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S3E03 – Does Selling Beats Mean You’re a Good Producer

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People search my website very often for does selling beats mean you’re a good producer..

And I can’t tell you how untrue that is!

First, I do believe that in order to sell beats, your beats need to be at a certain quality level..

But once you pass that quality level, it all comes down to marketing, and getting your music in front of the right people.

You may like my Proper Producer Mindset Book..
It will help you launch in a healthy way as a music producer

I read way too often that people are discouraged that their music is not good enough because they aren’t able to sell it.

Understand that the music industry is incredibly competitive, and you must study marketing A LOT in order to learn how to get your music in front of the right audience.

That’s why I said you should read Rich Dad Poor Dad Book!

It will give you the perspective of how to make money while focusing on what you truly want to do, without feeling so pressured.

Example of Targeting the Wrong Audience with Your Music:

If someone likes dance music, but you’re trying to sell rap beats, they won’t be interested.. make sense?

This episode will be very encouraging to those who want to learn to make beats in FL Studio, but get discouraged when comparing them self to others within the industry..

Want a pro-tip? Don’t compare yourself to others. 🙂

Learn to make professional beats here!

BEAT TAPES By GratuiTous Beatmaking Contracts Music Career Oxygen Pro

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S3E03 – Does Selling Beats Mean You’re a Good Producer

