Wendy Day tells emerging artists to buy exclusive beat rights, not leased ones, and to focus on real Spotify streams over follower counts. Leased beats risk copyright takedowns and losing your YouTube account. Build producer relationships through networking and split deals: pay half upfront, half when you sign paperwork.
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Hi guys, I want to talk about finding beats today, tracks, producers. But before I talk about that, I just want to make a little bit of a mention because I don't want to make a whole video about, um, the topic of vanity metrics. Don't get caught up in how many views you have or how many followers you have on Instagram. Like, don't let your ego take over in a place where emotion shouldn't be. Like, it's much better to have 1,000 really solid fans and people that engage with you and interact with you than it is to have 30,000 bots or 50,000 people, you know, in Indonesia and, um, Brazil who will never come to a show and will never buy a lick of merchandise. I know a lot of artists get wrapped up sometimes and feel frustrated because they feel like having larger numbers attracts more people, and that's not necessarily the case. Good content is what attracts people. If somebody comes to your site and you have 100,000 followers, that's great, but if you have shitty content and mediocre music, they're not going to care that you have 100,000 in content. Most people are looking for stuff that's interesting and entertaining. They're not looking for big numbers, you know. Certainly they expect Drake to have millions of viewers, and they expect, you know, Ed Sheeran to have millions of viewers, and Lizzo, because of who they are. But at the end of the day, people didn't turn away from any of those artists coming up when they were coming up, saying, oh, their numbers weren't high enough. At some point in time, all them had 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, and look where they are today. So don't get caught up in the vanity metrics. That's just your ego talking. You know, what matters is how many followers do you have on Spotify, how many streams are you getting on Apple Music, because that's what's making you money. And you're doing this for the money. You're not doing this for the popularity. Look at all the people on Instagram, like the trolls, that have 300,000 followers, but they're not making a dime. So don't go by how something makes you feel. Go by what really impacts your career. Okay, finding beats. And this is such a difficult topic because in a perfect world, you want to have a relationship with the producer and you want to be able to go into a studio and record. But when you're first starting out, the hardest thing to do is find tracks, especially if you don't have a budget where you can buy tracks. So I'm gonna suggest that you get on social media, you build as many relationships as possible. Yes, I'm aware that people get beats from YouTube and BeatStars and, uh, SoundClick and all the different sites. The reason that I don't utilize them is because my clients actually put money into marketing and promoting songs, and when you don't own the exclusive rights to a song, you cannot put money into it. Because what if you spend $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, and then along come the Migos or Chance the Rapper and they put out a song on that same beat that was not exclusive? And then what happens if you put out a song and it's a leased beat and it starts to take off and you go back to the producer and you say, hey, I need this exclusive, and they say, oh, I've already sold, you know, 10 leases to that beat, or okay, you can have it exclusive, I want $25,000. You've got to treat this like a business. And I know that there's a lot of producers out there that are selling leases to beats, and this is probably going to piss them off to hear me say it, but I don't do leases on beats because I can't put a budget behind it. And if I can't market and promote a, a track that somebody has spent money to rap over, it's useless to me. So I just don't go to those sites unless I know I can get a beat exclusively And a lot of guys on these websites, like, when you, when you reach out to them, you can't even get them to respond, let alone get them to negotiate, you know, something that's not a lease, something that's exclusive, and exclusive for single rights, and exclusive without giving you a maximum amount of streams that you can have. It doesn't help you for somebody to give you the rights to the song if it only streams 20,000 times. And I understand why producers do that because there's so many of you that get tracks from them and then you don't market and promote, so it's a wasted track. But when you do this professionally and you're doing this as more than a hobby and you're doing this to make a living, you cannot use leased beats. You cannot put money behind something that you don't own the rights to. And that's just the reality of it. So my best suggestion is to start reaching out to producers and build relationships. Network. Find the guys who are willing to give you beats up front for a split on the back end. Or if you've got a budget, you know, be honest with them. Tell them what your budget is going into it. But don't get some bullshit beats. Don't rap over B beats, you know. Rap over the A beats. Rap over singles. Rap over music that's amazing. Do not rap over a beat that somebody else owns. Do not jack a Lil Wayne beat. Do not jack a Block Boy beat. Do not jack a Gunna beat and rap over it. That spells amateur right out the gate. You can't use that. You can't make money from that. I've got a client who bought all of his beats on YouTube, and he's got some amazing production, but after he spent thousands of dollars to shoot the video and upload his video to YouTube, he got takedown notices because other people owned those beats. And those beats were, were put up by the producer, and there was a, um, there was a takedown notice. So we couldn't even make money from the beat that we had paperwork on that said that we, that we owned the rights to the beat. Like, it became a nightmare to work that out, you know. YouTube is not in the business of trying to hear us out. They don't give a fuck. So if there is a copyright claim, they just take it down. And if you get 3 of them— and, and, and by 3 of them, it could be the same song. So you could put up a lyric video, you could put up a music video, and you could put up the audio version of your song. That's 3 strikes. They pulled down your whole account. You lose your YouTube account, and YouTube is too important to lose. So when you're finding beats, all I ask is that you make sure that you have the rights to use it. Make sure that you get signed paperwork. If you work out an agreement to pay somebody for the beat, I would suggest that you give them half up front, and then you give them half once they sign the paperwork. So I know how hard it is to find beats, and, and I'm very uncomfortable making this video because I believe that every producer should get paid. I also believe that this is a production-driven industry, which means if you don't have the right beats, it's going to be really hard to attract an audience. So I understand how important the producer is, and the best advice I can give you is to work out a situation with a producer whose music you like and who understands that it makes more sense to put the money into marketing, promoting and then splitting the back end with them so that everybody gets paid when the money starts to come. That's just my advice. As you build a buzz and your movement gets bigger, it's going to be relatively easy to find beats because producers are going to be throwing them at you. But when you're first starting out, I know how hard this is. Just hang in there and try to do the best that you can and always do what's right. Okay guys, take care.
