UnitedMasters Alternative: Infrastructure, Not a Membership

Start with the part that favours them. DEBUT+ is $19.99 a year with unlimited releases, SELECT is $59.99, and on every paid tier the artist keeps 100% of the royalties earned on their music. With us you keep 85% on Solo and Basic and 90% on Pro, and 100% arrives only on Custom Distribution or an API tier, on your own direct DSP deals. For one self-releasing artist theirs is the better buy.

Neither company works for free. Their published money path runs through the membership fee, per-release purchases such as Content ID at $4.99 and mastering at $4.99 a track, a 20% share of gross Content ID royalties that matches our own 20% on revenue earned through LabelGrid's deals, with 80% to the artist, publishing administration at 80/20, and brand and sync deals brokered by a team built alongside the advertising agency Translation. Ours runs through the plan fee and the distribution share published for that plan.

What differs is how much of the ladder you can read before talking to anyone. Every LabelGrid distribution plan and API tier carries its price on the pricing page, Custom and API starting prices included, while no PARTNER, label-services or publishing-administration price appears in their 27 distinct captured pages read on 23 September 2026. Imprint, our white-label portal, is on a waiting list and scoped at onboarding rather than listed, so the difference is how much of the price list is public.

Our distribution plans are billed yearly and sized by a track limit and a label limit. Inside one: Dolby Atmos mixes and high-resolution masters at no extra charge, YouTube Content ID registration on every distribution plan, automated royalty splits and per-artist statements from Basic up and on every API tier rather than on Solo, and a person checking quality, metadata and rights before delivery unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals. Every self-serve plan opens with a seven-day free trial.

Both companies review before release, so that is not an axis. UnitedMasters sell the turnaround as a tier benefit, at two business days on SELECT and five on DEBUT+, and we publish no turnaround figure at all, which means speed is theirs to claim rather than ours. Their splits run on every paid membership and ours from Basic up: the same mechanism on both sides.

The arithmetic deserves honesty. An artist making their own records will pay less on either published UnitedMasters membership than on any LabelGrid distribution plan, and keep more of the streaming money. What our plans meter is worth reading before you buy: Pro carries a $0.15 per-track yearly overage, Custom Distribution $0.25 per track up to 10,000, and Solo and Basic move up a tier at their limits instead of charging one.

Engine is the API, and its documentation is public: the endpoints, the delivery model and the tier prices can be read before anyone knows your name. The sandbox opens once the plan is active rather than before purchase, which is worth knowing before you plan an evaluation. Deliveries go out as DDEX ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2, so a partner already speaking ERN is not rebuilding a pipeline to join.

The MCP server is open source under MIT, published on npm as @labelgrid/mcp and listed on the public MCP registry, with 30 tools across eight toolsets, and @labelgrid/cli wraps the same public API. You need an API plan, a token and Node 20 or later, and you can read the source before you install it.

Own the meters before they surprise you. On the API tiers the label limit counts the registered labels on your account: 5 on Starter, 25 on Growth, 100 on Scale, and no ceiling on Custom API. The three standard tiers also cap the royalties processed in a month, at $35,000, $115,000 or $350,000. Crossing that cap costs nothing: sustained excess starts a tier-upgrade conversation instead of an overage charge. Custom API sets its own cap with a $0.025 per-track monthly overage, and every meter here is negotiable in a custom deal.

Choose UnitedMasters if you are one artist releasing your own records and want the lowest published price with 100% of your streaming royalties on a paid tier. Choose them if you want a company that can put money behind a rollout, take your submissions for brand and sync deals and administer your publishing, and if being upstreamed to PARTNER by their artist-relations team is an outcome you are hoping for. Choose them if their iOS or Android app matters to how you work, or if daily payouts on their $59.99 SELECT tier, for artists earning over $20 a month, would change your month.

Choose LabelGrid when the releases are not all yours. A label with a roster needs per-artist statements, automated splits and deliveries in the DDEX ERN versions we support; a distributor with sub-labels or a platform pushing catalogue over an API needs a workspace for every end customer, which is what Imprint and the API tiers are. That is the layer we sell. It costs more than a yearly membership, and an artist putting out one single does not need any of it.