  1. Season three, episode three. Does selling beats mean you're a good
  2. producer? All right, this is kind of a hot topic, but I'm gonna approach it in such
  3. a way just to kind of give you a perspective, okay?
  4. At the end of the day, no matter what it is in this life, it all comes down to
  5. marketing, okay? And that's what we're gonna talk about in this episode.
  6. Before we get into this episode, again, check out my free book I have for you guys.
  7. If you're serious about learning to make beats in FL Studio and you want to get
  8. really good, I reveal tons and tons of secrets in my free book.
  9. It's called Five Keys to a Successful Beat.
  10. So simple it becomes creative.
  11. Go to it's gratuitous.com forward slash five keys, and I will email it to you when
  12. you sign up. Remember, the subtitle of that book is called So Simple It Becomes
  13. Creative. A lot of times people want to get so advanced, so complex, but listen to
  14. some of your favorite songs and try to listen to the melodies, listen to the
  15. percussion loops, especially when it comes to rap beats.
  16. Sometimes it's so simple that it's just like wow, that was so creative.
  17. Again, it's gratuitous.com forward slash five keys, and you can get that for free.
  18. Be on the lookout for my new Oxygen Pro version 2.1 premium user
  19. preset. Super super excited to get this one out to you guys.
  20. Tons and tons of workflow improvements.
  21. You can open up windows, you can change presets all off of the drum pads.
  22. It's really cool. All right, so let's get into this episode about does selling beats
  23. mean that you're a good producer?
  24. I want to first start with if you have ever read the book, it's called Rich Dad,
  25. Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. In the previous episode, I was talking to you about
  26. passive income and you essentially, you know, never selling yourself short, right?
  27. And so it's really, really important that you understand about this passive
  28. income if you're really wanting to pursue the music industry, because when you make
  29. a song and you're selling that song, typically it is passive.
  30. You create the song, you create the product, you sell the product, and since it's
  31. digital, you only have to make it once, which is so powerful.
  32. In the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, there's a section and it talks about the
  33. best-selling book, all right. It doesn't mean that like you're the best author in
  34. the world, but it was the best-selling book.
  35. For example, if a book is like a New York Times bestseller, like what does that
  36. really mean? This is marketing.
  37. It deceives people because it's perceived as a best seller.
  38. And there's little schemes sometimes going on even in book sales.
  39. So, for example, like let's say you write a book with a couple people, you can get
  40. people to buy copies. Like, let's say each each person has to buy 10,000 copies,
  41. then they can put it on the book, 30,000 copies already sold.
  42. And it's like they're not lying, but it's kind of like, all right.
  43. And I'm telling you that these are things that happen in the business.
  44. And when consumers, you know, if you go grocery shopping and you're walking down the
  45. book aisle, and then you see a book, it's like number one, oh, 50,000 copies sold or
  46. whatever. It's like, what does that really mean?
  47. Now, let's talk about how that can kind of relate to beats, okay?
  48. So when someone sells beats and they're very successful at selling beats, I do
  49. believe that their beats are at a certain caliber that people are willing to pay
  50. money for. But once you learn how to make a half-decent beat, then it's in the
  51. marketing game. It's nothing to do with really skill behind the beat anymore.
  52. It's now about learning how to sell the beat..
  53. All right And so what's all involved in that?
  54. Well, it's all about trying to capture an audience, trying to get people onto an
  55. email list, send them something free.
  56. For example, at the very beginning of this episode, what did I say to you?
  57. I said you can download my free beat making book.
  58. Why? Because I would want you to sign up to the email list so that I can send you
  59. marketing emails about my FL Studio education.
  60. When you sign up, if you get a really good experience, then the goal here is that
  61. you would want to join the platform because again, inside the platform, there's 30
  62. beat making courses, and it teaches so much of the knowledge of what I've learned
  63. over the years. But in the same thing, when you're trying to sell beats to artists,
  64. they sign up for let's say some free beats of yours, and then you offer a sale.
  65. You say, Hey, here's a special sale.
  66. You can get 10 of my beats for 27 or something like that, okay?
  67. And that is how it starts growing.
  68. The more people you can get on your list, the more potential sales that you can
  69. have. And so all I'm trying to say is if you are making beats and you're feeling
  70. down because maybe you know you've tried to sell beats and you're not able to sell
  71. beats or whatever, that doesn't mean that you're not a good producer.
  72. It doesn't mean that you can't make good beats.
  73. It just means that your marketing skills are really weak.
  74. And that's the reason why I started with the story about the books.
  75. People can say anything when it comes to marketing.
  76. Oh, number one best anything, right?
  77. And it's all perceived value. And when you visit my website, I
  78. never want to market that way.
  79. I typically try to just say it exactly as is.
  80. I don't try to pretend like something's in there that it isn't.
  81. You know, I have worked very hard to acquire the knowledge and practice, etc., etc.
  82. But when it comes to marketing, people are all about making the sale and they will
  83. do whatever it takes to make the sale.
  84. They'll say essentially whatever they can to kind of weasel around for you
  85. to make the transaction, right?
  86. So does selling beats mean you're a good producer?
  87. I think that yes, it means that your beats are at a caliber that people want
  88. to purchase the beats. That's very important.
  89. That yes, the beats are at least good enough that people are willing to either
  90. number one, sign up to the email list to get the free beat, number two, purchase the
