A beat is vital to music – so vital, in fact, that without beat, there might be no music. A beat, like every other term out there, lends itself to several interpretations. You may say definitions.
There are several types of beats. These include up-beat, down-beat, stressed beat, and non-stressed beat. Musical theory gives us something different: whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth and 32th beats. Beats can also be classified based on genre. So, for instance, you have rap beats and hip hop beats.
You have probably encountered some of them in your musical wanderings.
For an unsigned artiste with few resources for music production, an easy option is to download free beats online. Several websites provide free beats and instrumentals for download, some of them genre-specific.
Where To Get Free Beats
- SoundCloud
That SoundCloud, one of the biggest streaming platforms out there, should allow people to upload free beats should give you how vitally important beats are to creating music.
- BeatStars
Beatstars.com is another notable provider of beats out there. It calls itself the world’s number 1 marketplace to buy and sell beats. True to its boast, the company has an existing partnership with Sony/ ATV, representing some of the biggest names in global music, including Kanye West and Drake.
The site provides a search bar, which means you can find whatever you want with just a click. It provides free beats as well as paid ones. The site looks like this.
- FreeBeats
Freebeats.io prides itself as the hub for royalty-free beats, which you can download anytime to record on. Interestingly, it has one of the richest catalogues yet, which you can browse – and download – by genre.
Do you need a trap, hip hop, rap, pop, club, west coast, rock, country, and even electronic beats? Man, there is something for you and more!
You only have to click on the beat you desire, and you will be led to another page showing a YouTube embed of the beat while at the same time revealing two choices before you.
The first choice is to get a high-quality 320kbps mp3 file of the beat by following FreeBeats on social media. When you “Click to Get This Beat”, you are led to another site (hypeddit.com), where you are required to share your email address with the author of the beat and hypeddit.com to download the beat you want. You can unsubscribe at any time, according to hypeddit.com.
The alternative to this is to fork over $4.95 and sign a licensing agreement with FreeBeats.
FreeBeats claims that all the beats available on its catalogues are high quality, and you can download the free versions without producer tags and watermarks. For free quality beats without any tags whatsoever, all you have to do is follow them on social media.
Are Free Beats The Best? (Advantages and Disadvantages)
Most people usually go crazy excited at the mention of free. The trouble with free stuff is that they are not always the best quality, which also applies to free beats.
Free beats are great usually if you want to use them as demonstrations.
The problem with free beats is that they usually come with the producer’s watermarks and tags, and are sometimes unmastered, making them unsuitable for commercial and professional purposes. So you may want to download a free beat only as a demonstration to see how well it goes with the sog you have written. If it goes well, you can then buy a license.
A purchased license removes all watermarks and tags. It gives you the liberty to even record on the beat and upload to streaming platforms without fear of your work being taken down for copyright (DMCA) violations.