Switched on Pop - The $50M Beat Marketplace That Broke the Billboard

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Lil Nas X licensed the beat for “Old Town Road” from an e-commerce platform. He originally bought a non-exclusive copy of the backing track for just $29.99 from a 19 year old Dutch record producer called YoungKio. And he’s not the first hitmaker to do so. Desiigner, Bryson Tiller and Queen Naija have all made hit songs from internet beats. These beats are big business. The arguable market leader, BeatStars, has paid its producers over $50M since its inception in 2008. The platform allows producers to market their beats to MCs and singers, boasting 340,000 active sellers and 1.5M tracks. BeatStars CEO Abe Batshon originally created the company to connect artists who may not live in the music industry hubs in L.A., N.Y., Nashville and Atlanta. His global ambitions were realized—producers on the platform come from all over the world. They release a steady stream of new music, marketing their original and sound-a-like beats to aspiring and emerging artists everywhere turning into ad music, Instagram stories and even Billboard Hot 100 hits. While BeatStars increases access to music, could this commoditization of music devalue the creative process? We speak with Abe as well as producers on the platform—songwriter Breana Marin and producer Dansonn—to understand how online beat selling is effecting the sound of pop music. Music Discussed:Lil Nas X - Old Town RoadBryson Tiller - Don’tYBN Nahmir - Rubbin off the PaintDesiigner - Panda’Queen Naija - MedicineCERTIBEATS - MojoBEATDEMONS - NohoBrytiago ft Bad Bunny - NETFLIXXXBreana Marin’s BeatStars pageDansonn’s BeatStars pageListen to “Bouncing On The Band Stand” by Marian Hill’s Jeremy Loyd (Clear Eyes) and Charlie (Charlatan). You can even license it for $29.99 for your own production. Vote for Switched On Pop in this year's People's Choice Podcast Awards! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, a few weeks back, we did an episode about Old Town Road. What struck me after our episode was that Old Town Road was made with a purchased beat from the internet. Originally licensed, anybody could download it and put their own thing to it. And then eventually outright purchase. Have you heard of beat stars?

Nope. Beat stars is just one of a number of websites where you, if you make a beat, Charlie, you can upload it to this site and then charge money for other people to use it. Yes, yes, yes. Little Nas X was looking for a beat, went on to Beat Stars, scrolling through young Keoghio's beats. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. Whoa. He found one he liked and paid $29.99 for it. Oh, my God.

proceeded to record his vocals on top of it. And fast forward to now number one song in America. You know, the song is still number one, by the way, as of this recording, now for its 15th week. Astonishing. And I looked it up and it turns out that Old Town Road isn't the only one. There's a handful of other hits that have been made this way. All built off of free market beats. Yeah.

Bryson Tillers don't. YBN Namir's rubbing off the paint A really big one. Designer is Panda. No way. Oh yeah, sure. That's huge. That song was huge.

Yeah. Just to name a few. So it turns out there is a large ecosystem where producers, often remote, not based here in L.A., create and post beats online for MCUs to buy and wrap over or for other producers to pick up and turn into a full song. In fact, the song that's playing right now is a beat that's available on an online producer marketplace. Nice. Usually these beats are listed with tags, artist names, genres, subgenres. It gets pretty granular.

Common title format are things like Arna Grande type beat or Nikki type beat, feelings, upbeat, R&B, pop, 2019. Wow, so there's a beat for every figure and every mood you could possibly imagine. There's not a beat. There are thousands. It made me want to dig a little deeper. Is this model of uploading and purchasing beats contributing to any changes in the sound of hip-hop, R&B, and pop, and by its natural transitive relationship, the very nature of pop music?

I don't know, but I'm dying to find out. So we're going to ask these questions. We're going to look at is the rapid production and easy access to beats simplifying sounds or is it maybe having other impacts that we might not be aware of. So to answer these questions, I thought we would have to talk to some people. And what I found was really illuminating. Yeah, I was buying beats in AOL chat rooms.

