thats like askin a parent which kid is their favorite. let the audience decide
I couldn't disagree more. This is what is holding all of you back if that's the case...
Stop treating your music like it's your child...it's not. It's just one interpretation of one of your many ideas.
You have to learn to be able to separate yourself from your music, or any art, just enough so that you CAN go back and be WILLING to revise and rearrange. Otherwise you're going to be too afraid to change a thing or too cocky to change or too much or something that is going to keep you from getting better.
I can't tell you how many times I've gone back and taken a beat and evolved it into my latest style or heard something else in the song that I didn't hear before and decided to emphasize that instead of this etc. Same goes ESPECIALLY for lyrics and writing in general.
I'm a creative writing minor. I've never rewritten anything or remade any beat without it getting better. And I've never critiqued a writing or a beat that didn't get better after revisions.
Stop calling it quits after your first draft. In college I made a minimum of 3 drafts for all of my major papers. You read the first and read the third you will immediately see it's about the exact same things, but the writing, the analogies, the grammar, the points of view are all better in terms of how they agree with each other and how the convey the message to my audience.
How many of you are going out there and posting your beats up only to get critiques and improve on them?
I personally know no one who is doing this. I feel like most people are making their beats as quick as possible, posting them and hoping for some leases, then making a whole new beat after that one doesn't sell.
What a shame...when you have it up for sale, they assume that is your final product. So it's a yes or a no and obviously most people say no. So instead of you getting feedback had you been humble and developed your music for a few months before you started deciding official tracks for your mixtape or album, you have zero feedback and are just making first draft beats (the worst version of the best beats you can make) and selling nothing because your music isn't even on par with YOURSELF.
Give yourself and advantage here...get critiqued over and over and over. Develop a true sense of what people do and do not like about that particular track. After enough tracks, you'll get a sense of what you do best and what you don't do so well. Work on both areas and become better. Otherwise you're not even giving yourself the best chance you could be getting.
If you are treating your music like it's one of your children then think of it this way...would you send your young child out into the wilderness? That is what you are doing when you post up your first/second/third drafts for sale.
I wouldn't send my kid out into the wilderness until they are the right age, which is determined by when and how well I developed their ability to camp, make fire and hunt. They probably won't get it the first time around and I probably won't realize their short comings without someone else helping to point them out from a different perspective either.
Eventually you will understand how far you need to go with your musical development and when you have a track that is truly at the stage to compete in the wilderness.