Should I Use FREE Youtube Beats, Or Buy Them?
Ahh yes, I get this question a lot. The trend nowadays is to find beats on Youtube that say “FREE” in the title and download them. I would be comfortable to say that probably about 90% of my clients do this, and the question is,
“Should I be using free youtube beats?”
Everybody loves free right? And it seems kind of obvious, you are probably thinking “why wouldn’t I use the free beat”. To me it’s not as easy as yes or no necessarily. Personally I think it depends on your end goal with the song, how important or sentimental the music is to you, and how big you are as an artist… Let’s unpack this a little.
So there are a few things we need to consider when we’re using those free beats. Lets start with the most obvious to me: everyone has access to the same beats. When everyone is going to the same spot to find their beats, sometimes you are going to come across someone (or a lot of people) who have used a particular beat. This has even happened with my clients before, on multiple occasions, where I will have a client tell me to download a beat from Youtube and I’ll recognize it from having a previous client in the studio.
Let’s think about that for a second… two clients in the same region, with the same beat. Thats not a good look for either of them personally. Your song is your brand, and you only want people to think of you when they think about your brand. Nobody else.
Another thing on this front to think about is that if this has happened in this 1 studio, imagine how many people throughout the world may be using the beat. A beat I recently download for a client had roughly 33k views. Who knows how many songs were made with that beat, and it was only uploaded about a month ago.
Another big thing to think about when using these “free” beats is that generally they are only free if you are using them for non profit use. I talked about this briefly in another blog I did. But basically, you can only upload the music to places where you cannot make any money off of the streams. Soundcloud is a good example. The exception here is Soundcloud Pro, which is a paid version of Soundcloud in which you get extra features, such as getting paid for streams. In general, this is a great feature if you are an artist racking up a lot of streams on your Soundcloud, but not so much if you are using free beats.
“But what about Spotify and Apple Music!?”
They also pay you for your streams so you won’t be able to upload your songs there unless you lease, or buy the beat as an exclusive. And that right there is the reason that these producers put out those “free” beats in the first place.
They get you to click because it says free
You like the beat and end up making a song with it
You want to make the song publicly available to you end up following through with either leasing, or buying the beat.
If you look in the description of any of those beats that are free, 9 out of 10 times you’ll notice a link to a Beat Stars page where you can find lease terms, and prices for the same beat you just thought was free. But again, they are only free for non profit use.
Generally speaking, leasing the beat should be fine, depending on how big you are as an artist. If you are a local artist just trying to get your name out there is makes more sense to do that, however if you are a bigger artist with a decent sized fan base, you will probably want to look into getting an ‘exclusive’, which basically means that no body else can use the beat. In the event that you only lease the beat, somebody else could lease the same beat and still make a song with it because you don’t have exclusive rights. take a look at the different purchasing options for that same “free” beat.
You’ll notice that for the exclusive, you have to make an offer. Sometimes these can go for as low as $200, but i’ve seen them as expensive as $3000 on this same website. Another benefit to either leasing or buying the beat exclusively is that the producer usually has a different version of the beat without the producer tags in it. That way you don’t look like a scrub with the “purchase your tracks today” tag in the middle of your chorus.
And that pretty much covers the free beats movement on Youtube and how to navigate it. If you have any questions please reach out to me here or hit me up on Instagram!