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Beats For Cash: 300K Artists Making $20M In The Music Industry's New Gig Economy

First of all thanks to John Koetsier for this article.

Today anyone with an iPad and GarageBand can make the ingredients of modern music: beats. And 300,000 artists in their garages, bedrooms and condos are doing exactly that ... with some of them making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling short slices of music on a new Amazon.com for musical mixes, Airbit.

“After using Airbit for a while I started making six figures,” says US music producer Tone Jonez.

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Technology has enabled the disaggregation of work, as any of today's gig economy workers at TaskRabbit, Uber, Fiver, Airbnb or Postmates can tell you. Even knowledge work can be sliced up, divided into tiny segments and sent out to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where tens of thousands of semi-employed people work on pieces of your jobs.

Music -- and art in general -- seem different. Platforms like Airbit, however, are changing that.

The site allows producers to create, sell, and distribute their beats. There are now 300,000 producers on the platform, according to CEO Wasim Khamlichi, who have collectively made over $20 million.

That means, of course, that the average producer makes only $66 or so.

But others like "Purps," say he's made $12,000 from a single beat. The L.A.-based producer and songwriter contributed to hit singles on a recent album by Migos, a hip-hop group from Atlanta, Georgia. Their latest album, Culture, went platinum, and Purps contributed to two of the songs, which have over 10 million views and listens combined. It helps that he has over 150,000 Twitter followers and self-promotes on social media.

"Let's just say I have never had a regular job," he told me via email. "Selling beats has been my career for over 10 years."

Others are making money as well. Tommaso and Alessandro Pinto, producers in Germany who create music under the DopeBoyzMusic label, sold a track called Purple Clouds that has 1,000 leases, netting them $15,000. Some of the best-selling artists on Airbit top charts, Khamlichi says, are making a very good living indeed: $100,000/year or more.

While GarageBand might have popularized making music for the masses, serious artists use serious tools, like FL Studio.

And it's not all fun and games, top producers say.

John Koetsier

Beats sales platform Airbit

"As cliche as it is, it took time, patience and hard work," said Ric and Thadeus, a production team from a small town in Kentucky. "There is a process to it. You have to establish yourself and slowly but surely build a following and customer base. You have to be willing to try just about everything and figure out what works. If you do that, it’s possible to make a living doing this."

The interesting thing for me is this:

How many millennials listening to hip hop and rap know that their music isn't necessarily created by the stars with their pictures on the albums, but is often assembled, piece by piece, into a final product, in a musical production line?

My guess is: precious few.

And, if you've ever wondered by much of club music, hip hop and rap tend to sound the same, it might just be because of over-reliance on beats that hundreds of other artists have used too.