How to collaborate successfully

Collaborations play a huge role as an electronic music producer. They can help inspire you, reach new fanbases, make new connections and make dope music with other artists.

Work with vocalists

As a music producer, I mainly work with vocalists. In terms of those collaborations there are a few different types that are common. These are traditional collaborations, these are usually 50/50 in terms of royalties and publishing. As a producer working with vocalists, it usually means that you do the instrumental and production and they do they lyrics, melody and vocal recording. What I like about these collaborations is the set frame and split workload. This is why I recommend when you are collaborating with other producers as a producer, to have a similarly split workload. I haven’t done many collaborations with other producers but what I do recommend is that you only work on projects that really inspire you to work on them. Also, to be open to other ideas, even if you maybe would have done something differently than your partner. There are also times when the collaboration isn’t 50/50. These can be more commission type of arrangements where you have to pay the vocalist to sing on your track and they will then most of the time take less percentage on the master. This is common when the vocalists are really good or are a lot more popular than you. Good indicator for me of an artists size are Spotify monthly listeners.

Some tips for getting collaborations that I have are:

1. be professional: introduce yourself, tell them how you know them, tell them about the project you want to collaborate with them on, maybe also send a link to a song that you made or your Spotify profile – keep it short and to the point: don’t tell them your life story, but also don’t just write “collab bro?”
2. tell them EXACTLY what you expect them to do, for example with vocalists tell them exactly where you want vocals in the track, don’t just expect them to know what you want.
3. probably the most important point: SEND THE TRACK / instrumental / demo you want the person to work on with you, people are probably not going to want to work with you if they don’t know anything about the project that you want to collaborate on.