How to Sell & Promote Your Beats

 

Copyright

The very first thing to consider when you start trying to actually sell or promote your beats for production on a CD, download or vinyl record is to copyright the material you have made.

This can be done by simply making a copy of your song, beats, or piece of music onto a cassette tape, CD or memory stick and sending it to your self through the post!  However, it must be sent by recorded delivery, dated & registered.  And more importantly you must NOT open the package you have sent yourself as this would invalidate the copyright.  Instead you should lock it away in a safe place and it must be sent before you send out any physical or digital copy of the same music to anyone else.   You cannot even start to promote your beats or look for a recording deal until after you have done this.  This is to ensure that you can prove in any case of dispute over copyright that you made and recorded the beats first, before anyone else. 

This is not the only way to ensure that you have the rights to the copyright but it is the cheapest way, and a lot cheaper than going to a solicitor and paying them a ton of money.

Contracts

Once you have patented the copyright for the music you have made, you can start to promote your beats by sending them to producers and record labels, etc. 

By far the majority of these ‘producers’ will turn out to be cowboy operators who rarely, if ever, release any music for distribution at all.  There may even be offers of recording and performance ‘contracts’.  These are particularly dodgy and should be avoided at all costs if they are for long periods of time, such as a few years.  This is because many long-term contracts exclude you from making any recording deals with anyone else for the period of time covered by the contract.    Remember what happened to the ex-lead singer of Wham! George Michael many years ago, when he went solo. And his contract was with a large, well-known and established corporation!  

Use Block-Chain

There are now many more ways to share, sell or promote your beats, without any problems of copyright. And without necessarily any need for signing contracts with record labels or distributors.

Ujo, a New York-based company, provides a decentralized database of music ownership where artists can not only upload their work and earn 100% of their sales and tips with no fees to pay, but also automatically split payments with collaborators.

Another project, the Open Music Initiative, uses blockchain technology to identify music rights holders and has already drawn the likes of Soundcloud, Sony, YouTube, Spotify and Netflix as members, which shows just how fast technology is changing the music industry.

Music NFT’s or ‘Non-Fungible-Tokens’ (Unique tokens with ownership rights) are also increasingly being used for copyright and marketing value by some music artists.

Most bands, DJ’s or music producers find that the best way to secure a decent one-off recording deal with no-strings attached is to get your own contacts in the music industry.   This is not the only way, and it may take some time, but in truth it is how the majority of successful musicians and producers really do it.     

Even without any recording deal, you can still sell and promote your beats for use on adverts and other areas. Wherever producers need background music or beats, like film tracks for example. 

Social networking 

The internet made it significantly much easier and less complicated for bands, musicians, beat-makers and DJ’s to get to know the music business and for the music business to get to know them. They can now publicize their music for little or no cash. With the development of social networking sites and music sharing sites you can now promote your beats a lot further than just your local neighborhood or your own circle of friends.  

Social networking sites like My Space were the very first to enable artists to upload and publish their own beats, songs, or music. Followers could browse through the site and hear their entire track or tracks.  But it could be just a sample of some of the tracks, depending on how you wanted to promote your beats.

These days, on SoundCloud and other similar sites, there are services readily available for artists to offer tunes for purchase to their fans and supporters. Uploading tracks is free of charge and they keep track of the sales for you.

Music sharing

Music sharing sites and services have come under a lot of fire for enabling fans to get access to tracks without paying artists their due royalties. Even so, there are a variety of websites that allow musicians, artists and bands to upload their very own songs, beats or music for supporters to listen to, or buy and download. Several of these sites offer completely free access, while others permit free of charge uploading, free samples to hear, or purchase to download the whole track or tracks.

Even Amazon or iTunes allow musicians and artists to upload tracks without needing to have a CD out. For artists who do have a CD available, websites like CDBaby provide samples, purchasing, and delivery of CDs. 

If you are into video, and can make simple but effective music videos, even if made on an iphone or similar, then YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and TikTok are all excellent places to share and promote your beats to a wider audience!

Promote your beats

Probably the best single way to promote your beats and get them noticed is simply to use YouTube, as shown in the video below:

On a more local level, word of mouth by friends and family has always been the quickest, simplest, and most cost effective means by which to get your music heard. Handing out free sampler CDs to anyone interested will help, but it does cost you a bit of time and money to prepare and produce the CD for free distribution. 

Playing to a crowd, large or small, is likewise  a great way to promote your beats and get noticed. Even if you’re not getting paid for the gig, creating the foundation of a fan base and possible future sales will certainly pay off in the long run.  Is there a place locally that will let you play anywhere from a couple of tracks to a full set?  Do you have friends who DJ that might let you open for them and play a few beats?

The amount of self promotion and marketing an artist does might be limited by their income, but there are a lot of ways to promote your beats and get them out there without any money, and it will only take a bit of time and some creative imagination. 

And of course, if you have used the best beat making software to make your beats in the first place then that will help enormously too