How Lil Nas X's Story is Transferrable to Anyone

Abe Batshon explains with BeatStars anyone with a computer can sell their music to artists across the world.

Session at DIY Musician Convention 2019

Collaboarator went to the "Making a Living Selling Beats Online" session on Sunday, August 18 and is relaying Abe Batshon's and Beat Demon's dialog here. The whole video is below:

What's the biggest thing to happen on BeatStars

I'd say the biggest success of the transaction that happened on BeatStars is Old Town Road that's the arguably the biggest success in music history. That's definitely been just an amazing feat that we luckily were a part of.

How did that happen?

We worked eleven years just trying to build this ecosystem and build the technology to facilitate collaboration and affordable licensing and to see that young people are gravitating towards each other on the internet. Young Kio, the producer you know based in the Netherlands, and of course everyone knows the story about Lil Nas X being in Atlanta and them finding each other and buying the beat and turning it into it was the exact model of what we envisioned the company to do.

Can you talk a little more about that like isn't that kind of like you know unprecedented like at least in terms of the music industry in general that a relatively unknown producer from the Netherlands could never beat the artist of the song and be a part of the longest running #1 hit in music history - like what do you think about that?

I think now when you think of human beings in general we live on our digital devices first like we live that digital life first you know especially the younger generation that's primary form of communication, that's primary form of discovery, primary form of how we consume media now, so it doesn't surprise me that amazing things are happening you know from the internet. It's not a forced relationship like in the industry if a label signs an artist they put around producers that they feel fit them and kind of mold their music to the sound or what the label wants it to sound rather than letting it organically just happen and now that we are seeing this organic trend.

Is there anything similar happening on BeatStars?

Another track that was a platinum song, Queen Naija's Medicine, was that beat was also bought off BeatStars you know Future and Rihanna's Selfish and a few other tracks. I'm sure the Bad Bunny situation happened by producers listening to their music on Youtube or for the BeatDemons now they have a platinum plaque so it just makes things much more accessible.

If it's so accessible why isn't everyone doing it?

I feel like when I talk to a lot of producers especially guys that are guys/girls that traditionally operated in an old way of A and R one of the things that they have a right with is yo I don't want my hot shit on the internet I don't want it to be out there for everyone, I want to save this for a specific artist, I want to save this and 99% of the time their content is just collecting dust on a hard drive. Doing nothing for them it's not building any business and if your music is just not out there being consumed in every single format and every single vertical where music is consumed your shit is never going to get discovered my guy you know what I mean it's just not going to be, it's just not going to have, you're just decreasing your probability of discovery to zero basically.

Where should an artist live online?

if you're talking about how to navigate and tackle how young people are working on music today, if you do not hit them where they live which is on Twitter, SoundCloud, Youtube, BeatStars, and all these other like social platforms as well you're just missing out.

Have a topic you want talked about?

Email us at seth [at] collaboarator.com and it'll happen! This post was created August 22, 2019 by Seth Kitchen of Collaboarator LLC.