crimeethics
New member
What up FP! I used to lurk this forum all the time and i have gotten a ton of great info that has helped me immensely over the years. Its high time that I give back because I know that a lot of you guys want to know how i make money off of my music. I’ve studied it and I truly believe that this is the new model for making money as a producer/beatmaker and I believe that it’s evergreen. The model will continue to work going into the future and as technology changes and advances. I started out slow and didn’t make much at the beginning because I didn’t really know what I was doing. But about a year and a half ago, I decided enough was enough. I was sick of working my nine to five and I couldn’t see this as my life any more. As human beings, our life on this planet is extremely extremely short. The older you get, the more this becomes a reality. I spent about 6 months really studying the marketing space and being subjective about how I could apply it to selling beats. I figured that it’s high time that I share with you guys the process that makes me 8 racks a month currently. I’m not the first one to use email marketing to sell beats. Not by a long shot. But, I feel that i’ve really whittled the process down to a well oiled machine and i’m only seeing growth as i’ve moved forward.
My money making model is….
Email Provider // Auto-Responder
the first thing that I did that was probably the most crucial to growing my beat making revenue was investing in an email list provider. At first i used mailchimp because its free but i quickly found out that it is worth it to pay the monthly fee to use aweber for certain features. Plus hindsight is 20/20… I wish i would’ve just gone with aweber to begin with because it was a pain to move the list over. but you can use what you want honestly. there are a few good ones to use. getresponse is another one but i think they are a bit more expensive if i remember right.
Landing Page // “Squeeze Page”
I purchased the domain for my producer name and set up a landing page to build my list. I bought the landing page from a popular theme website. Just search google for “landing page” or “squeeze page”. You can find them for a decent price, but its definitely an investment to choose a good one. I used a landing page that showcases a youtube video with an email opt in form next to it. Then i just edited the theme using the instructions that came with it to replace the youtube video with my own. It’s pretty easy to do but you can find cheap html help if you need it.
Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a high converting offer that you give to people in order to get them to opt in to your list. You want your lead magnet to be of high value so that they want to opt in to your list. For this reason, I am using my most popular beat (my best beat in my opinion) as my lead magnet. For the youtube video on the landing page, I made a video using my most popular beat. For the title above the email opt-in form I made it read “Download This Beat For FREE!” and they can enter their name and email with a “GIVE ME THIS BEAT” button. When they click the button, it enters them into my email list. Again.. once people are on the list and they get my most popular beat for free, I can sell them the rest of my beats and make a lot more money off of each list member.
Beat Commerce Portion of the Site
Next I set up the actual beat portion of the website. I set this page up on mydomain.com/beats and i made sure to include opt in forms and opt in pop ups on this page as well… just in case they somehow got to this page without being on the list already. I made this page a nofollow for search engines so that they can only find my page via the landing page and be entered onto my list. You can find wordpress themes for selling beats or you can use a setup that uses myflashstore or something like that. Whenever I have a new beat that i’m ready to sell, I put it on the beat website and I send an email out to my list mentioning that I have a new beat for sale. I make each email custom to that specific beat so that my emails don’t get redundant. In the email I send them to the website with the beat on it and they can purchase the beat right on that page.
That leaves me to focus on two things. Make fire beats and grow my email list.
Growing The List
Currently my list is just under 4,000 people which is pretty modest to be honest. But the list is pretty targeted to artists who like to buy. This is key. The amount of beats that i sell each day varies. lots of times artists will buy beats 2, 3 and 4+ at a time for projects and those sales make up for the slower periods. Currently I average around 1-4 beats sold a day. I charge $75 for all of my beats on a lease and if they want the beat exclusively, I charge $3k but I might raise that price tbh. You might wonder why I charge so much for exclusive rights to a beat. The reason is because I can make way more money off of a beat if I can sell that beat to everyone on my email list and sell it over and over and over again forever. I’ve had a few complaints on the exclusive price… but thats just the way it is. It’s math. The funny thing now that i think about it… the dudes that complained still paid the price to get it exclusively lmao.
The main way that I grow my list right now is through social media. I’ll show you my methods for each platform. branding myself has been the most important part of this. I’ll show you how that was done too.
