A beat submission page for artists and A&Rs

If you’re making music, beats come from everywhere: email attachments, download links, Instagram DMs, texts, a folder somebody shared last month. Each one is fine on its own. Together they’re a mess.

• The beat you liked three weeks ago is somewhere in a thread you can’t find.
• Download links expire before you get round to them.
• Files called “beat.mp3” don’t say who sent them or how to reach that person.
• There’s no single place to sit down and listen through what’s new.

The problem isn’t the number of beats. It’s that they don’t arrive in one place.

A submission page is a single link producers use to send you beats. On Stems it’s sendstems.io/yourname. You put it in your bio, your link-in-bio, your email signature and anywhere else producers find you. Whoever sends a beat, from wherever, it ends up in the same inbox with their name on it.

Producers get something out of it too. Instead of guessing which email you check, they get one place to send, and a beat that goes straight to you. If you know producers who are trying to work out how to reach artists, point them to how to send beats to artists.

• Your page. Your photo, your socials, and a “Send me:” line that tells producers what you’re looking for.
• An inbox for beats. Every beat sent to you, with who sent it, ready to play in one tap.
• A review deck. Go through new beats one at a time. Save the ones you want and archive the rest.
• Messages. Reply to a producer from the beat they sent you.
• Imports. Connect Gmail and beats sent as attachments import to your page. Sync a Dropbox folder. Or forward an email to your page’s own address.
• Packs. Put beats together and send them on, with a link for each person, and see who opened, played and downloaded them.
• The iOS app. Stems — Beats Inbox puts your inbox, the review deck and your messages on your phone, with a notification when a beat or a message comes in.

1. Sign up and pick your link.
2. Add a photo and a short brief.
3. Share the link wherever producers already reach you.
4. If beats already arrive by email or Dropbox, connect them, so the old routes feed the same inbox.
5. Open the review deck when new beats come in.

Write a specific brief. “Dark trap, 140–150 BPM, room for a hook” gets you closer to what you want than “send heat”. Producers who read it send to it, and the ones who don’t are easy to spot.

Reply to the beats you save. A one-line message to a producer whose beat you kept is how a single submission turns into a working relationship.

Close submissions when you need to. If you’re heads down on a project, switch submissions off rather than letting beats pile up unheard.

Wondering how this compares with just using your inbox? See Stems vs. email. Or look around Discover to hear what producers are sending.