http://www.liveoffbeats.net
http://liveoffbeats.com/SpecialBonusCourse
http://www.liveoffbeats.com/milliondollarideas

I see tons of bullshit like this lately—long sales pitches promising you music business success if you’ll buy their product.  Their product is nothing but a .pdf document—words on a screen—and those words are just repackaged versions of shit you can get for free online.  Oh, and the free shit? It’s better.

I spent awhile studying Tellman Knudson, Dave Lakhani and Ben Mack.  All good names to google if you’re interested in sales, online marketing, and business design.  All of them teach persuasion, and this site is just a Tellman Knudson template with “Hip hop producer” filling in the blanks.  This kind of long sales pitch, by the way, is called a “squeeze page.”

Before I do a breakdown, here’s the background:

Who’s behind this? Postman, and you can check out his myspace here. As he admits on his myspace, he’s “not rich yet,” which indicates that his bullshit sales pitch is a bullshit sales pitch.  Check out the opening lines:

Dear up and coming super-producer,

Imagine chilling in an arena suite watching the stage glow while Kanye West puts on a historic performance.

The next weekend you’re wildin out in Vegas. VIP at the clubs, Gambling, Getting tore up, etc…

Then the next week BET awards, BET parties, etc…

That’s the producers lifestyle.  That’s my life…

But it wasn’t always like this.

Of course, ask Madlib about the “producers lifestyle” and you’ll find out it centers around PRODUCING FUCKING MUSIC. 

Postman also name checks another dude, “Urban Tactics” and a quick search on him will reveal the whole “secret system” which is exactly the same as every other direct marketer’s “secret system”—automated online sales via secured websites, and building customer relationships via automated emails and a “back end” sales approach.

http://www.urbtactics.com/

^^This is how Urban Tactics makes money selling beats online.  He’s working through a group called PMP—Production MarketPlace.  Obviously, you could set something like this up yourself without having some startup’s branding all over your site.  They even tell you how, because unlike Postman, they’re not lying ripoff artists:

http://www.pmpworldwide.com/legal.cfm

Breaking It Down

Uncover how to get your beats in front of paying artist .  Right now you don’t know how to reach the market.  That’s ok, because I will give you proven strategies to attract artists to your beat site.  Which means more $$$ for you.

Keywords and google ads, folks.  That’s the big secret behind 99% of these revolutionary system. GOOGLE WILL TEACH YOU THIS FOR FREE: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Discover how to turn online message boards into cash machines .  Many up and coming artist “hang out” in online message boards.  Discover how to use these message boards to promote your beats the RIGHT way.

Dozens of good, free articles online about building trust on forums and social networks and marketing without being obnoxious as fuck.  The best site to study from:  http://www.doshdosh.com

Discover how to get other people to SELL YOUR BEATS FOR YOU.  You can make good income promoting/marketing your beats yourself, but if you want to blow it wide open you will need to start an affiliate program.  I’ll teach you step by step how to set one up and start raking in the bucks now.  Even if you have no idea what an afilliate program is.

Nothing is simpler than affiliate marketing, and again, there’s hundreds of sites about this that offer detailed tutorials.  We were just talking about how to make fans into affiliates here: http://www.audiblehype.com/forums/viewthread/118/

Discover how to ensure artists never leave your beat page empty handed .  I’ll teach you how to use pyschological triggers on music artists so they NEED your beats.

It’s called manipulation and deception—just like the manipulative and deceptive sales pitch Postman is using to sell his $67 product.

Discover how to get artist to REPEATEDLY buy your beats. .  The key isn’t to sell beats to 1000 different artists each month.  The goal is to get the same 1000 artists to buy your beats over and over again.  I’ll teach you how to keep contact with your customers, and more importantly keep them buying.

Yep, back-end sales and email lists.  This, too, is nothing fucking new and there’s an abundance of free resources...start with http://www.copyblogger.com/

Discover how the top beat-sellers are utilizing banners to bring in the bucks .  Right now you probably aren’t using banners, and if you are you aren’t using them right.  Banner advertising is CRUCIAL to your online production business. Don’t worry, I’ll explain everything in detail.

