UnitedMasters Alternative: Infrastructure, Not a Membership

Short answer: UnitedMasters sell a membership to an individual artist, with an artist-services relationship attached, and LabelGrid sells the infrastructure a label or a distributor runs on. If you release your own records and nobody else’s, their two published paid tiers cost less than any LabelGrid distribution plan and you keep more of your streaming money. If the releases are not all yours, you need per-artist statements, automated splits from Basic up, an API, and a workspace for every end customer once you are reselling. Every UnitedMasters value in the table below comes from one of their own published pages.

UnitedMasters publish an operating manual for their label partners, and the work in it runs through people: assets prepared in Google Drive or Dropbox, TikTok timestamps, SoundCloud mapping, YouTube OAC upgrades, VEVO merges and catalogue migrations each requested through Label Support, and the guide closes “For any additional assistance, please reach out to your UnitedMasters label representative.” The LabelGrid equivalent is programmatic: Engine, our API, with documentation you can read without a sales call, an open-source MCP server on npm, DDEX ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 deliveries, and, on Imprint and the API tiers, every end customer in a workspace of its own. Their 27 distinct captured pages, read on 23 September 2026, do not describe a developer API, a sandbox, a white-label portal or DDEX delivery, and a named representative is exactly what some labels are buying.

Products on one backend

DDEX ERN versions

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

LabelGrid fee to issue a payout

Each UnitedMasters value below is taken from one of their own published pages, linked beneath the table with the date we read them. Where the two sides are level the row says so rather than dressing it as a win, and a dimension we could not source from one of their primary pages is left out rather than guessed at.

Each of the 10 UnitedMasters values above is sourced from their own published pages, read 2026-09-23: support.unitedmasters.com/hc/en-us/articles/29986532327827-What-are-the-benefits-of-each-UnitedMasters-membership-plan, support.unitedmasters.com/hc/en-us/articles/33850141108499-Does-UnitedMasters-offer-YouTube-Content-ID, support.unitedmasters.com/hc/en-us/articles/45046692190995-Label-Partners-Distribution-Guide, unitedmasters.com/, unitedmasters.com/en/partner, unitedmasters.com/en/pricing, unitedmasters.com/en/select/split-pay, unitedmasters.com/en/terms. Dimensions we could not source from one of their primary pages are omitted rather than guessed.

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 scoped and quoted at onboarding rather than listed, so the difference is how much of the price list is public.

Published per plan

Every distribution plan and API tier carries its price on our pricing page, including the Custom and API starting points.

What you keep

You keep 85% on Solo and Basic, 90% on Pro, and 95% on Custom Distribution and the API tiers through our standard-DSP deals.

Your own deals on Custom Distribution and the API tiers

On Custom Distribution and the API tiers you keep 100% of the royalties you earn through your own direct DSP deals.

Quoted at onboarding

Imprint is scoped and quoted when you come on board rather than listed on the pricing page.

The LabelGrid WordPress plugin pulls your catalogue onto your own site, and @labelgrid/mcp and @labelgrid/cli run on the same public API. Publish a discography without exporting a spreadsheet, or ask your own AI client what the catalogue earned last quarter.

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.

Release review

A person checks quality, metadata and rights before delivery on every distribution plan, unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals.

Atmos and Hi-Res

Dolby Atmos mixes and high-resolution masters are delivered on every distribution plan at no extra charge.

Splits and statements

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

Content ID and UGC

Content ID registration is on every distribution plan, with 80% of the revenue earned through LabelGrid’s deals to the artist and a 20% fee.

Two shapes of account sit behind these two products. Theirs is one membership held by one artist; ours is flat, and on Imprint and the API tiers every end customer gets a workspace of its own, on your own brand and your own domain.

Their product is bought by the artist: DEBUT free, DEBUT+ at $19.99 a year, SELECT at $59.99, and PARTNER by invitation, with the label programme and publishing administration each entered by invitation as well. Their label site describes a full-service partnership for independent labels, with strategy, marketing and DSP relationship management from their own team. A label that wants a partner rather than a platform should read that as a reason to choose them.

