On this edition of Real Reviews, we’re going to be looking at LANDR. LANDR is an auto-mastering site, distribution platform, marketplace for hiring help, sample library, plugin provider, learning course provider, whew... Can one platform do all of those things well? I’m not too sure to be honest, but LANDR does provide some really nice functionality at a decent cost. Let’s dive into it.

Full transparency - I’ve been a LANDR Studio subscriber for two years now, so I know the platform pretty well. This is my honest review. LANDR did not sponsor this post.

Automated Mastering

LANDR started off as an automated mastering service back in 2014. Given this was their first product, it’s typically what they’re known for.

Their automated mastering is simple to use. Just upload your track to their website and their product will start to analyze your track and build a custom mastering chain that best suites your track’s style.

Once it goes through that process (normally takes a minute or so), you’ll be greeted by a dialog box to make some choices. First you choose a Style: Warm, Balanced, and Open. Here’s how this differentiate according to LANDR’s site:

Warm: Vintage warmth with softer compression for thick, smooth sound.

Balanced: Controlled, with focus on balance, clarity and depth.

Open: Modern, open sound with emphasis on punch and presence.

Next, you’ll get to choose a Loudness: Low, Medium, High. Loud music sounds better, so I typically choose High, although I’ve used Medium in the past and didn’t notice that much of a difference. I would assume High might squash your track a bit more, so if you want dynamic range, I’d probably keep Medium.

Lastly, you choose a file format for your mastered track. You can choose between MP3, WAV, and HD-WAV. Some subscription plans on LANDR won’t give you unlimited WAV or HD-WAV. The plan I use gives me 60 WAV renders a year which is plenty for me. I do get unlimited MP3 renders though which is nice to just push a mix I’ve been messing with through this to see how it sounds mastered.

And you’re done! It’ll take another minute or two and then you’ll be able to listen to your track on LANDR or download it and put it anywhere.

Mastering sound quality

As for the quality of the mastering, it’s… fine. It’s not going to match the quality of a pro, but it’s honestly good enough for me.

The big downside though is that you don’t really have much control except for the ‘Style’ and ‘Loudness’ option that you pick. Compare that to something like Ozone Mastering where it can give you a good starting point and then let you tweak it to your needs.

As I was doing research for this post, I found that LANDR recently released a Mastering Plugin that looks similar to Ozone where you can make revisions and have finer control over the knobs. Pretty cool - I’ll have to dig into that a bit more.

Your choice for mastering is ultimately going to depend on your budget and your skills. You could do it all yourself, you could use an assistant like Ozone, you could hire a pro to do it, or you could use a fully automated tool like LANDR.

Distribution

The other big part of LANDR is its distribution platform. They may be known for their mastering service but the distribution is my favorite part of their service. Let’s break down the different aspects of LANDR distribution - I’ll provide some screenshots of what it looks like in the LANDR app when you release music.

Fees and Royalties

This is probably the biggest consideration when choosing your distribution platform. Some providers will charge per release, some will be subscription based, some will take a cut of your royalties, and some will do multiple of those.

For LANDR, you pretty much have any option. I’ll include screenshots of the current options as of May 2024, but please go to LANDR’s pricing page to check for yourself.

Pay per release

The first option is pay per release. This will be a one-time upfront fee plus a15% cut of your commission. This can be a great option if you don’t want a recurring payment.

Subscription Plans

LANDR also offers three different subscription plans depending on what you need. The most basic is very affordable at $23.99/year and will give you unlimited releases. If you cancel your subscription at any point, your music will remain live but I believe LANDR will then start taking a commission similar to the plan above.

Then there’s also the Studio Standard plan. This also comes with unlimited releases but includes other features like unlimited mastering, samples, plugins, and more. This is what I use and I have no complaints so far.

Distribution Reach

Not all music distributors have the same reach. Pretty much all of the players will release to the big streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music but I learned through releasing music that there are tons of other services. A huge thing to look out for is if the distributor supports social media services like Instagram and TikTok.

Here’s the major stores LANDR will distribute to:

And then there’s a slew of smaller stores also included, most of which I’ve never heard of:

All that to say - LANDR checks the boxes on distribution reach. All of this is configurable as well, you don’t have to release to all of these if you don’t want to.

Analytics

I don’t put too much stock into the analytics offering from distributors since you always have Spotify for Artists, but if you do want a single place to see stream stats from all platforms, LANDR does have some pretty basic functionality.

This screenshot will give you a quick understanding of what metrics you can slice and dice the data by (don’t roast my streaming numbers pls):

Payout Schedule

On LANDR, you can withdraw your streaming earnings at any timebut there are some gotchas. It typically takes 2-3 months for your streaming earnings to populate into LANDR. In my experience it’s been longer than that at times, so just something to be aware of. There’s a $1 fee to withdraw your earnings which isn’t too bad. I think they changed their payment provider over the last year or so because I think that number used to be higher.

Anyway, this is what you’ll see in LANDR in regard to earnings. Sorry for the humble brag of my huge streaming earnings.

Support

I can personally vouch for LANDR’s support team. My first release, I made the mistake of just letting it go live ASAP instead of scheduling a release date out into the future. I also did it at a time when there was apparently a huge backlog of music YouTube Music was working through, so it didn’t make it onto that platform until a few months later than the others.

I reached out to support during this time and they were extremely kind and understanding about my issue. Ultimately, I don’t believe it was LANDR’s fault but rather YouTube’s. They also helped me get my artist channel set up in YouTube which was great. They’re very responsive and friendly - nothing but positives to say.

Distribution Summary

All-in-all, I’ve had a very positive experience using LANDR’s distribution. I’ve done three releases through them now and they’ve all gone off without a hitch.

Other Features

Samples

I’m not a big user of samples myself, so I haven’t really dug into this offering yet. Poking around in the UI though, it seems like there is a LOT of samples offered here, so it could be worth checking out if that’s your thing.

Plugins

There are also a decent amount of plugins offered - everything from VST’s for guitar and piano, pitch correction, arpeggiator, and much more. At the time of writing this I see 40 plugins available that I think are all included in my subscription. I honestly haven’t dove into this a whole lot either but I’m about to after seeing what’s out there.

Collaboration

LANDR also has a marketplace where you can hire help for album art, mixing, marketing, etc.. I have browsed through here a bit but haven’t pulled the trigger on booking anyone. If you’re a pro in any of these areas, it could be a good opportunity for you to market yourself. It pretty much seems like Fiverr but focused on all things music creation and marketing.

Summary

And that’s a wrap. All-in-all, LANDR is a pretty unique offering since it can help with so many aspects of music creation. I’d give their music distribution platform an ‘A’ due to its ease of use, great support, and distribution reach. I’d give their traditional automated mastering a ‘B’ - it’s easy to use and gives you a serviceable master. I’ll need to check out the mastering plugin - look out for a separate post on that later!

Hopefully that was helpful to understand some of the features of LANDR and check out a bit of what you’d see if you were a LANDR user.

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