This is what I was doing in like 96, 97 as a songwriter in high school. That's a batchon. He's the founder and CEO of Beat Stars. These guys would send me like a credit card form to fill out like an authorized.net or what a pay. I don't even think PayPal was around yet. and they would ask for my shipping address and they would mail me a CD with all the files and the agreement. It was just really

old school and just super inefficient. And Abe says beat stars came out of this desire for easy connection and collaboration outside of the music mechas in L.A., New York City, Nashville, and Atlanta. Right. Like in the case of Old Town Road, it brought together a netherlandish producer and an Atlanta MC.

That's kind of astonishing. Exactly. And what's more, they're actually building relationships between producers. A lot of music licensing platforms, especially like on the sink side. You just go there, you look for a beat or a production track or a song you want to license, and it's just very impersonal. So we wanted to build a community. And so we gave people profiles and we put a message button.

And as social media started to emerge, we added all the social actions, you know, like repost or like and share. So his platform is arguably the biggest, most successful. beatmaking platform ever to hit the market. And it's far from just a website where beatmakers can host their music. This is a serious business. BeatStars has paid out over $50 million to producers on their platform. And it's challenging the way that music gets made, not just by connecting all the creative roles in a song development process, but by creating a formal structure that sits outside of the music industry within which producers can build their own brand and and make a living selling their music.

Imagine for a moment that you're an up-and-coming MC or vocalists looking for collaborators. Oh, easily. MC squared. I rap mainly about Baroque composers and miniature poodles. Please continue. That's immensely accurate, but let's pretend also that you are not a stellar jazz pianist and that, well,

I guess let's be real. You're not fly at making great beats. So we need to get you hooked up with someone who can do just that. Hmm. Okay. That relationship never existed outside of like going into the studio in a traditional studio and working with a producer in person. Which is not bad.

Of course, I'm not saying that's like a horrible process or that's like a bad method of making music. But for someone that lives remotely in a developing country that doesn't have access to high quality production, it's really hard for them to kickstart their careers without having some sort of destination to connect with producers. Okay, so we're in your alternate reality and you want to be producing music. And I want to see, you know, Nate, as this aspiring, what's your name? MC squared. Oh, okay, great. Your MC squared.

And in your alternative reality, you want to go and find someone to collaborate with. So let's take a look and figure out what you would. do. So do me a favor. Pull up beatstars.com. I see the world's number one marketplace to buy and sell beats. And then there's a search bar. Why we try searching for a beat? Okay. I'm going to throw in Drake as my search term because I feel like, you know, a kind of underwater mid-tempo beat could be right at my alley. So here's a beat from the creator Serta Beats called Mojo. And it's tagged hashtag dance hall hashtag UK Afrobeat. I think it's going to meet just what you're looking for.

Okay, perfect. This is great. Yeah. I'm into that. My head is bobbing. I'm digging the piano and chipmunk vocals. And then when the beat drops, all of a sudden, it's hyper-syncapated. Caribbean rhythms.

Yes, I want it. Take my credit card. You definitely can buy it if you want. It's $25. Seems reasonable. Yeah, not them. Seems pretty reasonable. Totally.

Now, of course, that's for a non-exclusive license. Other people can also use the track. But, hey, you're just getting started, so let's give it a go. Well, you know, the thing that stuck out to me about this track is it really reminded me of one dance. Like, I really felt like this is one dance light or one dance three point out or something. Two dance. I'm so sorry. So I talked to Abe about this phenomenon of sound delights.

And, you know, industry folks sometimes call these things type beats. When you say type beats, a lot of folks kind of get that definition confused a little bit. In our world, type beats are just keywords. The only reason the word exists type beats is because, you know, artists are looking for a certain style. for a certain style of music. And so they'll search by what artist inspires them. So they're like, oh, I want a Drake type beat. It doesn't necessarily mean that Drake type beat is like a knockoff of what Drake made or

what Drake put out. It's just that producer who made that beat, they start analyzing it. And they're like, okay, who can I hear singing on this or rapping on this? And so that's how they'll label it for YouTube or for SoundCloud or for Beatstars, right? It's just keywords. And that's not to say there isn't some wholesale copying going on. I'm sure there's some producers who are novice or still kind of getting into beatmaking who are trying to learn the techniques on how to make beats and stuff.