On Imprint and the API tiers each end customer is a workspace of its own, holding its own login, catalogue, analytics and earnings, composed by you rather than inherited down a tree. That composition has a cost worth knowing before you buy: a label workspace does not see its artists’ workspaces, and only you, the operator, see across them. Each standard API tier can add one pack of extra label portals through support, and the tier sets the pack size: 5 on Starter, 10 on Growth, 25 on Scale. Imprint puts the whole arrangement under your own brand and domain, every end customer in a workspace of their own; it is scoped and quoted at onboarding.

The published ladder is the floor of a conversation rather than its ceiling. A custom deal is for a business that does not fit the published ceilings: too many tracks, too many labels, or more monthly royalty income than a listed tier carries. Bulk label pricing for an operation running thousands of single-label artists is a real worked example. The existence of that route is public; the numbers inside any particular deal are not.

Our shape costs you something too. You compose the accounts and you bring the artists; what we sell you is the infrastructure they run on.

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 end-customer portals rather than your own labels: 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.

Public documentation

Read the endpoints and the tier prices without a login and without a sales call first.

Sandbox with the plan

A sandbox opens once your API plan is active, rather than before you have bought anything.

DDEX ERN versions

Deliveries go out in ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2.

Open-source tooling

@labelgrid/mcp is MIT-licensed on npm and the public MCP registry, with @labelgrid/cli on the same API.

Three published terms below beat ours outright, and the three columns take them one at a time. Their published pages describe more than those three: advances and financial backing on PARTNER, eligibility on SELECT to submit for brand and sync deals they say are not guaranteed, a partner network with a creative studio, publishing administration, iOS and Android apps, and daily payouts through Real-Time Royalties on SELECT for artists earning over $20 a month. Two of those we can answer for directly: LabelGrid does not fund advances and does not offer publishing administration today.

Their paid tiers cost less than any LabelGrid distribution plan and leave you more of the streaming money: $19.99 a year on DEBUT+ with unlimited releases, $59.99 on SELECT, and 100% of the royalties earned on your music against our 85% on Solo and Basic or 90% on Pro. An artist releasing their own records is precisely the buyer that arithmetic was built for, and we would rather point at it than hope you miss it.

Their SELECT page states that Wallet carries no minimum payment threshold, which their help centre scopes to paid memberships; an unpaid account cashes out once it holds $20. Our terms reserve the right to require a minimum payout threshold, shown in the dashboard, and to carry a balance below it into a later cycle; our published payment schedule, read on 24 September 2026, says none is in effect today. Theirs is a standing commitment and ours is a present state of affairs, and for a small earner theirs is the better position to be in.

UnitedMasters refund membership purchases on a case-by-case basis, provided the request arrives within 30 days of purchase and the artist has not breached their terms of use. Our published position on standard plans is blunter than that: fees already paid for the term are not refunded. If changing your mind inside the first month is something you want protected, their policy is the more forgiving of the two.

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

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.

You run a roster

Per-artist statements and automated splits on the distribution plans, and on Imprint and the API tiers a workspace, login and catalogue for every end customer.

Building on an API

Public documentation, published tier prices, DDEX ERN deliveries, and an open-source MCP server you can read before you install it.

You resell distribution

Imprint puts every end customer in a workspace of their own, under your brand and your domain.

You want the price first

Every distribution plan and API tier is priced on the website before you speak to anyone here.

Ask these of us as readily as of anyone else. They are the questions whose answers separate two platforms that look alike on a feature list.

01Ask what moves your bill as you grow: the number of tracks, the number of labels, the monthly royalty income, or a percentage that quietly scales with your success.

02Ask whether you can read the whole price list without a call, including the tier you expect to be on in two years rather than only the one you are starting on.

03Ask whether a person reviews each release for quality, metadata and rights before delivery, whether that costs extra, and whether it happens on every plan or only the expensive ones.

04Ask what the percentage is a percentage of, and where that definition lives: on the pricing page, or inside a document you are asked to agree to later.

05Ask which DDEX ERN versions the platform delivers and to which DSP, because a partner already speaking ERN should not have to rebuild a pipeline to join.

06Ask whether there is a sandbox and at what point you get it: before you buy, once your plan is active, or after a sales conversation goes well.

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

The UnitedMasters values in the table above come from their own published pages, read on 23 September 2026 and linked beneath it. Our own ladder sits on the pricing page, Custom and API starting prices included, with Imprint scoped and quoted at onboarding. If we have a fact of yours wrong, tell us and we will correct the page.