How to send beats to artists

Email. An artist’s inbox holds bookings, label mail, invoices and newsletters. Your beat is one more message in that pile, and often it’s too big to attach, so it arrives as a download link that expires or asks for a sign-in. To hear it they have to open the email, open the link, wait for the file and find something to play it in. Plenty of people stop at the first step.

DMs. Message requests from people an artist doesn’t follow sit in a separate folder, and a lot of artists rarely open it. A link from a stranger looks like spam, and a good beat scrolls out of sight under the next fifty messages.

Link dumps. A shared folder of thirty files called “beat 1” to “beat 30” asks the artist to do your sorting for you. Most won’t.

None of these were made for listening. The fix is to send beats to a place that was.

• One tap to play. No download, no zip file, no sign-in to somebody else’s cloud drive.
• A clear name. The beat’s title and yours. “final_v3_MASTER.wav” tells them nothing about what they’re about to hear or who made it.
• A reason to listen to you. A beat that fits what they make, sent because you know their music, not as part of a blast to a hundred names.
• A way to reply. If they like it, they should be able to reach you without hunting for your email.

On Stems, every artist has a page at sendstems.io/their-name. A beat sent there goes straight to their beat inbox, next to every other beat they’ve been sent, ready to play in one tap.

1. Find the artist. Browse the artists receiving beats on Discover, or use the Stems link an artist shares in their bio.
2. Read their brief. Many pages carry a “Send me:” line saying what the artist is looking for. Send to it.
3. Upload the beat. Give it a real title, and add any co-producers so they get credit for it too.
4. Choose who hears it. A box on the form lets the beat appear in the public Discover feed too. Untick it to keep the beat just for that artist.
5. Send it. Signed in with a verified email, it goes straight away. Otherwise you verify your email first.

With a Stems account, you can see plays and bookmarks on every beat you’ve sent, and the artist can message you about a beat directly.

The platform gets your beat in front of them. The beat still has to do the rest. A few things that help:

• Send your best one to three, not your whole catalogue. Lead with the one that fits them best.
• Leave room for a vocal. A beat that’s busy from start to finish is hard to write to.
• Send a finished-sounding mix. It doesn’t need to be mastered, but it shouldn’t sound like a rough bounce.
• Follow up once, later, with something new, rather than asking whether they heard the last one.

There’s more on all of this in how to get your beats heard, and a closer look at email in Stems vs. email.

The same link works the other way round. A beat submission page gives producers one place to send you beats, so you can stop digging through email and DMs for them.