Reputation: Remember, you must view yourself as a business and your beats are your product. Maintain a positive relationship with former customers. Be attentive and answer their emails as soon as possible. This helps to establish trust in your business and in turn will help to generate return customers. It is hard to recover your business reputation after it is damaged with many claims of poor customer service so make sure you respond to your customers as soon as possible, assist them, and show them that you appreciate their business. It is also important to remain professional in your emails/communications with your customers. Keep your audience in mind and use somewhat of a formal tone when communicating with your customers. If you carry yourself in a professional manner your customers are more likely to invest their trust in your business.

New Material: Some may feel content with just posting a select amount of their best beats on their website in hopes they will attract enough customers. However in order to increase your website hits, you must create return value in your website. Ask yourself, what if a customer has listened to all of your beats and, although impressed with your ability, has not found a beat that fits their style? If you are not updating your website, there is no reason that customer will make a return visit to your site. Make sure you are frequently updating your beat website/soundclick page with fresh material. Keep your audience engaged. Motivate potential customers to continuously visit your page by “promising” them frequent beat additions to your website. Adding new content to your website should not be limited to just beat additions. Post some news, make them aware of new discounts, and keep your visitors updated.

Quality..Quality..QUALITY: When attempting to sell beats online you must take note of the golden rule, Quality over Quantity. Too often many new producers attempt to post as many beats as possible, regardless of quality. This also ties in with your business reputation. If you present yourself as if you do not care about the quality of your product, the visitor will not invest their money into your business. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. If you were visiting your site for the first time you would want to hear a beat you like as soon as you begin listening. People tend to have a short listening span. If you flood them with a large amount of sub-par beats with a few quality beats here and there many people may be turned off to your music before they ever get to your better beats. First impressions are generally the lasting impressions. You want to create a great first impression in order to keep that visitor coming back!

Take Advice/APPLY IT!: If you are a music producer now looking to sell beats online, you typically feel as though your beats are good enough to be sold. However there should never come a time in which you do not accept criticism. Don’t dismiss all criticism you receive and don’t get defensive when someone gives you their honest opinion of your music. No matter how successful you become, you are always learning something new each day. Take relevant advice and apply it.

Market Yourself: An entire article could be written on this topic alone. It is one of the most important aspects to consider when you sell beats online. However in this article in particular, I will focus on a few of the overlooked marketing tools available online. Article and blog writing are two useful marketing tools that tend to get overlooked by those that sell beats online. By creating content rich articles that target your core audience, you will be able to create a relationship with your audience and help to drive them to your beat-selling website. Connect with your audience on a more personal level and write blogs documenting news/events in your everyday life. Always include some sort of link in your blog/article that directs the visitor to your beat selling website.

I hope you’ve found this advice useful when you begin to sell beats online. If applied correctly, over time you will see that following these tips will help you increase your business.

Kyle H. (KH Productions)
OME

There are a handful of sites that will off you your own online “store” to shop your beats in exchange for a cut of your profits. Which ones are best?

Before I get into reviews, let me first say that I am an avid believer utilizing every avenue you can to promote your beats. So even though some of these beat selling websites are a little sub-par in certain areas, I’d advise that you use them anyway for the sake of promotion.

Here are a few beat selling websites that I have had experience with:

MyBeatShop.com: MyBeatShop has been the most valuable beat-selling website in my experiences. I’ve made thousands from this website alone. It is easy and quick to upload beats, I’ve always been paid on time, and it offers a nice community of producers to interact with. There are beat battles for cash/no cash and all-time and monthly rankings for sales, battles, etc.

Now for the bad parts: The customer service is horrible. It is impossible to reach the staff by telephone because their phone inbox is always full. The site design is ugly – looks very amateurish. The site takes 20% per sale as a comission AND charges for beat space. This is a bit much considering how many beats they sell. Oh and did I mention the customer service is horrible? Oh I did? Well that’s cool ’cause it deserves to be mentioned twice.

Despite a lot of bad areas, at the end of the day this site has made me a lot of money, so I definitely suggest you check it out and get your beats on it!

RocBattle.com: RocBattle is probably one of the first, if not THE first beat-selling website for producers to shop their beats. A lot of producers have had a ton of success selling beats on this website.

The site is a lot nicer looking than most other beat-selling websites. The design and graphics/artwork looka LOT more professional than, say, MyBeatShop. It is very simple to upload beats to the site, and the upload time is quick. You can also order your beats after you upload them which is, to me at least, a very valuable tool.

Battling your beats is a big part of the website (hence the name RocBattle of course). You can select any one of your beats to battle against a beat from another producer. It is important to participate in battles, as it increases your song plays and exposure and can drive you up in the rankings if you are able to win a lot. These things will ultimately help to contribute toward the ultimate goal – more sales.

The bad part about RocBattle, at least in my experience, is that it seems a lot harder to sell beats on than MyBeatShop unless you are very active, win a lot of battles, or lower your prices to next to nothing. There is a lot of competition, and it is a bit more difficult to get recognition unless you earn it through battling and establishing a reputation. Overall though a very nice site that is definitely worth your efforts!

ThBeatTrader.com: TheBeatTrader charges $2.00 per “beat space,” which I believe is a bit overpriced. The site design isn’t the absolute worst, but it is still pretty amateur looking. They don’t have nearly as big as a community as MyBeatShop or RocBattle, and it seems a lot harder to be “in the spotlight” on this site. Again, I’ve had very minimal success on this site, so unless you plan on doing a lot of direct marketing yourself, don’t expect a ton of sales.

BeatSwagger.com: I only put a few beats on this site, because the site design makes it seem, well….a bit shady. There’s really not much to say about the site, except the design sucks, the site content is minimal to none, and I only got one sale on it. But hey…one sale is better than none, right? So what the hell…sign up anyway!

Those are the main sites that I’ve had some experiences with. Again, even though some of the sites are a bit lacking, I can’t stress enough that it is not a bad idea at all to sign up anyway for exposure and promotional purposes. These little things can go a long way in establishing yourself as a producer in the online community!

Until Next Time,

Tim Adamek
Open Minds Entertainment LLP