursuant to this section shall be permanent and irreversible.”, and their cancellation FAQ restates it as not being able to redistribute the same release, with the exception that a release never delivered to stores may reuse its UPC. On timing they say “It can take up to 30 days for a release to be removed from stores, but in most cases, your release should be removed in 5-7 days.” The licence LabelGrid takes is global and non-exclusive, the same content may be distributed elsewhere at the same time, and no exclusivity survives termination. Coming off LabelGrid is self-serve rather than a notice: you deselect the outlets on the release and we send the takedowns, which typically takes 1–3 business days to reach the stores, 1–14 days for them to process it and two to three weeks to clear everywhere. That is slower than the 5–7 days they publish. Ours also comes down per release rather than per track, and it is reversible by asking support to redeliver.

Their migration guide runs in one order: sign the catalogue up with Soundrop first, where “Each track will cost $4.99 USD, and if you have covers, that’s included too” and you should “be sure to use all the same metadata, all the same ISRCs, and the same UPCs for your release”; wait for delivery; then “Contact your former distributor to issue removals (removals can take up to 30 days)”. The 15% share applies to what those tracks earn from then on. They publish the reverse procedure as openly, so the same arithmetic applies to a catalogue moving in either direction. On refunds their cancellation FAQ answers both ways: “If you are canceling because your tracks were not able to be licensed, absolutely!” and “If your tracks have been licensed, we cannot issue refunds.”, and a licensed track can be reused on another release at no new fee. LabelGrid does not refund fees already paid for a term on standard plans either, so refunds are not a reason to pick us.

Splits are included with them and described as free: “You can split royalties between multiple parties on any track. And every month your collaborators will automatically receive their share of your earnings”. LabelGrid includes automated splits with per-artist statements and payouts from Basic up and on every API tier, so our entry plan, Solo, and GATE do not carry them, which is a point for their model if splits are the reason you are shopping. On reach, their homepage names “Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, Pandora, Instagram, TikTok, and more” and their feature list includes “Automatic distribution to any new platforms we add”. LabelGrid delivers to all major DSPs, download stores and social apps, among them Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TIDAL, Deezer, TikTok and Instagram, with regional services such as Anghami, Boomplay, JioSaavn and KKBOX; a release goes to every available outlet by default and any outlet can be deselected per release.

The Downtown Music Content Policy published in their help centre, updated October 2025, prohibits “Content created wholly or primarily by AI models trained on copyright protected sound recordings without a license from the applicable copyright owners” and adds that “AI-generated content that mimics popular artists is also not permitted.”

See what it costs before you talk to us

Every distribution plan and every API tier is priced on the pricing page, the API documentation is public, and Imprint is scoped and quoted at onboarding. Each Soundrop value in the table above comes from one of the pages linked beneath it, read on 23 September 2026. If any of it is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.