My Roadmap to Finding Hip Hop Artists Who Need Beats

Funkworm

Master Beater
I’ve been a member of this forum for almost 10 years. I was a lot more active back in the day, participating in beat battles and such, but I still occasionally drop by to see what’s going on.

This forum was a great benefit to me back then, so I thought that I’d give back by providing those who are up and coming beatmakers and producers with a few strategies and methods that continue to work for me when it comes to finding artists who are in need of beats and music production.

I’d been making a living producing music outside of the Internet, but I decided to start a beat site, QuickBeats.net, in 2006. This site became very profitable to me because the market wasn’t as saturated then and MySpace made it very easy to search and connect with independent rappers. Sites like Soundclick were around then, but it was harder to get things the way I wanted, so I had a web designer create a user friendly website that brought the customer away from the busy traffic associated with a social network.

This was important to me and still is. Directing a potential customer to a place where hundreds of others are selling the competing for the same business seemed to work against my benefit. So I continued the process of driving traffic from MySpace to my own domain, and everything was gravy until MySpace went sour and thousands of beat sites started popping up offering beats for much lower prices.

I thought about who my target customer was, and it was independent artists. Sure I could spend money and time trying to get my site to rank high in the search engines and even pay for advertising, but I needed a better way to connect with the very group I wanted to do business with. I looked around and saw that independent artists were basically being ignored by most of the popular blogs out there. Unless you were a big name or paid to be posted, you got no love.

This looked like a wide open lane so I started a blog, indiehiphop.net that exclusively featured indie artists along with music business information and without forcefully promoting my beat site, I was able to get massive traffic to it by just posting a banner on my own blog. 3 years later and now my blog is one of the most popular for indie hip hop artists. I don’t charge artists for posts but they pay for ad space to promote their releases and I’ve met some amazing people in the process. I even let other beat sites pay for promo banners on my site. I get offered free tickets, merch, and all kinds of other perks as a thank you for my support for the community. My beat site now is still regularly trickling in income even though I don’t update it as often, but the bulk of my production income now comes from me doing custom and exclusive beats.

In conclusion I want to say, think about what you can do for others first before you aggressively promote your beats. People automatically shut down to hard marketing because they are constantly bombarded with it everyday. The first banner I had on my blog simply said, “Do You Need Beats?”, and it was on a site that was completely trafficked by indie hip hop artists. Most of them at least clicked it to checked it out. If you got hot beats, more often then not, that visitor will convert to a customer. The beauty of it all is this, when I post artists on the blog, they promote the post, bringing their fans and other rappers to the site. So the site's popularity continues to grow. There are millions of indie hip hop artists out there that want and need exposure. And there are still very few blogs that are willing to feature them. I can’t even handle the massive number of submissions I get per day. It’s no cakewalk though. You still must blog regularly and maintain it, but you can create some lasting relationships with artists that could last throughout your career. Don't give up. Just think outside the box and create your own opportunity. Hope this post wasn’t too long. I tried to keep it short. just wanted to share some of my success with the forum in hopes that some would find it helpful.
 
I was thinking about doing something like this, but I also want to do interviews with the artists, and also maybe some up-coming producers. Im still thinking if I should have a beat page in my blog, or have it be on its own site.
 
I started out doing audio and written interviews and it was great for a while until the site started getting more popular. Then it was taking way too much of my time to interview every artist I posted. Profiling other producers is a great idea too. I don't know of any blogs that's doing that right now. And as for your idea about putting the beat page inside of your blog, I'll tell you, if I knew then what I know now,I would have definitely done that.
 
Thanks for the great advice I am going to do my research on starting a blog with will offer the up and coming artist and producer a medium to get exposed. Thanks again

Laman "olujade" Richards
 
I’ve been a member of this forum for almost 10 years. I was a lot more active back in the day, participating in beat battles and such, but I still occasionally drop by to see what’s going on.

This forum was a great benefit to me back then, so I thought that I’d give back by providing those who are up and coming beatmakers and producers with a few strategies and methods that continue to work for me when it comes to finding artists who are in need of beats and music production.

I’d been making a living producing music outside of the Internet, but I decided to start a beat site, QuickBeats.net, in 2006. This site became very profitable to me because the market wasn’t as saturated then and MySpace made it very easy to search and connect with independent rappers. Sites like Soundclick were around then, but it was harder to get things the way I wanted, so I had a web designer create a user friendly website that brought the customer away from the busy traffic associated with a social network.

