what should i charge for beats?

DJ Plan A wrote:

MPC4k wrote:the current online non exclusive market is 10 to 50

any sites you recommend for this type of strategy?

There are many of them, But you will be better served getting your own domain name

and webpage/hosting to put your beats for sale on. Your payments get processed through paypal, no extra middle man to hold up your money for two months (that's how the big third party beats sites do. plus they take a cut usually.

If you want to save even more, register your domain name 10 bucks a year and foward it to a myspace page.. you can get code that hides friends/comments join date
and basically will make a free myspace page into a jst about blank slate for you to post your beats to sell.

myflashstore.net 5 bucks a month (10 beat slots) gives you a beat store that you can link directely to or embed on any website, another option.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

giving away free e books with information useful to artists that may buy beats is good ided too as long as it has a link back to your page (people will pass around sending you more potential clients)

collecting opt in e-mail list subscribers that you can keep informed on any new beat updates, and keep in contact as many times a buyer will visit your beat store several times before making the purchazse so keeping in touch will keep you in their mind.


Remember it is a business of supply and demand so in order to sell beat mp3's to the artists you got to make the beats that THEY want, which is not always going to be YOUR favorite style, but you serve the customer and the profits will give you more opportunity to work on your own projects/beats styles you are passionate about.

Learn to separate the art/music and the business side of things.

The beats that sell the most, are usually the beats that will get dissed by other producers
as not "different" enough or complex etc etc but realize you are serving customers, not serving other producers, the beat buyers tend to want material very similiar to styles popular in radio at the moment so they can record songs and try to "blend in" compete with the successful bigger name artists, many are making music as a hobby and buying your beats to feed this hobby just like a person buys anything else hobby related,

You just got to make what they are looking for and lead them to YOUR store.


Don't look at it like your selling your beat cheap (10 bucks) because really you selling an mp3 copy of your beat and giving permission for them to record on it.
you are still retaining your ownership of your beat.

artists sell song mp3's for a dollar, you sell a beat instrumental mp3 for 10 times that just because of the added value of giving permission to use in a song.


You can find your potential beat buyers on myspace, on twitter, on the many rapper forum communities etc, even printed business cards with only your beat store web url and graphics that will breed curiosity (leave them in places that local rappers hang out)

youtube is good too, make videos that rappers/singers might like to watch and make sure your beat store link and one liner are in the video.

The online worlwide non exclusive beat mp3 market is different market than the harder to break in signed artist/label/placements market, and different strategies apply.

this post is directed toward the online mp3 beat selling strategies.

My own goal is to get 10 10 dollar mp3 beat sales per day, everyday, and pay my bills off beats.. that's the end goal, then you have time to make your own artistic music that is for YOU.


Good luck, stay grindin it out

check out my beat selling guide, i lay all this stuff out in detail. here's a couple of pointers:

-i personally don't sell mp3s for leasing deals. it seems really tacky from the point of view of standard pro-audio ettique to record over an mp3. leasing deals i would provide a redbook format (w/ adequate headroom, i've heard plenty of squashed mp3 thugtard rap songs and they all sound awful), & exclusive deals i would provide the customer w/ multi-tracks in hq format, including post-processing.

-always have contracts. even for leased beats. this serves the purpose of protecting your works more than anything else. without a legal agreement anyone could simply buy a leased beat for $20 and sell it to someone else for $50, claiming it as their original creation. and that's fudged up, but i've seen it happen to cats.

-i agree with getting your own domain. a lot of beatmakers on rocbattle and soundclick don't even realize that they're giving up their publishing rights and potential mechanical royalties when selling beats.

MalaKai wrote:
-i personally don't sell mp3s for leasing deals. it seems really tacky from the point of view of standard pro-audio ettique to record over an mp3. leasing deals i would provide a redbook format (w/ adequate headroom, i've heard plenty of squashed mp3 thugtard rap songs and they all sound awful), & exclusive deals i would provide the customer w/ multi-tracks in hq format, including post-processing.
.

The reason why I have no problem with selling beat mp3's is because to me it is just like selling a song mp3 on itunes (though the beat is the producer's "song")
We can charge 10 dollars, 25 dollars etc etc for that mp3 instead of the usual 1 dollar for a song simply because when selling that mp3 we are also granting permission(license) to the buyer to use the beat in a new derivitive work,
The beat mp3 itself has no value beyond a buck, it is the non exclusive license that you put that extra price tag on. I do know some producers like (DOMINGO) choose to preview mp3's but deliver.wav upon purchase. Mp3's are the quickest to download and upload and is all that is accepted at the third party sites and suit the purpose of the mixtape and.or rapper for hobby artists.

I would not even want to sell exclusive rights to any beat to an unsigned local artist doing mixtapes unless the money was like 3500 what I would get from a industry placement. (yet a whole other shady industry to break into)

The worldwide online mp3 beat selling biz is it's own thing separate from the other music industry. The online mp3 beat selling game caters to unsigned local artists, who wish to record mixtapes singles or albums or just rappers/singers who do it as a hobby and want beats to record on other than recycling actual industry beats. for these customers, mp3's are fine, 99% of them are recording at home without a care of their vocal recording quality, so giving a .wav instead of mp3 or a tracked out version to these buyers is pointless.

I have seen guys selling exclusives for real cheap, but they are usually their throw away beats that they do not expect to sell non exclusive. I would hate to sell exclusive rights of a beat to an artist for a couple hundred bucks that really is not going to do anything note worthy with it, when the same beat sold over time as noneclusive could earn more. Because you are just selling an mp3 of ya beat and have no further recording/song input, it is not really producing the song and you can't really expect the artist's results to be all that great and if ever is then that's cool, but don't worry about that, because regardless, it is money earned by doing what you are gonna do for free anyway so why not make some cash.

Also remember your online mp3 beat selling biz can be completely separate from your other projects you may be pursuing in the industry, If a different brand use a dfifferent name with separate branding and marketing so you can hit different genres or markets with out bias based on previous or current unrelated projects.

Online mp3 beats selling is just a case of supply and demand and marketing
and another avenue more money to be made off making music.
The last big purchase I made with mp3 beat sales money was my Akai APC 40

This one (below link) like a personal itunes store to sell YOUR beats (mp3's)

http://www.myflashstore.net/flash/istore.swf?user_id=229