Nobody wants to go down the long and winding road of getting somebody to stop using their beats once they’ve stolen them. It’s time-consuming, costly, and plain old annoying. Here’s a few ideas to stop people from taking your beats once you’ve put them on the internet.
Find an acapella and put it over the beat. Simple enough. Some people like this as it gives an idea of what an actual song over the beat will sound like, others dislike it because it ruins their rhythm when trying to think of a song to use the beat for.
I like this one. Although your beats won’t bang when somebody listens to them, they can get a pretty good idea of what it sounds like. Put the quality down to 64kbps, the beat will still be listenable, yet nobody will want to record over. And if they do, they’re so small time that I doubt anyone will even hear their music.
Say something over your beat and then loop it for the rest of the track. This is my least favourite way of tagging beats. It makes it almost unlistenable, yet for some reason I find this to be the most popular. I really just put this here as something to try not to do.
Make a short loop of the beat, a few measures, and put a long vocal tag on it with medium volume. Just talk about where your beat can be purchased, how to contact you, etc etc. It’s less annoying than a normal vocal tag because it’s not repeated. Make sure to highlight all the points of the beat in the loops you choose though; verse, chorus, bridge, etc.
These are just a few ideas, share your ideas in the comments.
9:48 pm
Nice. Good post. I dont produce beats just yet, but when I made mixes on http://www.jamglue.com, which is now shut down. ppl used to always steal my awesome mixes, so I added drops in mixes, which prevented ppl from stealing it.