It has also helped diversify the music industry. Selling beats online has been an enormously liberating experience, says Wesley. “I always tell people to do what you love most: if you have to force yourself to be creative in areas you don’t really want to be creative in, it’s not sustainable.” His first love was 90s-style rhythm and blues. “But after a while I just wanted to do what I loved most,” he says. He focused on copying what was popular in the music charts at the time – back then, he produced beats that would lend themselves to being used in hip hop and rap tracks.
Wesley soon moved over to Airbit, working as a logistics manager during the day and making beats to sell at night. Producers would sell non-exclusive licences to other music producers, artists and songwriters to use the backing tracks in songs, commercials and movie soundtracks. Prior to this, musicians would rely on a small cadre of professional beat makers to provide the soundtrack to their songs. Soundclick and other beat-selling sites represented a new opportunity: they opened up a marketplace to hobbyists to potentially sell their wares to professionals. Today the service, called Airbit, has nearly half a million users.Īmong them is Dutch music producer Robin Wesley, who got into making beats in 2013, joining a website called Soundclick when there only around 100 music producers creating beats on the platform. He did so, then decided to convert the individual projects into a standalone mass-market service. It was a success, and soon music producers were asking him to add the online store to their own websites. Instead, he created a new path he combined his passions to code an online store that could be embedded into websites, where he could license his music to artists who wanted to find backing beats for their tracks. “It’s either you get signed to a label, or you find a big artist that you can work with and come up together,” says Khamlichi, who is now 33.
He wanted to become a music producer, but the likelihood of success was low.
When he returned from Boston in 2008, he faced a quandary. He went to the UK School of Audio Engineering, a private college with outposts in 20 different countries, and on graduation travelled to Boston in the US to intern at a recording studio. After a year of programming, he left the company and became a music producer. At 16, he became a software developer for a company that developed programs for HMRC, the UK tax collection agency.īut Khamlichi wasn’t sure he wanted to build a career in software development. “I started breaking things and coding,” he says. When he got his first computer at the age of 10, he could barely wait to get it home and tear it apart. Wasim Khamlichi was always a computer geek.
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