I have spent the past 4 years putting in mad work on getting placements with anyone and everyone. All of these placements have been for free. I did this as a marketing strategy to get my name out there because I knew my music was good enough to sell and people would use it for free but i needed to brand myself. I started using a beat tag of someone saying my producer name on all of my beats. My producer name is unique to the point of where when someone searches for it on google, my landing page is the #1 result. At first, I had to fight for the artist to keep my beat tag on their records… but it wasn’t in vein. After a certain period of time, people were coming to me specifically for that tag on my beats.
Youtube
Some of these placements were big enough to be made into music videos for a few artists who are still building a buzz. These videos get plays every single day… my beat tag plays in the music videos and this drives people to search for my producer name (some at least lol) and they arrive at the landing page for my email list. I make sure to be up front on the landing page about sending new beats so they know what they are opting in for when they sign up for my list.
You could also take the youtube approach to the next level by uploading your own videos. It would take some thought on what kind of content to to put out to attract the views of artists who are willing to spend money on tracks though. But the beauty about using youtube as part of your traffic model, is that it is passive traffic. People are watching videos every single day whether you do anything or not… that's passive traffic driven to your landing page that turns into money when those people join your mailing list and buy beats. You could be working a day job or sitting on the beach….. those views and that traffic is coming regardless.
SoundCloud
For soundcloud, I have three accounts total that I use. My main account is my producer/beat making account branded with my producer name. On this account I only follow the people that I want to… specifically for branding. On this account I include links to my twitter, my instagram and to my landing page.
Custom Landing Pages
Each time that I upload a beat, I create a new custom landing page for it where people can download the beat by opting in to my email list. For the download link on my soundcloud track, i include the link to the landing page with the text FREE DOWNLOAD. I obviously don’t upload all of my tracks on soundcloud this way. Only music to help grow my list.
Promo Accounts
Next I make a list of all of the most popular songs that are similar to my music on soundcloud.
These other two soundcloud accounts are promo accounts. I repost the popular tracks from the list on each of these accounts… each one with diferent tracks. I try to find the absolute best avatar and header that i can possibly find for these. I dump a couple thousand fake followers on these promo accounts for social proof (the site that i use to pad my social media stats is followersgrow.com because i believe that they are the safest).
Then (by biding by soundclouds follow rules) I start to follow the followers of high profile sc users that are silimar to my style of music. I avoid following users with no username and no profiles. Because your account is filled with nothing but music that you know they will like, you have targeted avatar and header artwork, and you have a couple thousand followers, 90% of the people will follow you back. The max you can follow is 2000 so i like to order more followers than that so the following to follower ratio looks legit. Then after a few days you can unfollow every single one of these people and most of them wont even notice and will continue to follow you. Then you repeat the whole process again and again until you have thousands and thousands of targeted followers for each account. It takes time. Then you can start to repost the music from your main account and this will build you targeted organic followers, likes, and comments on your main account.
Twitter
Twitter has been huge for building my list daily also… but i’ve found that in order to be getting daily opt-ins from twitter, I need to be getting new twitter followers daily.
I do the same thing for twitter that i do with soundcloud but with a small twist. I have my main account who I follow who I want. Then the two promo accounts. Each of them is following the followers of a high profile twitter user with music similar to mine… a producer that i aspire to have the same success as. Then after a few days, I have these accounts unfollow the people who didn’t follow back. The difference is that I add fake followers to my main twitter account in addition to the promo accounts. I debated on this for a while but I slowly came to the realization that everyone is doing it and the people who aren’t…. aren’t on a certain level and are stuck in neautral. It takes followers to get followers. Most prolific artists started with fake followers.
Don’t beleive me?
https://www.twitteraudit.com/drdre
https://www.twitteraudit.com/timbaland
https://www.twitteraudit.com/youngchopbeatz
Also, on twitter… with my main account i also do a little bit of following/unfollowing but not as much as the promo accounts. but i always never follow more than 2000 people at any given time.
I can’t talk enough about how important it is to really target who your demographic is. The people that you you engage with and follow are the ideal people that you want on your list and sending emails to about buying beats. A small difference of approach can make an astronomical difference in the revenue that you bring in. Don’t go following a bunch of egg avatars who follow taylor swift.
Who is your target demographic?
Who is most likely to buy your music?
What kinds of interests do they have?
Who do they follow on Twitter?
What kind of tweets do they engage with?
The more questions that you create and the more creative that you get with the answers, the more money that you will make.
Should you be following the followers of a certain user?
Should you be following users who favorited a certain tweet?
Should you be following users who retweeted a certain tweet?
