Producer Agreement

This page contains the three documents you accept when you apply for a producer account on thebeatbeast: the Producer Agreement itself, the KVKK personal data notice, and the long form of the content warranty you give us. Together they set out what we do for you, how you are paid, what you promise about the music you upload, and how we handle your personal data. Read them before you tick the boxes — accepting them creates a binding agreement between you and us.

Who this is between

This agreement is between thebeatbeast, an İstanbul, Türkiye–based beat and sound store ("thebeatbeast", "we", "us", "our"), and you, the individual or entity applying for or holding a producer account ("you", "the producer"). You can reach us through our Contact page.

You must be able to enter into a binding contract, and — because we must be able to document every payment we make to you under Turkish tax rules — you must be able to provide accurate identity and payment details when you ask to be paid.

This agreement sits alongside our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and License Agreement. Where this agreement and those documents differ on a producer-specific matter, this agreement controls.

What we do for you

When your application is approved, we provide the platform on which your work is published and sold. Specifically:

• Hosting and delivery — we store your masters, stems, packs and presets, generate tagged previews, and deliver the purchased files to buyers over secure, time-limited links.
• A storefront — a public producer page carrying your name, image and catalogue, with your work surfaced across the site alongside everyone else’s.
• Licensing on your behalf — we grant buyers licenses to your work, in our name and on your behalf, on the standard terms published in our License Agreement. You authorise us to do this for as long as your content is published.
• Payment collection — we take payment from buyers, issue the license document, handle the payment provider relationship, and record what you have earned.

You keep ownership of your work at all times. Nothing here transfers copyright or any other ownership interest to us. What you grant us is the non-exclusive right to host, promote, preview and license your work to buyers while it is published on the Service, together with the right to use your name, artist name, image and artwork to promote it and the Service.

We do not promise any level of sales, traffic, placement or promotion, and we may change how the catalogue is presented, ranked or merchandised at any time.

Commission

We take a commission on each sale of your work. There are two ways to hold a producer account, and you choose which one applies to you:

• Subscriber — you pay the published recurring subscription fee, and sales of your work carry the lower commission rate published for subscribed producers.
• Commission-only — you pay no recurring fee, and sales of your work carry the higher commission rate published for unsubscribed producers.

The fee and both commission rates are the values published in your studio and on the plan page at the relevant time. They are not reproduced as figures in this document, so that the document can never contradict the rate you were actually shown. If we have agreed an individually negotiated rate with you, that agreed rate applies instead of the published one.

The commission rate is fixed at the moment of each sale and is never restated afterwards. When a buyer completes a purchase, we record the rate that applied to you at that instant against that sale. If our published rates change later — in either direction — the amount recorded as owed to you for a sale already made does not move. A rate change affects only sales made after the change takes effect. This works the same way as the license terms frozen into a buyer’s license document at checkout: what was agreed at the moment of the transaction is what governs it.

Switching between the subscriber and commission-only routes takes effect going forward only, and never re-rates earnings already recorded.

Payouts

Your share of each sale is recorded as an earning as soon as the order is fulfilled. Earnings become available for payout only after the clearing period published in your studio has elapsed, which gives us time to resolve chargebacks and payment disputes. Available earnings can be paid out once your available balance reaches the published minimum payout threshold. Both the clearing period and the threshold are the values published in your studio, and we may change them prospectively.

We cannot pay you until your payout details are complete. Turkish law requires us to document each payment to you with a *gider pusulası* (expense voucher), and that document cannot be issued without all four of the following:

1. your IBAN;
2. the account holder’s full name, exactly as held by the bank;
3. your Turkish identification number (TCKN); and
4. your address.

If any of the four is missing or inaccurate, the payout is refused by our system rather than half-completed. Your balance is not lost — it simply stays with us until the details are on file. Keeping those details correct and current is your responsibility, and you are responsible for bank charges or losses caused by details you gave us incorrectly.

Payouts are made in the Service’s base currency to a bank account in your name. We may withhold a payout, in whole or in part, where an order is under dispute or reversed, where we reasonably suspect fraud or a rights problem with your content, or where the law requires us to.

Tax and withholding

You are responsible for your own tax position. Nothing in this agreement makes you our employee, partner or agent; you act as an independent supplier of the work you upload.

Where Turkish tax law requires us to apply withholding (*stopaj*) on a payment to you, we deduct it and remit it to the tax authority, and the amount you receive in your bank account is the payout amount less that deduction. Withholding is applied at payout time, at the rate in force on the day the payment is made — not at the rate that happened to be in force when the underlying sale occurred. We record the withholding rate and the amount withheld against each payout so that you have a record of it.

