Earning your first $1000 from making beats is definitely the most difficult but rewarding part of being a music producer.
It’s difficult, because you’re starting from nothing. It’s the same with any business venture, finding your feet can be extremely challenging, and many people often (sadly) end up giving up before they manage to successfully get even a single sale.
Yesterday I posted a video covering practical tips to help you go from zero to a thousand real quick, and I’m confident you won’t have heard some of these ideas before.
So, without further ado, let’s break down what it takes to turn making beats into a lucrative income source.
Look Into Streaming
One of the most overlooked opportunities that music producers aren’t taking advantage of is releasing music to streaming platforms. A majority of producers I speak to who are finding it difficult to get their business off the ground focus on selling beats on BeatStars, and finding customers by posting their beats on YouTube.
Now this is a tried and true method, but let’s be honest. The competition is INSANE. YouTube has a huge viewer base, but that also comes with the downside of competing with thousands and thousands of channels trying to reach the exact same people you are. What this effectively means in 2023 is that there are way more beats for sale than their are rappers looking to buy beats.
Now it’s pretty common knowledge in business that when there is more supply of a product than demand, the sales dry up and the value of the product decreases as a result. It’s getting to the point where you need to be in YouTube’s top 1% of producer channels to make good money from directly showing off your Beats on YouTube and getting sales directly.
It’s possible, but difficult.
So with this problem becoming more apparent, what can be done to balance the equation out as a producer.
Well, something I started doing around 5-6 years ago is releasing my own music. Rather than marketing my work to other musicians, I hugely expanded my audience by instead directly producing music for music listeners. It’s hard to say, but I would estimate there are probably around 500,000 rappers who buy beats consistently, and at least 500 MILLION people who listen to trap music regularly.
With such a massive audience, it’s definitely possible to make good money from streaming royalties on your beats, especially if they’re interesting enough to stand up on their own, without the need for a rapper.
I’ve generally found over the last few months that Spotify pays me around $2400 per million streams, and Apple Music pays around $7000 per million.
So, doing some rough math, how can you get to $1000 from making beats by releasing them to streaming services like Spotify?
The easiest way to work this out is to make a few assumptions. Now I’m going to base this off my personal situation, but yours may differ.
Around 30% of my total royalties come from Spotify, with the remaining 70% coming from the other big alternative services, including Amazon and YouTube music.
So, with that being taken into consideration and Spotify Paying $2400 per million streams, if you can get to around 130,000 streams on Spotify, you have probably made around $1000 once you include the royalties from elsewhere.
It’s hard to say what kind of numbers you will do on each service, but that’s just my personal guideline I use myself when estimating royalties.
So, 130,000 streams on beats sounds like a lot, but lets break it down:
Firstly, as a beat maker you probably have a huge folder of beats at this point. If you don’t, you definitely should.
Let’s say you have 250 beats which you’re happy to release to streaming services.
That’s only 520 streams you need per song to get to 130k streams.
And if your beats are good and there are 250 of them lying around, 520 streams is really not a huge number to aim for on a beat.
My best trap beats get around 3-5k streams per day from Spotify alone, so 520 streams over the span of a few months is completely attainable.
Release More Music
This might sound like an obvious one, but the more stuff you make, the more ways there are for people to find you and resonate with your work.
As a musician, what’s a better advertisement than your music?
Let’s assume for a second that you’re mainly aiming to sell your beats. You need to see each of your YouTube videos you post as a free advertisement for your business. Content is king in 2023, and the more content you have, the more opportunities there are for people to find your stuff and become a long-term customer.
Think of it this way. Sorry, I always use analogies and little stories to explain stuff because that’s how I learn personally. Hopefully it’s helpful for you as well.
Let’s say there are a billion videos on YouTube.
If you post 1 video, you currently make up 1 billionth of the total share of content.
As soon as you post another beat, your slice of that pie has doubled in size.
Now if you keep going, and keep posting consistently, you would be surprised how big that slice of pie can get, and quickly, too.
but 50 videos is still only 50/1 billion. That’s not exactly a huge share. Or is it? This is where the network effect comes into play, which is one of the most powerful yet widely misunderstood concepts in the social media era.
At a very high level, the network effect is the idea that as more things are connected together, the size of the network increases exponentially.
Let’s say you have a single video, and a single website.
The only line that can be drawn here is between that one single video, and the site. You’ve got one connection. Let’s call this setup a size 1 network.
How big is the network if you add another video to the mix? At first, you might think 2, but this is actually a size 3 network, because there’s also a line between the videos.
The “proper” name for this concept is Reed’s law, and it’s way, way more powerful than most people realise. If you want to learn more around the more technical explanation, then definitely do a bit of research into it.
If you want to hear the rest of the tips, definitely watch the video I linked above.
Finally, if you want to take action and realise you need to make better music, and more of it, then definitely check out Symitone.
We make limited edition sample packs which are packed full of original samples you won’t find anywhere else, and our packs often cost less than the price of a coffee. Break through your beat block today and check out our site.