Look under rocks for that certain type of person who is a perfect candidate for buying your music. And then simply create the ideal Twitter account that they would follow/engage with/link click.
Instagram
For instagram, I use two promo accounts in addition to my main account. I pad all three of these users’ followers around 50k each to start and i follow and unfollow users in the same way that i do on twitter and soundcloud. Find your demographic and be diligent about it. With instagram it’s important to only post the tip top best images that you can. I post lots of high end studio photography pics (sometimes mine, sometimes not), anything thats luxurious in any way that i’m doing lol, any pretty girls that are around the studio and the occasional food porn for my main account. Why do I post these types of photos? Because thats what has proven to get me the most likes and engagement in the past… I started to get more followers when I started posting these types of photos. I just give the people what they want lol.
Once i got the ball rolling, it was easy because i purchased bots to automate all of these processes. it really freed up my time to focus on the music and bust out more beats. i’m not promoting purchasing bots… especially not at the beginning of this process. I went a good year before i started automating. Its extremely extremely important that you research and/or test the following/unfollowing and liking/commenting/etc rules for each platform because if you just waltz into this thing thinking you can go a mile a minute to scale it up… you’re in for a rude awakening and you will get your accounts temporarily suspended very quickly.
* * * * *
As you can see, the revenue is associated with whats going on with the daily process of reaching out on social media mainly. I’ve got the process hitting on all cylinders and the beauty of this model is that all i have to do is worry about making my best music and growing my list. The income isn’t tied to my time because revenue grows with my list and the more beats that i can offer them. it’s an exponential revenue growth model. it frees up my time so that I dont have to work a job and the more beats that i make, the more money that i make. it feeds itself. my biggest list growers are from soundcloud, and twitter… and mainly because i discovered the methods that i explained. after i started using the promo accounts method… my daily list growth jumped way up. I truly believe that anyone can make money selling beats using this model. It’s not about how good your beats are. It’s about getting to the people who will pay money for your beats. Then simply give it to them for a price that they will pay.
i honestly see my current income as small potatoes. i haven’t even reached my full potential musically and the sky is the limit for growing my list. IMO, this is how to take advantage as a producer like curren$y has as an artist. Make your lil name but you can get lots of bread. i’ll keep you guys updated as i go forward on how things change and grow. let me know what questions you guys have and i’ll either answer them the best that i can or point you in the right direction. it’s important that you really soak up the information that i’ve shared and read it multiple times if thats what it takes. the details seem miniscule but they are important. Don’t let the small stuff stop you from taking action though. Even if you only follow the broad outline, make sure you start immediately. The sooner you start, the sooner you can start making money from your craft. Even noob producers can use this method to make some side money… it just takes a small investment in yourself.
My money making model is….
- Creating a website
- Signing up for an email service provider
- Growing my email list using the methods detailed below
- Selling beats to my list
Email Provider // Auto-Responder
the first thing that I did that was probably the most crucial to growing my beat making revenue was investing in an email list provider. At first i used mailchimp because its free but i quickly found out that it is worth it to pay the monthly fee to use aweber for certain features. Plus hindsight is 20/20… I wish i would’ve just gone with aweber to begin with because it was a pain to move the list over. but you can use what you want honestly. there are a few good ones to use. getresponse is another one but i think they are a bit more expensive if i remember right.
Landing Page // “Squeeze Page”
I purchased the domain for my producer name and set up a landing page to build my list. I bought the landing page from a popular theme website. Just search google for “landing page” or “squeeze page”. You can find them for a decent price, but its definitely an investment to choose a good one. I used a landing page that showcases a youtube video with an email opt in form next to it. Then i just edited the theme using the instructions that came with it to replace the youtube video with my own. It’s pretty easy to do but you can find cheap html help if you need it.
Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a high converting offer that you give to people in order to get them to opt in to your list. You want your lead magnet to be of high value so that they want to opt in to your list. For this reason, I am using my most popular beat (my best beat in my opinion) as my lead magnet. For the youtube video on the landing page, I made a video using my most popular beat. For the title above the email opt-in form I made it read “Download This Beat For FREE!” and they can enter their name and email with a “GIVE ME THIS BEAT” button. When they click the button, it enters them into my email list. Again.. once people are on the list and they get my most popular beat for free, I can sell them the rest of my beats and make a lot more money off of each list member.
