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.
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.