  91. beats, but that doesn't mean that that producer is the best producer,
  92. right? It just means that they're able to make sales.
  93. But if you're making beats and if you feel that your beats aren't very good because
  94. you're not making sales, that doesn't mean that your beats aren't good.
  95. It just means that your marketing skills are weak.
  96. Okay. So that is this episode.
  97. Something that I really wanted to get out there in terms of encouragement, and
  98. they're just feeling down that maybe their music isn't good enough.
  99. The fact is it's marketing skills.
  100. But it is something that you probably already know.
  101. This music business is all about marketing.
  102. R?ight Whenever you hear about the music business, you know, if someone's trying to
  103. enter the music business, it's a cutthroat industry.
  104. It's all about. getting the music on somebody's phone so they can listen to it
  105. to purchase, to stream it And it's not just about money when it comes to the music
  106. being listened, it's about the views, it's about the attention, excitement behind
  107. the name. That's all in conjunction with the money too.
  108. It all kind of goes together. The approach I have taken is I actually don't sell my
  109. music. Yes, my music is on Spotify.
  110. Again, check out my beat tapes by Gratuitous, but I have just put it up there for
  111. convenience. It just allows people to follow along nice and easy.
  112. I started with my beat tapes by gratit or it actually used to be called Free Beats
  113. by Gratuitous. Again, I had to change it to beat tapes by gratuitous.
  114. And when I first released my very first one, I remember the first day, because this
  115. was when I was running BeatStruggles.com at the time.
  116. I released it and I got about 300 downloads like the first day, and I was like,
  117. whoa, wow, like really exciting, right?
  118. but that doesn't really mean much.
  119. It just means that some downloads happened.
  120. And as soon as I released the first one, I started making the second one.
  121. And the artwork was horrible, but it was the fact that, oh, I gotta release the
  122. second one. When I released the second one, I got like the same kind of feedback
  123. about two or three hundred downloads.
  124. And then I just kept releasing these beat tapes.
  125. And what I discovered over time of releasing these beat tapes is that they are a
  126. phenomenal way to practice. A lot of times people are just making that one beat and
  127. releasing it. But again, the whole art of putting together an album or a
  128. beat tape is slowly going away in the industry.
  129. When you put together a beat tape, you have to learn to master a song so that it
  130. works well with all the other songs in terms of the volume balance, in terms of the
  131. EQ balance, right? And these are things that you actually get to practice.
  132. It gives you a real portfolio to share to somebody.
  133. If somebody says, let's hear your beats, you can go to my website, it's
  134. gratuitous.com forward slash music.
  135. Essentially, that's like my portfolio.
  136. If you're just like, wow, yeah, this person can teach me how to make beats, or if I
  137. was trying to maybe even sell like my courses or something on a different platform,
  138. I would say, hey, I'm interested in submitting my courses to your platform.
  139. And by the way, here's my music page for you to see that.
  140. Yes, you know, I like to create courses, I like to educate, but I myself am actually
  141. a music producer, right? Like that's the reason why I've kept doing this, is because
  142. I wanted to be able to make beats.
  143. I wanted to make albums, I wanted to continue to do music because it was so much
  144. fun. It was something unlike anything I've ever done in my life, especially once you
  145. really start learning how to make, you know, really emotional chords and drum loops,
  146. learning how to put it all together.
  147. Once you can get to that level, I'm telling you, there is no greater like reward
  148. that I have felt in my life so far, is making music and being able to
  149. listen back, and you're just like, wow, it is so amazing.
  150. All right. So if you want to experience that same feeling of yes, you made that
  151. beat. Again, no pre-made drum loops, no pre-made MIDI packs, everything from
  152. scratch. We use high quality virtual instruments, we use high quality one-shot drum
  153. samples, and I teach you how to make beats and how to get a solid finished
  154. product. That was such an amazing feeling, especially in those first couple years.
  155. And like especially when you want to share it with people..
  156. Okay When you go to share your music, it's just one of those things that you learn
  157. over time, your audience. There's a time and a place to share.
  158. And when in your first couple years, you essentially you're really spammy.
  159. You want to get it in front of people's faces.
  160. Here's this, here's this. But as you progress, you start to realize now is not the
  161. time to talk about that, or you maybe you don't even want to talk about that, or you
  162. even withhold the information from people.
  163. Sometimes you don't even want to let them know that you make music, right?
  164. But when you're first getting started, it's all you want to talk about.
  165. Okay, so that's it for this episode.
  166. Again, check out my free beat making book.
  167. It's called Five Keys to a Successful Beat.
  168. So simple, it becomes creative.
  169. Visit it's gratuitous.com forward slash five keys.
  170. I promise you, my website, my platform is an amazing website to learn
  171. how to make beats with FL Studio.
  172. There's everything in there for absolute beginners.
  173. If you're wanting to learn piano with improvisation, if you are wanting to learn
  174. drum loops, it's what I call safe spots.
  175. You learn about sound placement, sound selection.
  176. You learn about what I call the organic tools, which are your free MIDI tools.
  177. If you can really truly learn how to use this stuff, I promise you, you will become
  178. such an amazing producer. Be on the lookout for the M Audio Oxygen Pro
  179. Premium User Preset version 2.1 is releasing very, very soon.
  180. There will be a video explaining how it all works.
  181. We'll talk to you in the next
  182. one.
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