TLDR
If you want control of your business, but can't afford upfront costs of creating a website or paying for a platform to sell your beats. I suggest trying payhip, its easy to setup and has no upfront costs, and only takes 5% of sales which is far less than BEATSTARS' new 12% service fee. It only lacks a few features and takes a little bit of manual setup. Now lets get into the details.
So,
I know that making a website is the best option long term, but finding an option I liked was out of my budget. I found that all the easy drag and drop sites I tried didn't have good enough choices for selling products. I needed a music player, multiple buying options for difference licenses and options to have specific files for each with instant delivery when purchased, as well as contractual agreement options that need to be confirmed in order to complete a purchase.
Great news and big surprise, payhip has all that.
You can create a store/webpage, and setup up as many items to sell as you want for free (5% sales fee). Payhip also shows stats such as site views, site sales, and individual product views, orders and sales. Which is good enough stats compared to beatstars’ selection if you ask me. Something like 95% of my followers on bstars are from bstars bots (acquired from their own paid promotion, from free promotion credits) so its not like those stats meant a whole lot anyway. Payhip also has coupons, sales, affiliate links, mailing lists, cross selling, referrals, social discounts(facebook sharing), and upgrade discounts. So Everything you could want there as far as I know.
What is payhip missing? Well…..
By default:
- A way to collect information needed to complete a beat license contract.
- A music player.
- An active user base trying to buy beats.
1 and 2 can be fixed very easily, I'll explain below... 3 is probably the biggest downside in comparison to other established beat selling platforms, but for a lot of producers sales come from building connections and outwardly trying to sell your beats, so it's hardly an issue.
SITE SETUP GUIDES BELOW HERE
Contract Completion Setup
In order to complete the contract I need the address and name of the customer. Beat selling platforms handle this by having users input that data when signing up. When a beat is purchased, that info is automatically put into the license/contract because its on the accounts of the buyer and seller.
So starting on the payhip dashboard:
- Go to Settings>Advanced Settings>Checkout Settings
- Check the box that says: Collect customer first and last name during digital product checkout
- Check the box that says: Display your own questions for customers to answer during checkout
I added these two checkout questions that are required in order to checkout:
- Do you acknowledge that by purchasing this, you are paying the license fee and therefore agreeing to the lease contract?
- To complete the Beat Lease Contract I will need your address or the address of your business. A copy of the completed contract will be emailed to you as soon as possible.
I think this covers everything that beat selling platforms do, just in a different order.
Setting up a Product Template
The main takeaway here is just to set up your page so that you can hit "duplicate" and then swap out the files and the product name. So fill out your description with things like information on your licenses, your contact info, social media, etc.
Also open the "Advanced Options" and Check "This product has different variations (eg format, version)" These variations are your different licenses.
Once you have your product set up, uploading new beats is as quick and simple as duplicating the product and swapping files and name.
Also there is an option to "upload a preview file..." in the advanced settings, I use this for distributing free tagged .mp3 files for non-profit use.
Music player work around
Payhip doesn't have a built in music player, to counter this you can embed your songs from places like soundcloud by using the “link video” option and paste the embedded code right into the description of the product. I use Audiomack as my platform for this since they allow unlimited uploads for free, and you can swap out files without having to delete the track, two things that SoundCloud free doesn't have.
Closing Thoughts
I hope this helps some people trying to expand their business. Its good to have your own page so you can control your business completely. Payhip really has all the stuff needed to get things going for a business like this, and honestly in terms of automated beat selling, its the best "free" option I could find.
Anyway thanks for reading, check out my beat page for inspiration on how to setup your page!