Beat Commerce Portion of the Site
Next I set up the actual beat portion of the website. I set this page up on mydomain.com/beats and i made sure to include opt in forms and opt in pop ups on this page as well… just in case they somehow got to this page without being on the list already. I made this page a nofollow for search engines so that they can only find my page via the landing page and be entered onto my list. You can find wordpress themes for selling beats or you can use a setup that uses myflashstore or something like that. Whenever I have a new beat that i’m ready to sell, I put it on the beat website and I send an email out to my list mentioning that I have a new beat for sale. I make each email custom to that specific beat so that my emails don’t get redundant. In the email I send them to the website with the beat on it and they can purchase the beat right on that page.
That leaves me to focus on two things. Make fire beats and grow my email list.
Growing The List
Currently my list is just under 4,000 people which is pretty modest to be honest. But the list is pretty targeted to artists who like to buy. This is key. The amount of beats that i sell each day varies. lots of times artists will buy beats 2, 3 and 4+ at a time for projects and those sales make up for the slower periods. Currently I average around 1-4 beats sold a day. I charge $75 for all of my beats on a lease and if they want the beat exclusively, I charge $3k but I might raise that price tbh. You might wonder why I charge so much for exclusive rights to a beat. The reason is because I can make way more money off of a beat if I can sell that beat to everyone on my email list and sell it over and over and over again forever. I’ve had a few complaints on the exclusive price… but thats just the way it is. It’s math. The funny thing now that i think about it… the dudes that complained still paid the price to get it exclusively lmao.
The main way that I grow my list right now is through social media. I’ll show you my methods for each platform. branding myself has been the most important part of this. I’ll show you how that was done too.
I have spent the past 4 years putting in mad work on getting placements with anyone and everyone. All of these placements have been for free. I did this as a marketing strategy to get my name out there because I knew my music was good enough to sell and people would use it for free but i needed to brand myself. I started using a beat tag of someone saying my producer name on all of my beats. My producer name is unique to the point of where when someone searches for it on google, my landing page is the #1 result. At first, I had to fight for the artist to keep my beat tag on their records… but it wasn’t in vein. After a certain period of time, people were coming to me specifically for that tag on my beats.
Youtube
Some of these placements were big enough to be made into music videos for a few artists who are still building a buzz. These videos get plays every single day… my beat tag plays in the music videos and this drives people to search for my producer name (some at least lol) and they arrive at the landing page for my email list. I make sure to be up front on the landing page about sending new beats so they know what they are opting in for when they sign up for my list.
You could also take the youtube approach to the next level by uploading your own videos. It would take some thought on what kind of content to to put out to attract the views of artists who are willing to spend money on tracks though. But the beauty about using youtube as part of your traffic model, is that it is passive traffic. People are watching videos every single day whether you do anything or not… that's passive traffic driven to your landing page that turns into money when those people join your mailing list and buy beats. You could be working a day job or sitting on the beach….. those views and that traffic is coming regardless.
SoundCloud
For soundcloud, I have three accounts total that I use. My main account is my producer/beat making account branded with my producer name. On this account I only follow the people that I want to… specifically for branding. On this account I include links to my twitter, my instagram and to my landing page.
Custom Landing Pages
Each time that I upload a beat, I create a new custom landing page for it where people can download the beat by opting in to my email list. For the download link on my soundcloud track, i include the link to the landing page with the text FREE DOWNLOAD. I obviously don’t upload all of my tracks on soundcloud this way. Only music to help grow my list.
Promo Accounts
Next I make a list of all of the most popular songs that are similar to my music on soundcloud.
These other two soundcloud accounts are promo accounts. I repost the popular tracks from the list on each of these accounts… each one with diferent tracks. I try to find the absolute best avatar and header that i can possibly find for these. I dump a couple thousand fake followers on these promo accounts for social proof (the site that i use to pad my social media stats is followersgrow.com because i believe that they are the safest).
Then (by biding by soundclouds follow rules) I start to follow the followers of high profile sc users that are silimar to my style of music. I avoid following users with no username and no profiles. Because your account is filled with nothing but music that you know they will like, you have targeted avatar and header artwork, and you have a couple thousand followers, 90% of the people will follow you back. The max you can follow is 2000 so i like to order more followers than that so the following to follower ratio looks legit. Then after a few days you can unfollow every single one of these people and most of them wont even notice and will continue to follow you. Then you repeat the whole process again and again until you have thousands and thousands of targeted followers for each account. It takes time. Then you can start to repost the music from your main account and this will build you targeted organic followers, likes, and comments on your main account.
