ok, so there's nuff "how much do i sell beats for" posts

but how about the actual format of the beats your sending out? i'm not talking about "does beat tape mean i need some c90s or is a CD ok?" type shit, i mean:

- how many beats per CD
- how long for each beat
- how should the beats be arranged - 16 bar loop type shit, or hook-verse-hook etc.

i've made a lot of instrumental shit and i've done collabs with various emcees but i've never really thought about sending out beat CDs so i'm interested in what thoughts/advice people have

Depends on the individual...
I try not to place more than 15 beats on a single cd,
because more than that can be overwhelming...
Some peeps prefer the instrumental versions (to get their freestyling on or whatever, whereas other cats can't hear the potential of a beat unless it has rapping on it already - so sometimes I drop an accapella over top so they can hear what it sounds like with a vocalist...
Hope that helps...

yeah, that's helpful man. i hear a lot of beat tapes from known producers (obvious ones that are all over the net like dilla (R.I.P), madlib, waajeed etc.) and they seem to feature 30-50 beats for about 1m30s-2m for each beat. i love that from a listening point of view but for an emcee i'm never sure what's the best way to go. i was thinking about putting out instrumentals on the CDs and including links to mp3s of versions with accapellas on them in the bio pack.

is it worth putting up a beat tape for download on my website? one the one hand i could see that being an advantage but then it also makes it shitloads easier to jack i suppose

maybe put it up, but make the clips shorter, and make it so users have to register to get it... or just stream it on there - with back-end protection so it's not downloadable/hacked, but at least people who hear the name can come and listen anytime...

yeah stream it.

safer.

word, good idea man. thanks

u know it G.

and yeah, make sure to have the programmer/sitebuilder/whatever hook it up right with the coding or whatever...

let us know about the progress!

peace mang

sol-t wrote:programmer/sitebuilder/whatever

hehe - that would be me... i'll go with "whatever" i reckon, it's a more suitable job title. nah, seriously, that's no problem and it's a good point man. naturally i'll post up anything (good or bad) that comes from it.

doublepost

http://www.onestopbeats.com/beattalk.html

check this site out

my bad, guess its another beats site (one stop beats). The section where the producers are interviewed is good in explaining how to put together a beat CD.

thanks man, some real interesting shit on that site

I love that site... BEATTALK is offical... they got a MP3 tribute to Dilla on their myspace... but the site is always disjointed... (who put that ish up...LOL) but alot of good stuff is on there if you can bare though it. I haven't checked the one stop beats part... I might just cop a disk of drums from them just for support... (some of that stuff really needs to be updated though)