Getting started selling beats online can be a daunting task, but it needn’t be. Here are all the tips and tools to get started selling beats.

Your Brand

Don’t expect to build a website, post your music and watch the money come pouring in for your licenses with no work. Before making one sale you need to establish yourself a brand online.

Make sure you’re active on all social sites. Posting samples on Facebook, ‘type beats’ with visualizers on YouTube, tagged beats for free download on SoundCloud. Don’t expect anyone to pay you until they can see you’ve got a following and a good collection of content online. Keep your online brand unique and consistent, this way you will stand out and be identifiable across different social sites.

Selling Music

The most important aspect of selling music is ensuring the music your making is perfect. Make sure it’s mixed and mastered in the best way possible.

Listen to other musicians work and compare it side-by-side with yours. Is yours sounding flat or smaller? Work out where yours is suffering, research how to improve in this area and put in the hours to perfect your craft. This will be time consuming, but only by spending time researching and building will you get better and quicker over time.

Get your music everywhere. Social site, stores, streaming services, lease selling sites and your personal website. We can help with the stores and streaming services.

As for lease selling sites, take a look at Beatstar, Airbit and SoundClick. These sites all offer different deals, but their concept is largely the same. They will host a page showcasing your music, give listeners the various pricing tiers you offer for different licenses and manage payments. They all offer different deals based on what you want as an artist. Beatstar for example offer the follow:

  • FREE – Upload up to 10 tracks, Beatstar commission 30%, 5 monthly private messages, 2 license agreements for sale
  • Marketplace Plan ($9.99/month) – Unlimited uploads, Beatstar commission 0%, 20 monthly private messages, 4 license agreements for sale
  • Pro Page Plan (Unlimited) ($19.99/month) – Unlimited uploads, Beatstar commission 0%, unlimited monthly private messages, unlimited license agreements for sale

Check out the full pricing details here. Find what site works for you and what pricing tier. Trial each and see which is most successful at selling your music.

Decide what sort of licenses you’ll be selling and for what price. Most producers will offer a range of leases for different prices.

  • MP3 – lower quality, cheaper
  • WAV – highest quality, more expensive
  • Limited number of streams – how many streams can the buyer amass
  • Limited number of sales – how many copies can the buyer sell
  • Track Out – individual files for each instrument, ideal for mixing
  • Exclusive beats – sold to only one person, for them to publish as they wish
  • Custom beats – made especially to a criteria, for a specific project

Find out what the competition offer, at what cost. Start small and build up.

Promoting Music

The most difficult part is promoting your beats. What use is producing absolute gold if nobody’s buying it?

There’s no sure answer to success in this area. Search #rapper on Instagram, find real people that may be interested in your music, connect with them, follow them, like their posts, DM them, mention specific tracks of there’s you liked. Don’t copy and paste the same spammy message across thousands of comments. Offer discounts, two for ones, find your niche, something that no one else is doing.

Once you’ve build up a nice following and consistently producing quality music, fans will come back to work with you again.