Twitter has been huge for building my list daily also… but i’ve found that in order to be getting daily opt-ins from twitter, I need to be getting new twitter followers daily.
I do the same thing for twitter that i do with soundcloud but with a small twist. I have my main account who I follow who I want. Then the two promo accounts. Each of them is following the followers of a high profile twitter user with music similar to mine… a producer that i aspire to have the same success as. Then after a few days, I have these accounts unfollow the people who didn’t follow back. The difference is that I add fake followers to my main twitter account in addition to the promo accounts. I debated on this for a while but I slowly came to the realization that everyone is doing it and the people who aren’t…. aren’t on a certain level and are stuck in neautral. It takes followers to get followers. Most prolific artists started with fake followers.
Don’t beleive me?
https://www.twitteraudit.com/drdre
https://www.twitteraudit.com/timbaland
https://www.twitteraudit.com/youngchopbeatz
Also, on twitter… with my main account i also do a little bit of following/unfollowing but not as much as the promo accounts. but i always never follow more than 2000 people at any given time.
I can’t talk enough about how important it is to really target who your demographic is. The people that you you engage with and follow are the ideal people that you want on your list and sending emails to about buying beats. A small difference of approach can make an astronomical difference in the revenue that you bring in. Don’t go following a bunch of egg avatars who follow taylor swift.
Who is your target demographic?
Who is most likely to buy your music?
What kinds of interests do they have?
Who do they follow on Twitter?
What kind of tweets do they engage with?
The more questions that you create and the more creative that you get with the answers, the more money that you will make.
Should you be following the followers of a certain user?
Should you be following users who favorited a certain tweet?
Should you be following users who retweeted a certain tweet?
Look under rocks for that certain type of person who is a perfect candidate for buying your music. And then simply create the ideal Twitter account that they would follow/engage with/link click.
For instagram, I use two promo accounts in addition to my main account. I pad all three of these users’ followers around 50k each to start and i follow and unfollow users in the same way that i do on twitter and soundcloud. Find your demographic and be diligent about it. With instagram it’s important to only post the tip top best images that you can. I post lots of high end studio photography pics (sometimes mine, sometimes not), anything thats luxurious in any way that i’m doing lol, any pretty girls that are around the studio and the occasional food porn for my main account. Why do I post these types of photos? Because thats what has proven to get me the most likes and engagement in the past… I started to get more followers when I started posting these types of photos. I just give the people what they want lol.
Once i got the ball rolling, it was easy because i purchased bots to automate all of these processes. it really freed up my time to focus on the music and bust out more beats. i’m not promoting purchasing bots… especially not at the beginning of this process. I went a good year before i started automating. Its extremely extremely important that you research and/or test the following/unfollowing and liking/commenting/etc rules for each platform because if you just waltz into this thing thinking you can go a mile a minute to scale it up… you’re in for a rude awakening and you will get your accounts temporarily suspended very quickly.
* * * * *
As you can see, the revenue is associated with whats going on with the daily process of reaching out on social media mainly. I’ve got the process hitting on all cylinders and the beauty of this model is that all i have to do is worry about making my best music and growing my list. The income isn’t tied to my time because revenue grows with my list and the more beats that i can offer them. it’s an exponential revenue growth model. it frees up my time so that I dont have to work a job and the more beats that i make, the more money that i make. it feeds itself. my biggest list growers are from soundcloud, and twitter… and mainly because i discovered the methods that i explained. after i started using the promo accounts method… my daily list growth jumped way up. I truly believe that anyone can make money selling beats using this model. It’s not about how good your beats are. It’s about getting to the people who will pay money for your beats. Then simply give it to them for a price that they will pay.
i honestly see my current income as small potatoes. i haven’t even reached my full potential musically and the sky is the limit for growing my list. IMO, this is how to take advantage as a producer like curren$y has as an artist. Make your lil name but you can get lots of bread. i’ll keep you guys updated as i go forward on how things change and grow. let me know what questions you guys have and i’ll either answer them the best that i can or point you in the right direction. it’s important that you really soak up the information that i’ve shared and read it multiple times if thats what it takes. the details seem miniscule but they are important. Don’t let the small stuff stop you from taking action though. Even if you only follow the broad outline, make sure you start immediately. The sooner you start, the sooner you can start making money from your craft. Even noob producers can use this method to make some side money… it just takes a small investment in yourself.
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