They might be knocking off a little bit. They, you know, we all did. Like we all did as artists coming up. We wanted to know how our favorite producers made this or favorite artists made that. And it's like part of the growing stages. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, the majority of the stuff is like a lot of original stuff.

confession, I was the same way when I was a kid first making music. I definitely copied my heroes aggressively. And yeah, that's a part of what's happening in this sort of typebeat phenomenon, as well as its use as a search term. What's more interesting to me, though, about these online marketplaces is that it's much more than just copying. There is original music being put out at an absurd pace. I thought we would need to talk to some of these producers directly. With the help of our producer, Megan, we reached out to a bunch of these creators on beat stars wanting to know who are they and what does it take to have a successful online beatmaking career? When we come back, what does it mean to be a full-time beatmaker? Is it changing the sound of pop?

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The producers we spoke to described an experience that I think a lot of musicians might be familiar with. It's the experience of witnessing your beats in the wild. You heard from this woman, Brianna, whose friend told her they heard her song on television, and she didn't even know that. So, Brianna's somewhat unique on Beat Stars because she's a trained singer-songwriter, and rather than make the underlying beat of a song, she writes the vocal hook that, short, repetitive phrase that you hear, often in rap and R&B, and collaborates with producers on the platform to make nearly fully composed songs for artists to purchase and put their spin on. She says that the BET experience is surprisingly common. Oh, yeah, I've heard it on TV shows.

I often get like phone calls. It's like, oh, my God, I can't believe you did a song with so-and-so. And I'm like, I don't even know who's that it. So herein lies the beauty and the challenge of online beatmaking. you're incredibly exposed, but it's that exposure that allows you to make a living from it. Wow. So this is exactly what an online beatmaker expects. Multiple artists will license the same beat and put it out in many variations.

You don't have control of where it will go to, but you're getting paid for that beat multiple times in a row. But sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Another creator we spoke to, this producer, Danson, who's had his stuff, placed in films, commercials, songs by major artists. He talked about how getting your beats stolen or miscredited in the online beatmaking world is pervasive and that it also is starting to feel like a norm. Any online beat producer who's been doing it for a while, for sure, how there's stuff stolen at least multiple times, right?

I mean, I found my beats on other people's channels, trying to resell, just retiling and everything. I think that happens to almost every producer I've ever met. like it's a normal thing, whether it's, it's obviously not a good thing, but that's just part of the process. I've had artists, you know, licensed my beats legally and everything and wrap over it, but it's something that I completely don't agree with, whether it's like politically or morally, just the message of trying to put in the song. So that's sometimes kind of tough to hear. And we heard that echoed from other creators as well. The reality is that you are giving up control

to a certain degree when you're putting your music out in such an exposed way. It becomes a problem when there's serious compensation on the line. We spoke with one producer who heard a replica of his beat in a song by a major artist and actually had to hire a lawyer to ensure he was properly credited on it. So check this out. Here's the original track by Beat Demons called NoHo. Funky. Yeah, that could definitely be on the radio.

Okay. Yeah, and check this out. Here is the track by Brichago featuring Bad Bunny called Netflix. That's very That's very similar Yes, so similar That beat demons is now credited on the track And has a platinum plaque, which is pretty wild

Yeah, seriously. It's like the wild wild west of beat making here. Totally. And part of why he has that platinum plaque could be because of the way beat stars is set up. You know, your profile and your track are public and they have time stamped proof of when you uploaded it. There could be a real fine line between life-changing success of having a platinum record and the often nameless nature of production work. This timestamp, I'm sure, had to be an important part of the process of showing which song came first. But beyond

type beats and copying, I'm really interested in what makes a success on these beat platforms. And I want to talk about some of the qualities of successful beat stars producers and give a little bit more insight into how they approach their work. So Brianna and Danson, who you just heard, have both had huge success on the platform. And they both mentioned two qualities. One sort of goes without saying, which is, frankly, raw talent. And Abe talked about this too. You have to understand music in order to make music that people want to buy on beat stars. If you're an industry producer, I think it can be tempting to think of platforms like

Beat Stars, like an easy bake oven. But really, it's much more than that. It's a universally accessible storefront where, to extend the metaphor, any baker trying to make it in the baking business can come set up shop. It's really competitive. Many of these producers, in order to stand out, really need to know their stuff. Danson, for example, studied classical cello for eight years, so he's approaching his production with that lens. Brianna has been singing and writing songs for over a decade.