Withholding and commission are separate matters and are deliberately handled differently. Commission is fixed at the moment of the sale, because it is the deal you agreed to before selling. Withholding is fixed at the moment of payment, because it is tax law as it stands on the day we pay you. A change to one does not move the other. If the applicable withholding rate changes between a sale and its payout, the change affects the withholding on that payout and does not touch the commission recorded against the sale.

Nothing on this page is tax advice. If your circumstances are not straightforward — if you are registered for tax, invoicing us as a business, or resident outside Türkiye — take your own advice, and tell us, because the documentation we must issue may differ.

Your content and your warranties

This section is the long form of the content warranty you accept when you apply. It is the single most important promise you make to us, because we license your work onward to buyers in reliance on it.

What you promise

For every beat, sound pack, preset, cover image and other file you upload, you represent and warrant, on each upload and on a continuing basis, that:

• It is your own original work, created by you or by people whose contribution you have the right to exploit and who have been properly credited and paid.
• You hold all rights necessary to grant the licenses we grant to buyers on your behalf, including any rights of any co-producer, featured performer, session player, engineer or other contributor.
• It contains no uncleared samples — no recording, loop, one-shot, vocal, melody or other material taken from a third-party work unless you hold a written clearance covering the use we make of it, and no library or pack content used outside the terms of that library’s own license.
• It contains no other third-party material requiring permission — no third-party artwork, logo, trade mark, name, likeness, or AI-generated output whose terms of use you cannot satisfy.
• It is not encumbered — it is not subject to an exclusive licence, publishing commitment, label agreement or other arrangement that would conflict with selling it here.
• It is lawful — it is not defamatory, does not infringe anyone’s privacy or personality rights, and does not breach any applicable law.

If that turns out not to be true

You will indemnify us — that is, you will cover us — against any claim, demand, proceeding, damages, settlement, fine or reasonable legal cost we incur because content you uploaded breached the warranties above, or because a third party alleges that it did. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and will not settle it in a way that admits fault on your behalf without asking you first.

You will also reimburse any amounts we have to refund, credit or pay onward to buyers of that content, and any commission we have already paid you on sales of it may be reversed against your balance.

Our right to remove content

We may remove, unpublish, archive or refuse any content at any time — including on receiving a credible rights claim about it, and without waiting for that claim to be proven. We may do so before contacting you where the risk warrants it. We will tell you what was removed and why, and we will restore content if the claim is withdrawn or shown to be unfounded. We are not obliged to defend your content against a rights claim, and removing content is not an admission that a claim is correct.

Licenses already granted to buyers survive the removal of the content they cover, unless the license itself has to be withdrawn because of the rights problem.

Licensing

We license your work to buyers on the standard terms set out in our License Agreement. Beats are sold under tiered non-exclusive licenses, with the deliverables and usage limits attached to each tier published on that page. Sound packs and presets are sold under their own single-price licenses; a pack marked as a sample pack carries stricter terms.

The license terms in force at the moment of a purchase are frozen into the license document issued to that buyer. Changing your prices, your tiers or your catalogue afterwards does not alter a license already issued.

Exclusive rights are never sold self-serve. There is no exclusive tier at checkout. An exclusive sale can only begin as an enquiry, is negotiated individually, and does not happen without your agreement. Anyone claiming to have bought your work exclusively through the ordinary checkout is mistaken.

You set your own prices within any limits published for your account, and you may run sales on your own catalogue within the published maximum discount. Site-wide bundles, coupons and flash deals are ours to run; only one discount ever applies to a given line, and the commission on a discounted sale is taken on the discounted amount actually paid.

Suspension and termination

You may stop selling at any time by unpublishing your catalogue, and you may ask us to close your producer account. Closing the account does not cancel licenses already granted to buyers, and does not remove your obligations for content you have already sold.

If you are on the subscriber route and your subscription payment fails, we apply a staged lapse process rather than deleting anything abruptly:

1. After one week of non-payment, your content is archived — it disappears from the public site and can no longer be bought, but nothing is deleted.
2. After one month, the archived content is soft-deleted. It is retained internally so that it can be restored, and so that we keep the records we need for licenses already issued.
3. After three months, your producer role is removed and the account reverts to an ordinary account.

At any point in that ladder, bringing the subscription up to date stops the process. Nothing in the ladder affects earnings you have already accrued: a lapsed or terminated producer is still owed their balance, and we will pay it out once the payout conditions are met, subject to any amounts we are entitled to set off. You remain able to give us the payout details needed to be paid.

We may suspend or terminate your producer account immediately for a serious breach of this agreement — in particular a breach of the content warranties, fraud, manipulation of plays or sales, or conduct that exposes us or our buyers to legal risk.

