Obligatory "This is the music BUSINESS" post.

Alright, a few things have kept me away from this blog for a bit, but that's my business and not yours. One thing however has made me feel so strongly about writing a new post, that I have awoken from my literary slumber to rant and rave yet again.

Listen up people. If I don't know you, have worked with you in the past and liked the finished product, or we don't share some of the same DNA, do not approach me with the word FREE when it comes to asking me for beats. I don't get it. I've had a slew of people contacting me recently asking me for free beats. I'm a nice guy, but I'm not that nice.

I've been doing this long enough and have worked with enough established artists that my time is worth money. If you don't understand that concept, then I don't know what to tell you. I'm not saying that I deserve thousands of dollars per beat, but I don't think that $200-$500 is too much to ask. If you're serious about your project, you should have some sort of a budget. If you blew your financial load on features and don't have enough for beats, go lease some $20 jawns off of some Soundclick producer that doesn't really give a fuck what you do with the beat as long as you send that $20 via Paypal.

What's even funnier is you clowns who try to tell me that you didn't pay "so and so" for a feature on your "album". Do you people realize that I know a lot of the people that you're featuring on your record? Do you know that I make phone calls and ask questions? Do you know that when they tell me that you paid them for a verse when you told me you didn't I think you're a fucking snake and I will never work with you ever? First impressions are key. If you're starting off by bullshitting me, you'll always be a bullshitter to me and nothing you can say will ever change that.

Now, there's also this little thing called give and take here. All of you "MC's" asking me for free beats but paid for features, check this out. How about you make some sort of proposal to me like "Hey, I don't have cash for a beat, but I got for a feature. You think you have something that could work for the track?" This is what we call mutually beneficial. Of course I'd probably have to like the dude who is being featured on the tracks music, but to me, that sounds a lot better than "I don't have any money, give me free shit".

We ALL do this for the love of music. We also do it to supplement our incomes, and in the case of the well established, do it for a living. I'm not going to run the whole cliche of "Do I come into your job and......" because that shit is played out. What I am going to say is have some consideration for the artists you approach about collaborations. While we may not be a physical business per se, what we're doing is still work. Even though we enjoy the living shit out of it, it's still a job.