So you’ve started out in the world of leasing beats, You’ve been trying your hardest and haven’t sold a single lease yet? and now you’re asking yourself what the hell am I doing wrong?
- Do my beats suck?
- Are my beats priced too high?
- Is my website design wrong?
Well, I hate to tell you straight, But it’s probably a mix of a lot of things, But out of the many things it could be, It’s most likely that you just suck at marketing and that you don’t how to bring potential buyers to your website.
Before I share any beat selling tips with you I want to explain a few things that you shouldn’t be doing, that you most likely probably already are, and if your not, I salute you. you’re officially a part of the 1%.
If you actually want your visitors to convert and buy beats from you, pay close attention.
What Not to Do!
1. Automated Twitter Direct Messages
You know exactly what I mean right? I’ve never met someone that hasn’t experienced this themselves, you follow someone on Twitter, and seconds later you get a spammy message with SoundCloud, Facebook & Youtube Links, When this happens to me, not only do I delete the message but I unfollow you as well, And quite frankly that’s what you deserve! as its not the right way to go if you’re selling beats.
This is no way to promote your beats or music services, Not only will it deteriorate your professional reputation but you’ll also piss a lot of people off along the way.
2. Unprofessional Artwork
Nothing puts me off more than bad artwork, as personally, I feel it shows unprofessionalism and lack of enthusiasm for your project.
If you’re going to put out an album or EP that you to plan to aggressively promote, then NEVER skimp out on the production and marketing of it, and when it comes to the visuals, your job is to catch someone’s eye, not to offend it! (sorry).
If you don’t have a natural eye for design then don’t bother trying to knock something up yourself, hire a professional!
It’s a cost that’s worth swallowing and the results will be better than anything you could ever achieve right?
3. Asking for a Purchase Right Away!
Going straight in for the sale is a dying tactic and is gradually becoming less and less effective, If you’re trying to build an audience for yourself then rope potential buyers in with entertainment and focus on building relationships and forget transactions in the beginning.
As much as Automated Direct Twitter Messages annoy the heck out of me, If you’re doing it (I hope by the end of reading this you’re not) do it in a way that creates interest for your brand and never ask someone to buy your beats right off the bat!
If you don’t like it, then don’t do it to other people!
Now that we’ve gotten that bit out of the way, let’s get into what you SHOULD be doing to create real traction towards your beat selling website and to ultimately land more paid leases.
5 Beat Selling Tips for Leasing Producers
1. Set Your Beat Player to AutoPlay
If you already have a website, great! you’re already halfway done, at first you may be reluctant to set your beat player to auto play your beats on page load, I understand that one of the reasons may be that you may think you’re going to p*ss a lot of potential buyers off by doing so. but think of it this way…
Selling beats online is like using a filter, sometimes you need to cut off some frequencies either high or low to get the result you want to achieve, not all of the traffic you send to your site is going to convert, so you need to filter out the people that aren’t interested and focus on those who are, By setting your beats player to auto play, your visitor will instinctively have to find where the music is playing to either stop it or to check your beats out further.
Recommended Beat Players
2. Have Fair Pricing
Pricing is a very touchy subject for most leasing producers, It’s important to keep your leasing prices consistent with one another, never have one mp3 lease priced at $20 and then another priced at $80, this will create disloyalty with your potential customers and increase your bounce rate astronomically, resulting in loss of custom and less revenue.
When you’re first starting out your credits are everything, and if you don’t have any, then pricing should be kept towards the lower end of the spectrum, once you start stacking up credits or at very least have built a large following then you’ll be safe to start jacking your prices up.
You have to understand that a product’s value in this industry is a matter of subjectivity, If you have credits from big artists and companies, you can create the perception to your potential buyers that your beats are worth more than the next producer.
The same point can stand if you have a loyal following on social media, or any other medium, Think of people like the Kardashians, their completely talentless right? but somehow they can sell anything! let that one stew for a minute…
3. Keep Marketing Consistent
The biggest mistake I see new leasing producers make is becoming inconsistent with their marketing efforts, If you’re trying to sell beats then make ALOT of beats and update your website and social channels a couple of times a week, making a few a month is by no means enough, look at the big names in the leasing business!
- SuperstarO
- Curtiss King
- Mantra Beats
All of these guys are supermen when it comes to their marketing, they’re not putting out a new beat or video once a month and hoping that it goes viral, They’re updating their websites, YouTube channel and emailing their lists multiple times per week.
My best advice would be to monitor these people with an eagle eye, NEVER copy what they do, use what they doing as inspiration to create your own marketing plan and set yourself up to become a leader in the industry.
4. Create A Brand
Now a lot of people that say they’re creating a brand in truth, don’t know what the hell they’re doing before we get into anything useful, you need to know that just putting out beats and nothing else isn’t enough to attract people to you in 2018.
People now want to be entertained, educated, and to feel like they’re a part of something, if you’re selling beats you’re servicing the entire world and not just your city, there is a reason why they call the worlds wealthiest people the %1, they’re the people that think differently to everyone else,
When you sell beats you’re operating a business, which means you need to give value to your audience in more ways than just your music.
One way I serve my community is through putting out regular YouTube Tutorials, As you can see the screenshot below is from a video called “Controller Assignments The Easy Way – Logic Pro X Tutorial“ which currently has over 50k views. Not bad right?
YouTube has so far has opened up a series of opportunities for me, that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, such as being invited to be a guest on local podcasts, which in result has gotten me contacts in the business world and lead to private production work for local businesses.
5. Learn SEO
There is a reason why the video above has so many views, It’s optimized to a standard that Youtube’s search engine can understand it enough to rank it on their first page for search terms like “Logic Pro X Controller Assignments” and as you can see from the screenshot below, the video ranks at position 3.
Go ahead and search for it now!…
YouTube SEO works a lot differently to regular SEO and ranking web pages, with Youtube you’re at a great advantage if you manage to get a video ranking for a high volume search term, Youtube’s algorithm works in a way that it actively promotes videos that are feeding it good metrics such as high watch time in minutes and hours.
To learn more about YouTube SEO check out this guide YouTube SEO: How to Rank YouTube Videos in 2018 from backlinko.com
Selling Type Beats
One of the most debated subjects in the music producer community that is in effect heavily related to YouTube SEO is, in fact, making Type Beats! Is it good or is it a bad thing?
Selling beats is the same as any other business, you need to give value to your potential customers and create long-lasting relationships so that one transaction is not the only transaction, Mix that enthusiasm with strategy and technical knowledge and you can truly put yourself at a distinct advantage over the competition.
See More: Email Marketing for Music Producers: How to Sell More Beats
[thrive_leads id=’6072′]
With 17 Years music production experience, George Matthews is the CEO of Your Local Musician, he also makes music under the name Grimmm and releases Lo-fi music.
