With Drops by Colossal, it’s easier than ever for producers to earn from their beats

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Drops is a slick new tool by Colossal that promises to help producers get their beats directly into the hands of artists. By folding in licensing, payments and file transfer into a single shareable web link, they’ve managed to simplify selling your beats into a process that is “frictionless, beautiful and optimised to boost sales”, says founder Paul Anthony.

To test this, I jumped onto the Drops platform to see how long it would take to get started. With no need to sign up for a subscription, I was loading in my tracks right away and exploring the different release options, which include the choice of non-exclusive and exclusive licenses, setting my own price and adding some vibrant visuals. It’s an effortless experience, with everything distilled down into a one-page user-friendly design.

Hitting publish on a beat will generate a Drops link which is where the magic happens. The shareable link contains everything that someone else needs to buy your beat using PayPal, agree to the licensing terms, and download the high-quality audio file — no low-quality MP3 allowed here. Drop the link into a post, video description or DM. That’s it!

When someone is interested in buying your beat, just give them a Drops link, and the rest is up to them.

A single shareable link seems almost too obvious. Surely, this exists already? Yet the current alternative is a cobbled-together system that is unappealing to both the producer and artist.

A lot of the time, producers end up fielding responses to requests through DM’s, emails, or via messaging apps like WhatsApp. If all goes well, they can then send their track via a file transfer service like Dropbox or WeTransfer, and somewhere along the way, payment has to be arranged via a bank transfer or another payment app. This method makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of who is downloading your music and, in the case that they haven’t actually paid for the download, leaves you with very little you can do about it. These are issues that have long been solved when it comes to selling most digital goods and online services.

Cleaning up this ad-hoc system is what Colossal has set out to do. For this neat all-in-one stack of functions, producers pay a 15% commission only when they make a sale. Adding to the simplicity of using Drops, there is no subscription or payment plan in sight.

So, what else do you get for that fee?

A key feature of Drops is something that has little glamour or appeal, but is essential to every single producer hoping to share their work: licensing.

Cleaning up the murky waters of licensing was a critical mission for Colossal. Most of us hardly ever read licenses, even when we ultimately click ‘Agree’. This can be excused when it’s a software licence, but when you’re licensing your music, there is no room to be so careless. Colossal’s licenses were written with music lawyers and are locked from edits, so neither producers nor buyers can alter the fine print. This approach helps provide a level of consistency for anyone who uses Drops, with the understanding that once you read the license once, you’ll never have to worry that the terms have changed, even if you’re buying from a different producer.

Reading the license isn’t as daunting as we’ve all come to expect. To ensure these licenses are clear to everyone involved, a summary of core terms is displayed right next to the preview of the beat, keeping a fixed spotlight on the legal end of music. For the music industry, renowned for ownership disputes and misuse cases, having a solid licensing framework offers a lot of peace of mind.

Beyond the tedious legal legwork, it’s exciting to see that Colossal has included some innovative features in the service. With each release, you can set a limited number of downloads for your beat or create a limited time for when people can buy your Drop. This nice touch of exclusivity can help producers elevate their work to a more valuable category. With an abundance of music floating around online, and YouTube to MP3 software commonly being used, many producers will relish the chance to add a bit of scarcity back into the equation.

Rounding out Drops’ promotional tool kit is the ability to add your own image or video to each track and have these visuals automatically whipped up into a pleasing layout for your beat’s landing page. These pages are optimised for mobile devices, resulting in beautiful graphics, and a user-friendly interface, that is perfectly suited to how most people browse music.

Looking to the future, Drops by Colossal has a few exciting features in development, including the functionality to unlock a beat by subscribing to a YouTube channel, joining a Discord server, or hitting follow on Instagram or TikTok. Colossal is also looking to expand beyond beats and build a beat marketplace that also supports samples, loops and stems. Sitting alongside Drops is a companion search and discovery platform called Vibes, where you can speedily audition new beats by swiping in the fashion of TikTok, which is coming soon.

Nowadays, most of the work that goes into sharing beats, reaching audiences, and selling your music happens on social platforms. Colossal has formed Drops to fit perfectly into this ecosystem.

Whether you want to get your music out there for a bit of fun or hope to turn beat-making into your full-time gig, Drops will do the heavy lifting while you focus on making the music.

Garling is a composer, sound artist, and contributing writer for MusicTech, with over a decade of experience making music. Endlessly fascinated by the possibilities of sound, she grabs whatever tech suits the moment, switching between hardwiring electronics, programming audio in Max and digging into plugins and synths.