Are AI mastering tools like LANDR and eMastered worth it?

For demos, for a first EP you're releasing yourself, and for anything where the alternative is uploading an unmastered mix, AI mastering is worth the money. It stops being worth it the moment you're using it to rescue a mix that isn't finished, because none of these tools does that. That's the honest answer. The rest of this is what each one actually charges in pounds, and what you give up against paying a person.

The three names people compare are LANDR, eMastered and BandLab. All three take a stereo mix, analyse it, apply EQ, compression, saturation and limiting, and hand back a louder, more even file in under a minute. The prices are wildly different, and one of them is free.

What mastering is doing, and why the loudness argument is mostly over

Mastering is the last stage: one final pass over a finished stereo mix to even out the tonal balance, control the dynamics, and bring the level up to something comparable with commercial releases. It's a small set of moves applied carefully, which is exactly the kind of task a trained model handles reasonably well.

The old reason to chase volume has largely gone. Spotify normalises playback to -14 LUFS, applying negative gain to anything louder so it plays at the same level as everything else, and leaving 1 dB of headroom for lossy encoding. A master crushed to be the loudest thing on the platform gets turned down to match the rest anyway, and arrives with less dynamic range for the trouble. What you're paying an AI masterer for now is tonal balance and translation across speakers, not raw level.

What LANDR costs in pounds

LANDR is a Montreal company and the best known of the three. You can master and preview any number of tracks on a free account without paying; the charge lands when you download. A single WAV master is £8 as a one-off, which is the number worth remembering, because it means you never have to subscribe to try it properly on a real release.

All LANDR prices exclude VAT, which is added at checkout, so add 20% to every figure above for the real cost. The Studio Pro price is currently discounted 36% off a £20 list price on the yearly plan, so treat £12.80 as a promotional rate rather than a permanent one. Every subscription tier also bundles unlimited distribution, sample credits and a plugin library, which is how LANDR justifies the price; if you only want masters, the £8 one-off is the cleaner deal.

Two things are held back from free and one-off users. Revisions, where you nudge the initial master and regenerate it, and saved mastering preferences are both subscriber-only. Album mastering, which processes 2 to 20 tracks together for consistency across a project, still costs one master per track. LANDR also sells its mastering plugin outright at £239 for a perpetual licence, which runs the same engine inside your DAW with no recurring fee.

What eMastered costs in pounds

eMastered sells one thing, called eMastered Studio, at three prices depending on how much you commit up front. Every tier includes the same unlimited mastering, so the only decision is the contract length.

• £29 a month on a rolling monthly subscription, cancel any time.
• £15 a month billed monthly on a 12-month commitment.
• £9 a month billed yearly, taken as £108 up front.

Those also exclude VAT. The gap between the rolling rate and the annual rate is more than three times, which is a lot to pay for the freedom to leave, and worth noticing before you sign up for a single month to test it. Free previews are unlimited, same as LANDR, so testing costs nothing anyway. There's a 14-day money-back guarantee, though it only applies if you've downloaded fewer than four tracks.

The subscription also covers unlimited distribution, Stemify stem separation, the ATOM synth, PitchPro vocal tuning and a link-in-bio page. At £9 a month annually that bundle is genuinely cheap. At £29 rolling it is not, and the mastering alone doesn't carry that price.

BandLab masters for free, and that changes the maths

BandLab's mastering tool is free and unlimited, with four presets: Universal, Fire, Clarity and Tape. There's no download cap and no watermark. A BandLab membership unlocks four more presets, Natural, Cinematic, Spatial and Punch, plus an 11-step intensity slider that lets you dial the effect between light and heavy.

It's less controllable than the other two, with no reference mastering and no revision loop. But it costs nothing, and if you can't hear a clear improvement moving from BandLab to a paid tool on your own monitors, then the paid tool isn't the thing to buy yet.

The three compared

Where a human mastering engineer still wins

A person listens to the track as music, understands what you were going for, and can be argued with. Abbey Road's remote mastering service charges £100 a track on its Standard package with the first available engineer and one set of revisions, £150 to choose your engineer, and £250 for the package that adds Apple Digital Masters and 320kbps MP3 deliverables. Stem mastering, where the engineer works from separated groups rather than a single stereo file, isn't available through the online service at all.

That's twelve times the price of a LANDR one-off, so the comparison only makes sense on a release you've genuinely finished and expect people to hear. For a single you've spent three months on, £100 with a named engineer and a revision round is defensible. For a beat you're posting on Sunday, it isn't.

The other thing a human gives you is a second opinion on the mix. An AI masterer will happily process a mix with a 200Hz build-up and hand you back a louder version of the same problem. An engineer emails you and says the low mids are cluttered.

The case for buying a plugin instead

If you release regularly, a one-off purchase beats a subscription on a long enough timeline. Ozone 12 Elements is £55 from iZotope and includes the Master Assistant that does the analysis-and-suggest job the online tools do, inside your DAW, on unlimited tracks forever. Ozone 12 Advanced is £479 for the full 20-plugin suite, and iZotope discounts both heavily in sales, so nobody should pay list. LANDR's own plugin at £239 sits between them.

£55 once is less than seven months of eMastered's annual plan. The catch is that a plugin makes you the engineer: it suggests a starting point, and you still have to judge whether it's right. That's a skill worth having, and it's the reason the free compressors and EQs in our free VST plugins guide are a better first purchase than any subscription.

Who each one suits

• You're posting demos, works in progress or beats and want them to sit at a sensible level: BandLab, free, and stop reading here.
• You've got one finished track you're releasing and want it to sound right: LANDR's £8 one-off WAV, no subscription.
• You release something every few weeks and want distribution bundled in: eMastered at £9 a month billed yearly, if you're confident enough to commit to a year.
• You want to learn mastering rather than buy it: Ozone Elements at £55, or the free plugins you already have.
• It's a release you care about and have a budget for: pay a human.

The trap with all of these is the same one covered in our Splice piece: a subscription only makes sense if you'll use it. Three masters a year on a £9 a month plan works out at £36 a master, which is worse value than LANDR's one-off and much worse than free.