Free tool
Beat licence decoder
Almost every guide to beat licensing on the internet is published by somebody selling beats. This one has none to sell. Put in what your contract actually says and it will tell you what you hold, how close you are to breaking it, and what that costs.
Get the contract out. Your licence PDF or the terms on the product page. The important values differ from producer to producer, so a tool that guessed them would be worse than useless. Anything you genuinely cannot find is worth an email to the producer, and this will tell you which ones those are.
What you bought
The name on the product page you bought from.
Marketplaces supply a template; the producer sets the numbers in it.
Optional. Used to show what upgrading would cost you later.
The limits in your contract
These are the lines that decide everything. Where your contract does not state one, say so rather than guessing, because a missing limit is a finding in itself.
Usually counted across every platform added together, not per service.
When a term ends the song is meant to come down or be relicensed.
Their share of the song, separate from the recording.
Many leases forbid it, because your claim would collide with everyone else's.
Where the song is now
Used to work out when the term expires.
Every platform added together.
Optional. Used to estimate when you would cross the limit.
Why the cap is the part that catches people
A lease is permission, not ownership. The producer keeps the instrumental and, unless you bought exclusive rights, keeps selling it to other artists for as long as they like. What you bought is the right to use it inside a set of limits, and the limit that matters most is the number of plays.
Those limits vary enormously between producers. Basic tiers commonly sit somewhere between ten thousand and a hundred thousand plays, premium tiers higher, and some producers sell unlimited tiers with no play limit at all. There is no industry standard and no default you can safely assume, which is exactly why this tool asks you for the number instead of supplying one.
Nobody emails you when you cross it. There is no counter, no warning and no automatic upgrade. The song keeps playing and the breach sits there quietly until somebody notices, which is usually the producer, and usually because the song started doing well.
What it costs to fix, and why the price moves
Upgrading a lease is a negotiation, not a checkout. The producer is not obliged to sell you the exclusive at the price on the website, and once your song is visibly working their position is stronger than it was the day you bought it. Some will honour the listed price. Some will not.
Worse, a non-exclusive beat can be sold as an exclusive to somebody else at any time. If that happens before you upgrade, the option to buy it is simply gone, and what happens to your release then depends entirely on what your licence says about existing copies.
The cheapest moment to fix a licence is before the record starts working.
What this tool cannot do
It cannot see your contract. It works from what you type in, so if you misread a clause it will confidently misread it with you. It is not legal advice and it does not replace reading the document or asking the producer a direct question in writing.
Where it says a value is not stated, that is not the tool failing. That is the finding. A licence that does not say how many plays it covers, or how long it lasts, is a licence whose most important terms are undefined, and the fix is an email to the producer asking them to put it in writing.
Sources
No figure in this tool is asserted as an industry standard, because there isn't one. The limits, the term and the shares are read from whatever you enter. The ranges described above are drawn from the licence tiers publicly listed by beat marketplaces and individual producers, all of which are selling beats, and all of which disagree with one another. Treat them as context, not as a benchmark. Checked 9 September 2026.
Found something wrong here? Tell @coolturkeyCT and it gets corrected, dated, and added to the receipts index.