Beat makers, and the beat-making industry

There are beats everywhere, and a lot of them have the same sounds. New beatmakers are popping up every day, learning from a mix of self-taught lessons and online instructors. Searching for a lo-fi tutorial on youtube, for instance, will bring up youtube accounts like Curtiss King, J.Rent, Busy Works Beats, and countless other producers (or producer-adjacent people) who have themselves established their own authority in the beat-making industry.

It's an industry with a very low barrier of entry and a very long road to tangible success. If you're a producer or learning to become one, you've probably come across resources like:

-Stock sample sites

-Free sample packs

-Artist sites

- Producertheme: how to sell beats online

-Beatstars/ Beat stores

-Producer exclusive sound packs

-Filesharing

-Splice

-Many more

These are wonderful library additions for anyone who knows their way around a DAW. However, as producer Hot Sugar once pointed out, "everyone ends up using the same sounds...melody or chord progressions..." in popular music. With the swell of hip-hop's popularity, it would make sense to see the beat-making industry thrive as well.

The difference between beat-making and music production lies in the craft and practicality aspect behind track composition. A beat-maker's end goal is to win in the numbers game, with a lot of tracks behind them. Compared to a beat-maker, a producer's best feature is in the value of each track. It's near accurate to consider the comparison as to quality over quantity.

When dealing with numbers then, there is going to be a lot of demand for innovation from project to project. Beat-makers have to deal with herculean tasks like needing to produce consistently new content amid a creative burnout and having to promote themselves to some degree or another.

Now, much like beat-making, producers of pop music will draw inspiration from often used sounds, chords, and themes. To see that parallel across styles should only further support that again, increasingly popular music cannot be made in the same fashion as other types of audio producers.

Thankfully, the ingenuity behind the art of music is a prerequisite for both roles, and adept enough musicians can switch between the two effortlessly. In many cases, beats are a simple way to play a scene, or paint a portrait, as people hear them. How they are made, what types of drum patterns or samples to use determines how repeatable the process is. A beatmaker's tracks under this criteria would rank very high in repeatability, as a product of the beat relying on a mix of contemporary and traditional conventions.

If you put those perspectives on beat-making into account, then what you're looking at turns out to be an entire tapestry of expressions. Ready to be added onto, rapped/sung behind, or remixed, these tracks have a formatted record of feelings like relaxation, dominance, or heartbreak through only sound forms. Each track has roughly 2 to 5 minutes to move in its listeners a feeling that wasn't there before listening.

The beat-making industry, much like its parent the rap/hip-hop genre, is currently facing a heavy surplus of talent. The artists and producers who are making daily attempts and monthly releases are only strengthening the pull of the music's influence, but it comes with a price. The exposure spreads and branches off into untold potential in the way of impassioned fans of the music. With the prospect of the internet creating an infinite amount of demand for music, artists and producers everywhere are looking into facets like beat acquisition, and beat-making.

If music were treated as a language, and hip-hop its lingua franca, then beat-making would undoubtedly be the dialect that everyone's choosing to learn.