Here’s an interesting new opportunity for composer/players – Beathaven is a new website connecting producers and musicians, providing the chance to be paid for adding parts to pre-existing tracks or get feedback from producers on their parts.
The way it works is that producers have tracks that need additional parts uploaded to the site – you download the tracks, add your parts, then upload your version to the site for evaluation by the producers. If they like your additions, they offer you a fee to use your parts on their song or royalties from downloads and track sales. It’s similar to something like Taxi, but instead of creating complete songs from scratch, you’re completing a partial track.
Seems like a pretty cool idea to me – I’m gonna give it a shot myself and evaluate the results. I, like some people, work really well when given a solid starting point to go off of, and with a reasonably sophisticated home studio and compositional ear, it could turn into a pretty profitable enterprise.
From the website:
GET FEEDBACK. GET PAID.
Cotillion / March 7, 2016 1:57 pm
Totally awesome … until you realize it costs you $5/track to get involved. The company’s idea is great: crowd-source your music and come up with something previously impossible .. but the $5 is a non-starter in the economy where plenty of people still pirate music when spotify or apple music would give them access to the vast majority of their favorite bands. Their justification (https://thebeathaven.com/faq/) that you’d spend $5 to get to your next audition or further your career in other ways is fair to a certain degree, but until they drop this charge, or make it a monthly subscription charge, it really seems that the actual business model is to make money off the musicians who submit ideas.
Good luck, it’s sad to see something that could have been a lot of fun for musicians turn out to be DOA.
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drummer35 / March 7, 2016 5:28 pm
My reaction to this opportunity is just the opposite Cotillion. Not having a monthly subscription commitment is exactly what I’m looking for. I can preview all the tracks and only pay a fee when I’m ready to track on one. It’s cool to be able to play right into a session that’s in production. I think this is an approach the industry needs. Taxi is $300 a year plus a $5 fee for every upload!!!!!! and you never really know if you’re tracks are going anywhere. Way to go Beathaven!!! I’m in!!!
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Cotillion / March 7, 2016 11:06 pm
Sounds like Taxi is a ripoff as well. If Beathaven dropped the $5 fee OR charged a $5/month membership fee, it’d be a different story. I get that it’s a business but you have to be realistic to what the market will bear. This article made no mention of the $5 charge TO MUSICIANS, most likely because the service isn’t very upfront about it in their description about how it works. More power to you if you can get hoards of musicians to shell out $5 every time they want to solo over your backing tracks, but I’m guessing most don’t have sufficient disposable income to do so with any regularity or would prefer to spend it on beer. Anyway, best of luck @drummer35:disqus I’m only saying any of this because the business sounds like a cool one, with this one major issue, and given that you’re clearly a representative of Beathaven (shitting on your competition, enthusiastic and unqualified endorsement, account created today, no other comments), I’m offering you the feedback; I won’t even ask for the $5 in return.
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Veldar / March 8, 2016 4:51 pm
I’ll give this a try, you really need experience in session work to break into it.
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