These producers are not amateurs. They're totally skilled musicians. I find that comforting, to be honest. Like, the fact that, you know, even in this sort of anonymous marketplace of beats, the one that rise to the top are the ones with musical integrity and experience. Yeah, I don't want to downplay it. Raw talent is definitely a part of what it takes, but I'm going to deflate your bubble just a little bit. Oh, okay. Bring me back down to Earth. Because raw talent is insufficient, and everyone we spoke to talked about how these producers

are also marketing wizards. These are producers as influencers. They need to get their material noticed. Here's how Brianna put it. The people that I run into in the Beat Stars community that are successful are more of like an entrepreneurial mind. They're more about like creating a business and like figuring out other ways to bring in different income like from different avenues because a lot of them, you know, they start with the Beat Star community, but then they'll start doing other things. Like some of them are doing speaking engagements or releasing sound kits or some of them are doing online courses and YouTube videos. I think it's a different type of person that's into that online world than traditional music industry.

And Abe from Beatstar has said this too, that many of the super successful beatmakers and writers on the platform, they have an established brand, often with visuals. They follow their sales and they're tracking which of their beats are performing best, something you can do on the back end of your profile, and they're super in tune with what their core audience is listening to. Brianna actually mentioned that when she gets a new follow, she'll go check out that person's profile to see what they're listening to,

read their comments to see what they like about it, and then she'll bake that into the hook that she creates. I'll be honest, I was a little worried too, Nate, about the impact that all of this could have on the music itself. For example, Brianna and Danson both said that they stick to a consistent release schedule, and I wonder might that schedule be forcing creators to do more sound-alike beats or lower their own standards around what they're putting out. I'm not entirely convinced that's not the case with some artist, but Danson had a really interesting and I think admirable approach to this question.

I've been doing this for a while now, but I still feel very early in my career and I feel like everything I'm doing right now as much as I'm making money off of it, releasing beats online and everything. I really feel like it's just practice in a way. At least every week I try to focus on one tiny thing to make my beats a little bit different or interesting than before whether that's something as simple as the way I can in my high hats. And I think I just see it as repetitions, repetitions to get better and better. I'm still growing, I'm certainly in this full process. So I just want to stay active and keep at it.

I really like this growth mindset. And it shows he has so much material. Releasing at least a track a week, you could scroll almost endlessly down his feed all the way back to January 2014. Since then, he's had 2.4 million plays just on the Beatstar's platform alone across 273 tracks.

And when you listen to his music, you can hear that his sound has evolved. He gets better. So maybe this speed of releasing material is, in fact, pushing artists to create more original work and to challenge their abilities. Wow.

This is a lot to wrap my mind around. It's such a different kind of approach to a musical economy. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm really curious to sort of peek into the mechanics of this. Yeah, when I started, I had this one big pressing question, which is how, if at all, is this rapid creation leasing structure changing the sound of pop music? Is this new economy encouraging the mass production of, sounding type beats or is it encouraging creativity and innovative sound? And I'm not sure I know

the answer definitively, but here's what I think we do know. B platforms expand access and producer artist relationships. And I think that's phenomenal. People can make music outside of the major metro hubs that are the center of the industry. The internet model simultaneously makes you more powerful and more vulnerable and open to plagiarism. And there's this age-old fine line and copying versus more creativity that I think gets played out because of, I think, those internal dynamics of online culture. I also notice how it takes a really driven, business-minded creative to build a career online. Because, you know, ultimately, the charts are still a limited pie. Everyone's trying to place music into the

mainstream and beat stars and platforms like it are making the pie marginally bigger. The new bit here, though, is significantly people seem to be able to make a real living off their artistry without going through the traditional gatekeepers. Here's Dancin. This online beat licensing market is still very, very small compared to, I think, the whole industry and the way things have been running for forever, right? and I understand that some people who have found success in the industry doing things, I guess, the traditional way, you're never really going to truly understand or even grasp some of these numbers that these online guys are doing.