More revelations.  Just google “effective banner ads” and ask yourself if this information is worth $67.  But external research is not part of the sales environment—that’s why the pitch page for Live Off Beats is so damn long.  That’s why auto dealerships make you wait for no damn reason.  They’re manipulating your decision-making abilities and emotions based on sociology and behavioral psychology.  Remember, I’m talking about sales persuasion...not banner ads.  Those are just mosquitos.

Discover how to utilize articles to increase your beat sales. Right now you have no idea what article marketing is, and how it will help you sell more beats.  That’s not a problem, I’ll teach you everything you need to know. I promise!

Here’s a capsule summary: article marketing is using shallow and usually stolen content with heavy-duty SEO to get search traffic to your advertisements.  You talk yourself up as an expert, throw a few crumbs out and then give a sales pitch.  This is very simple and anyone with internet access can do it all day.

And Oh Yeah

To anyone saying “could you do better?”—obviously, I will, on Audible Hype, within the next week.  I might be a dumb hippie but I do it for y’all.  Peace.

Remember:

I’m not saying dude doesn’t have a point. You’ll make more money by actively selling beats than by waiting for people to ask you. You’ll get more attention by marketing yourself than you will be hoping someone passes your CDs along. You’ll make dough with less effort if you set up a website that automates the process. All that shit is still true. Talent is not nearly enough.

Anyone can get an endorsement—but only certain endorsements matter.  If you can ?uestlove to endorse you, that’s a lot more impressive than a quote from one of your friends.  We’ve already seen one of Postman’s endorsement quote providers, Urban Tactics.  Here’s the other one:

http://www.myspace.com/IsmaelsBeats

His bio is hilarious:

Yo what it iZ, I’m IzZy. What I do is make/sell beats to artist’s in the need of a hot banger to make their song start out. I am under a major but unmajor production company by the name of Instrumentally Sick ©. We strive to keep the word “Hot” in the song. You can’t have a hot track if its not “Instrumentally Sick”. I’m gonna tell you guys str8 up. I’m 16, been making beats for about a year and yes, I use the very well know program called Fruity Loops aka FL Studio . I’m from Centralia and I am on my come up. So haters, start watching a lil more, I’m am what you aren’t...and thats Instrumentally Sick.

Needless to say, if this is the kind of copywriting, branding and presentation skills that the “Live Off Beats” program teaches, it’s not even worthless.

Related forum threads:

Girl Talk, Sample Law, and Getting Away With It:
http://www.audiblehype.com/forums/viewthread/92/

Jake One: advice for aspiring producers:
http://www.audiblehype.com/forums/viewthread/7/

Hip Hop Production Roundtable: tons and tons of gems:
http://www.audiblehype.com/forums/viewthread/99/

Wired gives PMP a thumbs up:

A electronic music artist (NSFW link) I know who once released an album on Matador told me one time that rather than dealing with putting together a cohesive album, it’d be a nice change of pace to release a collection of beats, loops, and sounds for other artists to use.  George Clinton, Mick Fleetwood, and others have released such collections on CD, but like so many other things musical, the beat-selling concept seems to make a lot more sense online.

Producers, artists, and beatmakers should check out PMP Worldwide, a social networking site designed to help them sell their wares to label reps, brokers, managers, and artists.  It costs $50 a month to post a producer profile, and all audio samples (10MB limit) are screened by the site’s operators for quality before they appear on a profile page or in the site’s featured music section.

Buyers can search for producers or browse by category: electronic/dance, movie scores, R&B;, reggae, rock, instrumentalists, pop, rap/hip-hop, reggaeton, and soca/calypso.  When they decide to buy something, PMP does not take a percentage.

(Artists who’d rather participate in someone else’s project might try Indaba, a collaborative recording site where pro and semi-pro musicians and producers can get paid for participating in online sessions.)

Those are reasonable terms.  I’d also recommend considering something cheaper than $50, like...free.  There’s plenty of options for music hosting online that won’t charge you a monthly fee, and you can design something better than the generic PMP interface yourself.