This was important to me and still is. Directing a potential customer to a place where hundreds of others are selling the competing for the same business seemed to work against my benefit. So I continued the process of driving traffic from MySpace to my own domain, and everything was gravy until MySpace went sour and thousands of beat sites started popping up offering beats for much lower prices.

I thought about who my target customer was, and it was independent artists. Sure I could spend money and time trying to get my site to rank high in the search engines and even pay for advertising, but I needed a better way to connect with the very group I wanted to do business with. I looked around and saw that independent artists were basically being ignored by most of the popular blogs out there. Unless you were a big name or paid to be posted, you got no love.

This looked like a wide open lane so I started a blog, indiehiphop.net that exclusively featured indie artists along with music business information and without forcefully promoting my beat site, I was able to get massive traffic to it by just posting a banner on my own blog. 3 years later and now my blog is one of the most popular for indie hip hop artists. I don’t charge artists for posts but they pay for ad space to promote their releases and I’ve met some amazing people in the process. I even let other beat sites pay for promo banners on my site. I get offered free tickets, merch, and all kinds of other perks as a thank you for my support for the community. My beat site now is still regularly trickling in income even though I don’t update it as often, but the bulk of my production income now comes from me doing custom and exclusive beats.

In conclusion I want to say, think about what you can do for others first before you aggressively promote your beats. People automatically shut down to hard marketing because they are constantly bombarded with it everyday. The first banner I had on my blog simply said, “Do You Need Beats?”, and it was on a site that was completely trafficked by indie hip hop artists. Most of them at least clicked it to checked it out. If you got hot beats, more often then not, that visitor will convert to a customer. The beauty of it all is this, when I post artists on the blog, they promote the post, bringing their fans and other rappers to the site. So the site's popularity continues to grow. There are millions of indie hip hop artists out there that want and need exposure. And there are still very few blogs that are willing to feature them. I can’t even handle the massive number of submissions I get per day. It’s no cakewalk though. You still must blog regularly and maintain it, but you can create some lasting relationships with artists that could last throughout your career. Don't give up. Just think outside the box and create your own opportunity. Hope this post wasn’t too long. I tried to keep it short. just wanted to share some of my success with the forum in hopes that some would find it helpful.

doing what you are doing but for christian artists
just open up my site in Jan.1,2012 so I'm still making connections/building relationships now
 
My story is similar. I'm glad that you've decided to come back and contribute. Would you say that your website is on autopilot, after 3 years of being online?

---------- Post added at 08:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:44 PM ----------

Thanks for the great advice I am going to do my research on starting a blog with will offer the up and coming artist and producer a medium to get exposed. Thanks again

Laman "olujade" Richards

Get a system like this one...


 
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My story is similar. I'm glad that you've decided to come back and contribute. Would you say that your website is on autopilot, after 3 years of being online?

You're welcome. As for your question about running on autopilot; the only thing that I don't have to do anymore is find artists that want to be posted on the blog. I get a large volume of submissions daily. This is the only tedious part about running a blog like this. I try to personally listen to them all, but so many of them are just garbage from artists who don't take their craft seriously. I have some contributors that sometimes submit articles to be posted, but the majority of the posts are written and uploaded by me. It's possible to allow a blog like this to be run by other administrators who you trust and have a love for hip hop, but you have to consistently put some work in it if you want to create something of value.
 
Thanks for the great advice I am going to do my research on starting a blog with will offer the up and coming artist and producer a medium to get exposed. Thanks again

Laman "olujade" Richards

need help contact me sir I'll help you for free
 
Hey

Thanks for the info man! Good stuff, I need to start a blog, know a good place for me to start researching? thanks
 
Thanks for the info man! Good stuff, I need to start a blog, know a good place for me to start researching? thanks

Sorry for the late reply. There are a lot of "how to" info videos and articles out there about setting up a blog. I would recommend you use the Wordpress blog platform. Just search YouTube on how to set up a wordpress blog and you'll get tons of great info on setting things up, and getting it going.
 
I think Im going to take a page out of your book and take some time out to givr back by doing a profile on an artist once or twice a month from my community. Giving back and creating awareness may lead to that artist marketing quite effectively for me in the future.
 
I think Im going to take a page out of your book and take some time out to givr back by doing a profile on an artist once or twice a month from my community. Giving back and creating awareness may lead to that artist marketing quite effectively for me in the future.

Best of luck to you!
 
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