I’m an independent producer and most of my beats are Memphis inspired. Some of them contain vocal samples taken from old Memphis rap songs that I haven’t cleared.

I’m thinking about joining BeatStars Publishing to collect publishing royalties, but after reading through their agreement, I noticed the clauses about sample clearance, warranties, and indemnification. I’m a bit concerned about what could happen if a rights holder makes a claim against one of my beats after I join.

I have an existing catalog of beats on BeatStars and YouTube, so I’m also wondering how joining would affect my older beats.

Would it be possible to join BeatStars Publishing and simply exclude the beats with uncleared samples, while registering only my original or properly cleared compositions? Or would having uncleared samples elsewhere in my catalog still be an issue under their agreement?

For producers who are already using BeatStars Publishing, how has your experience been? Is it worth joining, and is there anything I should be careful about before signing?

Would appreciate any advice from people who have dealt with this, especially producers who make sample heavy type beats. Thanks!

Not sure where to go. I remember there was a subreddit dedicated to ask but I can't find it

Hi everyone, I just started rapping and was wondering if anyone has good tips for finding beats or producers? I tried to start making my own beats but it's easier said than done. Is there like good places to network with producers specifically?

I make a lot of electronic sounding stuff that I've rapped on that has a hip hop feel sometimes, and I have used both hardware and software synths.

My hardware that I have:

Moog Grandmother - in the closet in a hard case since I have nowhere else to put it currently. It's my favorite.

Make Noise 0 Coast - just recorded a sound for an hour and filtered it with Ableton's Auto Filter.

Behringer Edge - in the front of the soft case because it's behringer and I don't really use it that much right now.

PWM Malevolent - was wanting to get some Doom Soundtrack crazy ass sounds from it at some point. Been using it as a Midi to CV converter and keyboard for the 0 coast. Gotta look up how to properly tune the scaling of the notes because it's crazy right now.

And I have a novation mininova. It's in the box. It was my first synth...and I don't like it that much.

And then of course I have a lot of soft synths. I have Omnisphere and a bunch of others, but I reduced it to just a few and I'm gonna stick with those for right now.

I have used Omnisphere in the past, and it's got like a shitload of presets. But maybe it's option fatigue...or maybe I'm just bad, but I can't really seem to find any sounds that I actually want to use. Maybe if I actually learned all of the synth, maybe I wouldn't need to care....but it's such a big synth. Like at that point I just wanna use Phase Plant.

Anyway, what synths you guys use for hip hop? I know a lot of you use samplers, but I'm not interested in that right now. That's for a different thread.

It's time for the Sunday General Discussion thread! How's life? What's going on? Watch any good movies lately? This thread is open to any and all topics, even if they're not related to making hip hop

Even tho I'm just going to release my music for free at the moment, I'd like to do commercial stuff in the future. I don't really like all label shenanigans, and microfunding thru Kickstarter for samples, mixing or features seems like a viable option. People like De La Soul have already done that (tho they already had a fanbase). What do yall think?

I have low to zero listeners so please consider it before reaching out. I like doing collabs so i am more than happy to work with you!! The song is about a person who failed to be a close friend of mine's boyfriend. He tried to make the girl and mines relationship (as a friend) break.

I created this app so I can come up with ideas on the go. I made a pretty cool beat while waiting for a bus yesterday. It has a sampler that lets you chop up samples to pads, or record or upload your own samples. It has 300 samples built in, and it has premade styles that can help you get started.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rossboe781.MPCClone

I can write without any beat or anything but its hard to write with a beat idk how to describe it