Another option:

http://www.givemebeats.com/beats/

Probably not the most professional outlet in the world.  Ask yourself what sorts of clients/customers would actually be satisfied by an interface like that.  Also, listen to some of the beats and ask yourself if you want to be thrown in the mix with weak product. 

Nope, you want control over your own design and branding. 

Their terms are reasonable and their services are many—http://www.givemebeats.com/sell-beats—but the presentation and the total lack of quality control make this a losing proposition.

in the long run i don’t think any of these programs are all that fulfilling.  it seems like a shill approach if anything.  i get dozens of these emails every week and all of them are so obviously bogus that it’s comical.  i may be an extremest but i also don’t buy into the whole leasing aspect to selling beats and making money.  the thought of getting payed multiple times off the same beat seems cheap, fake, and dishonest to me no matter how much i could make financially. to me it’s doing it for all the wrong reasons.  i prefer the hands-on, working with the artist directly approach.  it’s more work but it keeps things unique and fresh.

What baffles me is—who are you leasing to? The absolute dumbest thug raptard motherfuckers I know just download instrumentals from Dre, Alchemist, Just Blaze etc and spit over those. When people are making an album, they’ll buy some beats, but....yeah, the leasing thing just baffles the hell out of me.  Because I’ve never seen it happen, never known anyone who’s done it.

generally by leasing beats you and the buyer sign contracts agreeing that the beats cannot be used for profitable purposes, so it’s usually meant to demo the artist for labels, etc. 

part of the whole reason why i don’t buy into the leasing game; it caters to the dinosaur model.

i would rather make $150+/pop for a dope beat plus percentage of record sales or percentage of a label advance than make $20 here and there while my beats get played the fuck out by hordes of no name rappers.  from an artistic standpoint leasing is essentially like a cookie-cutter model, hence the difference between a producer and a mere ‘beat-maker.’

selling exclusively gives me more of an opportunity to establish myself by working with artists directly. 

the only real disadvantage is that you can end up having a hit beat go nowhere if you sell to lazy cats who aren’t serious, but i look at it more as a one-off product rather than a never-ending game of trying to make 5 year old beats sale more.  inevitably my time would be better spent focusing on the future and making better newer beats.

the people who are doing it can be found at the top of the list at rocbattle.com, mybeatshop, the beatmaker, etc.  it’s an entirely respected form of commerce these days and i can see why.  people are making serious money.

there’s arguments for and against leasing that are difficult to ignore.

The sales pitch changed—I showed this site to a friend and now he’s got free PDF content up front.  Like most any marketer, he’s a fucking terrible writer and an even worse liar.  The title is “Music Production Success” and it’s a long re-hashing of Napoleon Hill and The Secret—basic shit about getting your mind right, and all your limitations are in your head, etc.  Then, in a timeless comic gem, he finally gets to the point on page 31 of 38:

If you have beats you want to start selling online just do it. If you have no idea
how to do it, start trying to find the answer. Hell everything you need to know is
on Google now-a-days.

Am I picking on a retard here? I just gave this dude an email address in exchange for a book about how to make money selling beats online, and I have to read 31 pages to get that priceless advice? 

Anyways, after that he finally gets into the real serious details you’d expect, like “To-Do Lists” and “Repetition.”

Finally, with 3 pages left, he drops a chapter called “How To Succeed As a Producer In Todays Industry.” ...oh wait, that’s just more bullshit and fluff.  The closing quote is classic:

I’ve done my part to help you along your career. You can procrastinate like most
failures do, or do what the successful do and start now.