All sales are final

The products sold here are digital files delivered immediately, so all sales are final and we do not offer buyer refunds. See our Refund Policy for the buyer-facing statement of this.

Because there are no ordinary refunds, an earning recorded against a completed sale is not later reduced by a change of mind on the buyer’s side. The exceptions are payments that are reversed against us rather than refunded by us — a chargeback, a payment provider reversal, a fraudulent order, or a sale we have to unwind because of a rights problem with the content. In those cases the corresponding earning is reversed, and if it has already been paid out, we may set the amount off against your future earnings.

We may, exceptionally and at our discretion, make a goodwill refund to a buyer — for example where a file was faulty or wrongly described. Where the cause lies with your content, the earning is reversed; where the cause lies with us, it is not.

Personal data (KVKK notice)

This section is our notice to you under the Turkish Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK, Law no. 6698). For personal data we process about buyers and visitors generally, see our Privacy Policy and Cookies + KVKK pages. As data controller (*veri sorumlusu*), thebeatbeast, İstanbul, Türkiye, processes the following personal data about you as a producer.

What we process

• Identity data — your name, artist name, and the identity details in your application.
• Contact data — your email address, and any other contact details you give us.
• Account and usage data — your login credentials in hashed form, your catalogue, your sales and earnings records, and your activity in the studio.
• Payout data — your IBAN, the account holder’s name, your Turkish identification number (TCKN) and your address, processed because we cannot document or make a payment to you without them.
• Technical data — device and browser information, and IP addresses stored only as a salted one-way hash, never in raw form, used for security, fraud prevention and de-duplicating play counts.

Why we process it, and on what basis

• To perform this agreement — running your account and storefront, publishing and licensing your work, and calculating what you are owed.
• To meet our legal obligations — issuing the tax documents for each payment to you, applying withholding, and keeping the accounting records Turkish law requires us to keep.
• For our legitimate interests — securing the platform, preventing fraud and abuse, and defending legal claims, balanced against your rights and freedoms.
• With your explicit consent where consent is the proper basis — for example marketing messages that are not necessary to run your account. Consent can be withdrawn at any time.

How it is protected

Your payout details — IBAN, account holder name, TCKN and address — are encrypted at rest using authenticated AES-GCM encryption with a key held outside the database. They are decrypted only when they are actually needed: when you view your own payout details in the studio, and when an administrator issues a payment to you. If the encryption key is unavailable, the system fails closed and refuses to read them rather than falling back to anything weaker. Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes and are never recoverable.

Who it is shared with

We share personal data only with the service providers needed to run the Service — our hosting and database provider, our object storage provider, our payment providers, and our transactional email provider — each acting on our instructions; and with public authorities where the law requires it. Some of these providers process data outside Türkiye; where that is the case we rely on the transfer mechanisms permitted under KVKK. Your public storefront, artist name and image are, by their nature, visible to everyone.

How long we keep it

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. Records of sales, licenses issued, earnings, payouts and the tax documents attached to them are kept for the retention period required by Turkish tax and commercial law, counted from the end of the relevant financial year, because we are obliged to keep them even if you close your account. Payout details are deleted or anonymised once no longer needed for a payment or its record. Hashed technical data is kept for a short operational period only.

Your rights under KVKK Article 11

Under Article 11 of KVKK you have the right to learn whether your personal data is processed; to request information about it if it is; to learn the purpose of processing and whether it is used accordingly; to know the third parties to whom it is transferred at home or abroad; to request correction if it is incomplete or inaccurate, and that any such correction be notified to those third parties; to request erasure or destruction where the grounds for processing have disappeared, and that this too be notified; to object to a result reached solely by automated analysis that is to your detriment; and to claim compensation for loss caused by unlawful processing.

Exercise any of these rights through our Contact page. We will respond within the period KVKK allows. Where a request conflicts with a record we are legally obliged to keep — a tax document, for instance — we will tell you which part we cannot action and why.

Changes to this agreement

We may update this agreement. Minor corrections — wording, typos, clarifications that do not change your rights or obligations — take effect when published.

A material change bumps the version of this agreement and requires your acceptance again. Where that happens, the next time you open your studio you will be asked to read and accept the new version, and studio functions stay unavailable until you do. We record which version you accepted and when, so that both of us can tell which text governed a given period. Sales already made continue to be governed by the version in force when they were made, and by the commission rate frozen against them.

If you do not accept a new version, you may close your producer account; we will still pay out any balance you are owed on the terms above.

General

This agreement is governed by Turkish law, and the courts and enforcement offices of İstanbul (Çağlayan) have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continues in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent; we may transfer it as part of a transfer of our business.

The Turkish text of this agreement is the operative version. The English text is provided for convenience; in the event of a discrepancy, the Turkish text prevails.