You can find the term „exclusive beats“ everywhere around the music industry, especially when it comes to hip hop music. But what does it mean? Well, professional producers sell their beats to earn money. They always try to bring their music to a new level and also give their beats an individual touch. Uniqueness is the key to their success. That is what makes a beats exclusive. But that’s not all!

„Exclusive“ also concerns the ownership and use rights. If you have an exclusive beat, that means you produced or obtained the beat. Therefore you are allowed to use it. When you bought the beat, you are the only owner and only you can use it.

If you consider buying an exclusive beat, you should pick carefully, since you are spending some decent money on it. Try finding beats which you think would suit you best, then create a shortlist and decide for the best of them. Also look for what kind of use right you want to obtain the beat. There are three: demo rights, leasing rights and exclusive rights.

Demo rights is best when making a demo tape, which you want to send to some labels to get their attention. Or you can use the beat for your own experimental purposes, freestyling for example. But you can’t publish it.

With leasing rights you may publish your song, but only for smaller purposes, like a mixtape or free giveaway samples. This is ideal when you’re not intending to make money with it, but more to use it for promotion.

Exclusive rights will be interesting for you when planning on publishing an album. This is when you are printing CDs for commercial use. All the rights on the tracks are yours and no one is allowed to use your music without permission.

The good news is, you don’t need to pay the producers after you published because the beats are already yours. This is common with the smaller, not so well known producers. With the big guys in the business it’s different. They want you to pay a percentage of the earnings from the songs they produced, and that’s why so many artists either start to produce their own beats or work with underground guys who are very talented and experienced, too. The downside is, with a noname producer’s beat you don’t have the same chances as if you could say you worked with Timbaland.

This is the way the music industry works. With exclusive beats, your music is unique and I hope this information will help you moving in the right direction.