A Beatmaker's Story: From SoundCloud to Fiverr Clients

My first upload on SoundCloud got 4 plays. Two of those were me, checking if the link even worked. The other two remain a mystery I've stopped trying to solve.

That was in early 2023. I want to say things improved dramatically after that, but they didn't, not for a long while. It took roughly 14 months before a single track of mine crossed 200 plays. Fourteen months is a strange amount of time to wait for what felt, at the time, like a pretty minor milestone.

I make lo-fi and boom-bap beats now, mostly for YouTubers and small indie artists. Getting here involved a lot of uploading into what felt like silence.

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The early SoundCloud grind, honestly described

I used a cracked version of FL Studio for the first eight months, which I'm not proud of and don't recommend, but that was the reality of having no income yet. Learned almost everything from free YouTube tutorials, the same ten or so channels everyone starting out watches.

The early beats all sounded suspiciously similar to each other. Same drum kit, same chord progressions borrowed from tutorials. I could hear it. I assume anyone listening could hear it too, if anyone was listening, which mostly they weren't.

That phase probably happens to most people starting out. You copy before you find your own thing.

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Building any kind of audience took forever

I uploaded weekly without missing a week, even during stretches with zero engagement. That routine mattered more than any single upload.

By month 30-ish, I had 184 followers. Small number. Genuinely small. But maybe 20 of those people actually commented, shared tracks, gave real feedback. That handful became something like a community, small as it was.

One producer with about 60,000 followers reposted one of my tracks out of nowhere. Plays jumped to 290 on that single post over two days, the biggest spike I'd ever seen. Then it dropped right back to single digits daily within a week. Still, that spike proved growth was possible. It just required staying consistent long past the point where consistency feels pointless.

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Moving to Fiverr for actual income

Once I had a decent catalog of beats, I figured it was time to try monetizing directly instead of just posting and hoping. Set up a Fiverr gig: custom beat production, lo-fi and boom-bap focus.

First client came in about 11 days later. $9 for a 30-second intro beat for a small YouTube channel. Took me roughly 90 minutes. Client said "cool, exactly what I wanted" and left five stars.

Second client took almost a month. During that gap I genuinely wondered if the first one was a fluke. It wasn't, but the silence in between made it hard to believe that at the time.

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Mistakes worth admitting

I priced way too low starting out. $6 for a full custom beat including mixing, and one client asked for five separate revisions, all of which I did for free because I hadn't set a boundary. Working it out afterward, that project paid something like $1.20 an hour. Not a typo.

I also didn't track licensing properly early on. Accidentally sold what I'd called an "exclusive" beat to two different buyers because I had no system for tracking what I'd already sold. One buyer noticed his supposedly exclusive track playing under someone else's video. That conversation was uncomfortable in ways I still think about. I now keep a simple spreadsheet logging every beat's licensing status before anything goes out.

Revision limits weren't defined either, and that cost me hours I never billed for. My gig description now says two free revisions, anything past that is billed separately. Both sides know where they stand now.

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Where things actually stand now

Somewhere between 5 and 8 orders come in monthly through Fiverr these days. Some are small, $10 to $15 intro beats. A few run larger, $40-plus for full track production with mixing included.

Last month totaled $221 from beatmaking alone. That's not quitting-your-job money, to be clear. But it's real, it's consistent-ish, and it's for work I'd probably be doing for free anyway if nobody paid me for it.

I've kept SoundCloud active purely for discovery. Every so often a Fiverr client finds me because they heard a track first and messaged directly instead of browsing the gig listings.

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There's one thing I still can't explain. The beats I personally think are mediocre tend to pull in the most plays. The track I spent nearly two months perfecting sits at 9 plays right now. Nine. Meanwhile a beat I made in 40 minutes on a random Tuesday has over 300. I've genuinely given up trying to predict what lands.

Next up is an 8-track lo-fi project for a client, the biggest single order I've taken so far. Somewhere between nervous and looking forward to it, honestly not sure which feeling is winning at the moment.