Start what?

i guess a lot can change in a couple of months

i may be deciding to test-drive the leasing route, because as we all know, some money is definitely better than no money.  and i need some new equipment.  plus i really need to get my stuff out there in general.  i have a bunch of 3 year old beats to put to use and no one’s willing to spend the exclusive cheddar if they don’t know who i am anyway.  for all they know i just stole the beats from someone else and am passing them off as mine.

so with that being said i’m hijacking this thread and turning into my own progress diary.  i’ll post up whatever good research links i come across as well as a solid gameplan once i set the gears in motion.

artisthousemusic.org videos:

http://www.artistshousemusic.org/videos/producer+kelvin+brown+on+becoming+a+hip+hop+producer

i’ve never heard of this cat kelvin brown before but he does seem to have his priorities in order.  the videos on the sidelinks are worth watching..

good advice on “legally” selling beats:

http://www.futureproducers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=157084

what’s beautiful is that you can essentially set your own business ethics in contract negociations with clients to create a sustainable legitimate track record.

also, hiphopproduction.com has a good contract archive:

http://hiphopproduction.com/?pageid=contracts

from the client point of view:

http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/rap-beats-and-hip-hop-how-to-set-yourself-apart-from-the-rest-of-the-aspiring-rappers-and-singers-453833.html

now that i think about it, that last article was kind of blatantly bogus. 

couple of thoughts:

-realizing the difference between a producer and a “beatmaker” is absolutely essential to making it somewhere.  you need to establish a proven track record by working directly with artists rather than tossing beats to random net emcees.

-in the past, (non hip-hop) producers were traditionally concerned more with artist development than with creating the music.  that was left to the musicians.  being a hip-hop producer in this day and age requires you to acknowledge the importance of artist development to some degree.  what this means is taking some time out to learn mixing and mastering, and being willing to work with artists in a larger capacity than simply tossing them a wav file of the beat.

-a successful producer should be well versed in the recording process.  they should know how to mic instruments even if that’s something they never do.

-getting on requires at least a few years of being willing to work for cheap/no pay.  at this point in your career, exposure is more important than instant gratification.  it will take time and will be very frustrating. 

-talent speaks for itself.

it’s been a few months so i decided i’d update this here thing:

i have been, since about the last time i hopped up on here, contacting numerous emcees and groups to be part of this album i’m working on.  it will be a free downloadable, meaning i won’t get paid a dime (directly) from this album.  neither will the artists featured.  i added ‘(directly)’ because the way in which i hope and plan to have this album promoted will be like indra’s net.  the patience required to put a quality record together, especially when it involves simultaneous communication with many artists, cannot be understated.  working is a humbling experience.  keep in mind that i am also assuming people will want to buy my beats, and the exposure i recieve will allow them to find me. at the same doing all this my main recording and mixing computer has bit the dust.  it’s no longer workable in my setup.  which means that i will have to (am already doing) improvise with what i have (a laptop, a usb soundcard, backed-up project files, backed-up application files, plug-ins, etc.).

that other computer (an 8 year old dell desktop) was what i was used to in terms of reocrding, mixing, and mastering.  i had everything set up perfectly the way i wanted, but at the same time i became too insulated from dealing with the problems of change and impermanence, which in life can happen frequently.  i needed to adopt a more mobile method of being able to have what i need to do what i do. 

while in the process of doing all this i am also moving to another state, which means things are even more confused.

producer quick lessons:

-learn to accept change as a constant of life.
-do it everyday, but take a break every so often.
-always back up your data, never rely on the computer alone.

Thanks for keeping this thread alive.  I will definitely give you a shout-out on the next round of Audible Hype material. 

This is a project I’m sitting down and working through in earnest today...I will edit in a ton more brainstormery here later on.

this thread will definitely be kept alive, if i can help it.  lots of craziness has been happening in my personal life, but that won’t stop me.  no shoutouts needed.  i have finally come to the realization that everyone changes everyday.  every moment.  producing hip-hop has taught me to accept a lot of my own personal shortcomings, my own lack of enthusiasm at times, and my own ability to be constantly bombarded with the possibility of completely changing everything about what i do.  it’s real.  constant reinvention is key to getting somewhere.  constantly questioning yourself and what you can offer is what will allow you to communicate with others. 

this album i’m working on is still in the works.  finally finished my new setup.  the ‘cracked open’ remix is about 70% done and sounds pretty groovy.  got tons of other cats on the album.  no idea how i even found them.  it must be the miracle of myspace or something.  more to come..