I mean, I think this last year or two years, a lot of that's changing. I mean, even the fact that we're talking right now, I feel like it's a big testament to seeing how much this has changed, right? It's true. There are producers on Beat Stars that make six figures a year producing beats, and even established producers in the industry sell beats online, sometimes making more on beat licensing than standard song licensing. Abe even told me about emerging and established producers who, even with industry publishing deals, struggle to pay their bills and would likely be resorting to other gig economy work if they couldn't supplement their music income with the beat platforms. Now these artists have alternatives to those standard gatekeepers. Just how traditional industry has always been established where the producer is always this background figure.

They do the work and they're getting the job done. They're the engine behind the song and the artist and stuff like that. Now with this visibility that we all have, everyone's starting to see an opportunity to be kind of like a DIY entrepreneur. It's just been this process for like 11 years, man, figuring out ways to have to happen. producers have a home, basically have an identity online where they can make a living doing this with just the mass amount of recording artists and songwriters that exist on the web itself. It's just a huge market. In the spirit of celebrating aspiring producers trying to get their music out there, I want to listen back to the beat that we heard actually at the opening of the episode. What do you think?

I'm into it. If I had to guess the tag for this, it's something a little harder. It's more of like a DMX type beat or something. It's a little more raw and angry, and I dig it. Well, then I'm happy to tell you that I help produce this track with our friend Jeremy Lloyd from Marion Hill. No way. Kudos, man. I was feeling that.

Thanks, dude. I want to bark over it. You can actually go buy this. beat right now if you want Nate. I'm currently leasing it for 2995 under my Beat Stars producer name Charlottin. I like it. Okay. Can I get like a friends and family discount? You know, I'll give you a discount on my first beat because I actually, I created this Beatstar's profile a few weeks ago. I uploaded a track that I created called Bezos Money. but you know I had the profile up for a couple of weeks I think I got like seven plays off of it

I'm guessing five of them were from me and I'm I kind of want to run this like a B test to see does a really hot beat made by Jeremy of Marion Hill perhaps perform better I don't know and you know this beat may not be going anywhere the charlatan profile might not be a success I think I probably don't have the marketing wizardry to make it so. But I am incredibly curious to see where this online beatmaking world is going, whether the marketplace will continue to fuel the creative goals of brands, Instagram influencers, and amateur MCs, or whether a year or two from now will see the Billboard Hot 100 flooded with Beat Stars beats, or maybe even create a totally alternative music ecosystem from the charts. You know, Abe says that they're just getting started on their

global ambitions. Beatstar still has a long way to go. Our goal for the next 24 months is establishing small little satellite offices in a lot of developing countries or at least one in every continent and have a place where we have someone specialized in these places telling us like, yo, this is how music's made here and we need to do outreach and we need to do events and we need to get we need to talk to this community. We need to localize our apps and our sites to to work for those communities who don't speak English. And so we're in the process of doing all that now. Right on.

Okay, Charlottetton, yeah. That's me, yeah, yeah. I'm going to go peruse your beats and then see what kind of rhymes I come up with. I'll be looking for a hot MC squared track real soon. Special thanks to Abe, Danson, Brianna, and Jeremy Lloyd from Marion Hill for their help with this episode. Additional thanks goes to Chris Gomez and Mark Hardin of the production duo Beat Demons. If you want to hear their work, you can find links to all the producers' profiles in the episode description. I'll also post the beat that Jeremy and I made on my Charleston Beatstar's profile.

Tell us what you think of these online beats on Twitter and Instagram at switch. This episode was produced by our fellow Megan Lubin, edited and mixed by Brandon McFarlane. Bridget Armstrong is our producer and Nashak Kerwaw and Liz Nelson are our executive producers. You can find all of our episodes on switchedonpop.com or on Apple Podcasts,

iHeartRadio, Spotify, anywhere you get your podcasts. We'll be back again next Tuesday and until them. Thanks for listening.