If you’re a music producer, you know how challenging it is to optimize your beats so that potential customers can discover them. To help you out, I decided to do a little research and find out how the search algorithm works on BeatStars – the most popular platform for selling beats – and how important it is what people type into the search box.
Important: In this article, I’m just sharing the results of my research, not trying to tell anyone how to promote their beats. Also, please keep in mind that I’m just a dude from the internet and I don’t have and can’t have any official information. Only the BeatStars developers know for sure how their algorithms actually work, so I am just having fun here and pretending to be a savvy SEO specialist. Now that the responsibility is off my shoulders, let’s get started! 😎
What’s the difference between “artist name type beat” tag and just “artist name”?
Even if two producers create beats with the same style and use similar tags, they might describe them differently. You’ve seen all those Drake type beat and Drake tags and similar word combinations on BeatStars, right? But have you ever wondered if there’s a real difference between tracks tagged Drake type beat and tracks with just Drake in the tags? Let’s find out if these little differences in phrasing actually matter when it comes to search results.
To test this, I’ll use the tag 6lack type beat. Here are the search results:
If we look at the first ten results, they all contain the 6lack type beat tag. And the situation remains the same at least up to position 40. I couldn’t find a single beat that was tagged only with 6lack. This phrase may appear in the track names (we’ll get back to that later), but not in the tags.
Now let’s address a question: can you find a beat tagged as an artist name type beat by searching for the artist name only? To explore this, I’ll use an even rarer tag like Weekend – this is a slightly misspelling version of The Weeknd’s name with an “E” that shouldn’t be there if you’re referring to the Canadian singer. Let’s see the results:
As you can see, searching for Weekend returns beats with tags like the weekend, the weekend type, and even da weekend type beat. This means that even a partial match to the query is enough for the track to appear in the search results.
✅ Conclusion: If your beat has the tag Drake, someone searching for Drake type beat won’t find it because they used a more specific (and longer) search term. On the other hand, if your beat is tagged as Drake type beat, a search for Drake may cause your beat to show up in the results because it contains the desired keyword.
Do I need to include tags in my track titles on BeatStars?
Many authors on BeatStars use type-beat tags in their track titles. Personally, I’m not a big fan of this practice, as it can make things look a bit messy. However, it comes down to a choice: do I want my beats to look aesthetically pleasing to me, or do I want them to be easy to find? I lean towards the latter. So the question is, does BeatStars take what’s in the title field into account when ranking beats in search results?
Here’s how I tested it: I picked a word that someone might use as a track title, but probably would not use as a tag. If BeatStars shows me some beats with this title in the search results, it tells me that the track title is also important for the search algorithm. Honestly, it was hard to come up with a search term that could be a track title but probably wouldn’t be a tag, but I did it: Toyota! Here are the results:
I checked the first 50 results: among the top five tracks, Toyota was in both the titles and the tags. What’s interesting is that two of those five tracks had completely different titles. The sixth track had Toyota Supra as a tag and title, while others beats had my search term in the title only, along with regular tags like artist names.
From position 13 to 34, there were tracks with Toyota as the title with no additional tags. Next came beats with more specific titles:
Around the 35th track, additional words appeared in titles, but tags remained the same – artist names and other random things. The word Toyota was only in titles.
✅ Conclusion: Yes, BeatStars uses the title field to rank the search results. This wasn’t a surprise, but what’s interesting is that if the same word from the search query is also in your tags, your beat will rank higher.
Moreover, it seems that BeatStars gives a higher priority to the tags field: that’s why the top results include beats with titles that don’t match our search term, but with matching tags. The less matches (extra words or no tag matches), the lower the beat appears in the search results. The more matches (no extra words in tags or titles), the higher the position of your beat.
Is the description of my track matter for the search ranking on BeatStars?
The last thing left to figure out is whether the text in the description field of our tracks is important. Often producers fill their beat descriptions with contact information or some other details like tempo, key and genre.
I’m going to test it just like in the previous section. I’ll use some text that could be used as a description and is unlikely to be in other fields. I want to see if the search results return anything with this text.
Let’s check: I open tracks from the top charts and study their descriptions. The goal was to find a beat with a description that didn’t contain any type beat tags, so I could copy that text and search for the exact same beat. For example, I found this phrase: Please purchase a lease for Spotify and etc. Let’s try it out:
Okay, maybe too many words? Let’s try shortening it to Please purchase:
There are only five results for this query. But here’s the thing, they all have the word “please” in their tags, and the first one has the phrase please purchase this beat as a tag. I hope one day someone will actually buy this beat 🙏
I tried a few more times with other terms like youtube, website, contact me, email, and serious inquiries, but each time I found beats that had those words in the title or tags, but not in the description.
❌ Conclusion: The search algorithm on BeatStars doesn’t care about the text we use as a description, so filling it with tags and keywords to improve search rankings isn’t worth it. The best use of descriptions is to provide meaningful information to our customers, including your contact information, discount codes, terms of use for free beats, and more.
Is there anything else that is affected by the tags or the title of my track?
This question deserves a post of its own. For example, if you open any beat on BeatStars and scroll down a bit, you will see a section with similar beats, and it may be that tags have an effect on these recommendations. But I’m not entirely sure about this and it needs more time to be explored. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested. 👇