For the first three years of my production career, I sold beats the way everyone told me to: upload to BeatStars, set a price, wait for purchases. I had leases at £29.99, exclusives at £299, and I spent more time tweaking my storefront than actually making music.
By 2021, I'd sold maybe 200 leases and a handful of exclusives. After platform fees, I'd averaged about £8 per hour of work. That's not a career. That's a very expensive hobby.
So I stopped. Here's what I learned, and what I do now instead.
The Problem With Flat-Rate Beat Sales
Selling beats at fixed prices puts you in a race to the bottom. There are thousands of producers undercutting each other, and the artists browsing those marketplaces are often shopping on price alone. You're competing with bedroom producers who don't need to pay rent and AI tools that can generate passable loops in seconds.
But the bigger issue is that flat-rate sales cap your upside. If you sell an exclusive for £300 and that track ends up on an album that does 50 million streams, you've left serious money on the table. You've also created no ongoing relationship with that artist — they got what they needed and moved on.
I'm not saying beat stores are worthless. They can work as lead generation, and some producers do well with volume. But as a primary income strategy, they kept me stuck.
Licensing Tiers That Actually Make Sense
The shift for me came when I started thinking like a publisher rather than a shopkeeper. Instead of selling beats, I started licensing rights — and structuring those licenses to reflect actual usage.
My current setup has three tiers:
Demo/Development License (£150-300): The artist can use the beat for demos, pitching to labels, and non-commercial releases. If they want to release commercially, they upgrade. This works well for artists in development who aren't sure what they're going to do with a track yet.
Commercial License (£500-1,500): Full release rights, but I retain ownership of the underlying composition. They pay more upfront, and we split publishing 50/50. If the track performs, we both benefit.
Buyout (£3,000+): They own everything outright. I use this rarely, and only when the fee justifies walking away from future royalties.
The exact numbers depend on the artist's profile, the track's potential, and the context. A sync placement for a major brand isn't the same as an independent EP release.
This approach filters out artists who aren't serious while creating real partnerships with those who are. It also means my income isn't purely transactional — I've got publishing royalties coming in from tracks I placed two or three years ago.
Retainers Over One-Offs
The most stable part of my income now comes from retainer clients. These are artists or small labels who pay a monthly fee for a set amount of production work.
A typical arrangement might be £1,500/month for four exclusive instrumentals plus two rounds of revisions on each. The artist gets priority access and consistency; I get predictable income and fewer admin headaches.
Retainers work because they change the relationship. You're not a vendor they're buying from occasionally — you're part of their team. That means they value your input more, you understand their sound better, and the work improves as a result.
Finding retainer clients takes time. Most of mine came from one-off projects that went well, or from referrals. The Producer Playbook covers how I structure these conversations and what to include in the agreement, but the short version is: start with a trial period, define scope clearly, and build in a review point every three months.
Building a Client Base Without Begging for Attention
Social media is necessary, but I've learned to use it differently than most producers.
I don't post beat snippets with "DM for price" captions. That attracts tyre-kickers. Instead, I share process — how I approached a specific mix decision, what went wrong in a session, the thinking behind a particular sound choice. That content attracts people who are interested in craft, and those people tend to be better clients.
I also focus on platforms where my actual clients spend time. For me, that's Instagram and LinkedIn (yes, LinkedIn — there are A&Rs, managers, and sync supervisors on there who never check TikTok). Your platform mix might be different depending on your niche.
The goal isn't virality. It's credibility. When someone's considering hiring me, they should be able to look at my feed and immediately understand what I do and how I think.
Pricing Is a Filter, Not a Barrier
Early on, I was terrified of quoting high and losing the job. Now I understand that pricing is one of the best filters you have.
If someone balks at your rate without any discussion, they were probably going to be difficult to work with anyway. The artists who value production will negotiate respectfully or ask what's included — they won't ghost you for not being cheap enough.
I still adjust based on context. A genuine emerging artist with limited budget but clear potential might get a different deal than an established act. But I don't discount out of desperation anymore. That desperation cost me years.