Our Guide to Your First Month on BeatStars

Week 1: Get Inspired and Define Your Audience 👥

Before anything, think about what your “theme” or inspiration will be for creating your music. You’ll want to define what makes these different from other tracks you might’ve heard to ensure your music stands out on the BeatStars Marketplace. Solidifying your branding is ideal as well, so you can create a memorable identity that your audience will quickly recognize.

Fun Fact: Using a signature color can increase your brand awareness by 80%

Next, determine your audience. The better you understand your target market, the more relevant your product, content, and marketing will be. Doing this will give you a much better chance of reaching the most likely audience to convert into customers. Questions to ask yourself can be:

✔️ Who are you making music for?

✔️ Age, gender, location?

✔️ What platforms do they use?

✔️ What other brands/creators do they admire?

After that, write out the top 5 goals you’d like to achieve. Think about where you are and where you want to be. When you are intentional about setting goals and commit to doing the work it takes to achieve them, anything is possible. We recommend having both short-term and long-term goals.

Week 2: Set Up For Success ⭐️

Now that you have direction and your target audience has been selected, it’s time to put things into motion. This is what we recommend doing to get started:

Licensing and Pricing

We recommend you review your licenses and prices before going live to ensure you’re receiving proper compensation for the right license. This is SUPER important! 

Custom Domain

As a music creator, having a custom domain will help to establish your business’ level of professionalism. Using a domain specific to you will help to boost reputability, build trust among potential buyers, and ultimately help drive traffic to your site by ranking you higher on search engines. Learn more about setting your custom domain as your Pro Page URL here. 

Email Address and Automations

Email marketing is a great way to stay engaged with your customers and keep them informed on new releases, sales, and more. Not only is it a cost-effective way to market your music, but it also gives you a chance to speak directly to customers, via their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them. Learn more about our trusted integration, Mailchimp, here.

Discounts and Bulk Deals

Bulk discounts are a win-win for both you and the customer! They win because they're getting more music and saving money. You win by making a sale with penny pinching customers.

Fun fact: “Old Town Road” was sold as the free beat in a buy 1 get 1 free bulk deal for only $30!

Merch

When merch is done well, it helps fans feel connected to your brand and your community. It is also another source of revenue that can help fund your business and make more people aware of your music and brand.

Here are some terms you should know:

Print-on-Demand: An order fulfillment method where items are printed as soon as an order is made, often, and in printful’s case - without order minimums. With pod, you can create customized designs for a variety of products and sell them under your brand. Learn more about BeatStars’ print-on-demand integration, Printful, here.

Drop-Shipping: This means there is no need to think about inventory or storage. With drop-shipping, you can sell products in your online shop through a product supplier. So you as the owner don’t have to worry about inventory or product storage, simply ship your orders on-demand from your supplier.

Week 3 & 4: Plan and Promote Your Music 🎉

Finally, you're ready to get your music onto the BeatStars Marketplace! We're just as excited as you are, but before you publish, we advise that you organize your music catalog. This ensures you use the correct genre tags, BPM, and other metadata information. You'll also want to ensure you upload a WAV file of your track since this is higher quality than an MP3 file. BeatStars will automatically convert your WAV file to an MP3 file for FREE! If you want to sell stems, we recommend uploading those too, since more licenses will be available based on file type.

It’s also crucial that you have a release strategy for reaching the most amount of buyers on BeatStars. You'll need to decide where your music will be available, how often you will be releasing it, and how many tracks will be released at a time. Planning ahead will allow you to track your progress and analyze what works.

According to DillyGotItBumpin, one of BeatStars’ top members, this was his strategy when first starting out:

“I was uploading every other day, or maybe 3-4 times per week, before I made my first sale. I told myself I would upload for a year like this to see what happens.” - DillyGotItBumpin

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Here are some other features we recommend you take advantage of to unlock your full BeatStars experience:

BeatStars Promote

Promote is an advertising tool exclusive to BeatStars creators that works to boost your music's visibility and increase brand awareness with the 10 million+ creators on BeatStars. Whether you want to gain more followers, or increase your potential track sales, our Promote tool is the quickest way to get you there. Learn more about BeatStars Promote here.

BeatStars Publishing

We offer key administrative services on behalf of our members, including registering copyrights with global collection societies and performing tracking analysis to ensure that all music consumption is being collected and distributed accurately. This will be available to you the moment you sign up!

Here are a few reasons why you should join the community:

• We’re backed by the world’s leading music publisher, Sony Music Publishing.
• We’ve collected and paid over $20M in royalties to our members with over 100,000 registered songs.
• You retain 100% ownership of your songs, compositions and copyright ownership.
• You receive 80% of publishing royalties collected from your music.

Learn more about joining the BeatStars Publishing community here.

Submit to Open Opportunities 

BeatStars regularly creates opportunities for our community to get their music heard. Our curated playlists are seen by thousands of artists and are meant to not only showcase the best of the best music coming from our creators, but help inspire collaboration and music that may otherwise not have happened. Learn more about opportunities here.