Music marketplace and collaboration platform, Gemtracks recently announced it will be adding K-Pop to its list of official genres in which users can buy and sell beats, and hire freelancers.
Since 2016, Gemtracks has been known for their marketplace for exclusive beats and instrumentals. For each track that is sold, it is also removed from the website and the rights of the track is given to the buyer. This gives seller the chance to increase their prices in exchange for losing their intellectual properties, and the buyer getting the peace of mind to do anything they want with the track without having to pay any further royalties.
"Seeing the growing international explosion and interests in K-Pop, we have finally decided to include and embrace K-Pop as one of the many genres of music users can create on Gemtracks," Jesse Neo, founder of Gemtracks revealed in an email. "Seeing many international indie artists picking up Korean as a second language and being so engaged in the country's pop culture, we believe this update will open doors to a new list of music producers, sellers and buyers that use our platform."
Already, Gemtracks has already seen huge growth in Central and South America, and many producers from the African continent collaborating with artists in the United States. In fact, many of the successful producers are from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Kenya and Nigeria. The website currently has more than 20,000 registered members, and more than 1 million monthly unique visitors.
With the news of opening Gemtracks to the K-Pop industry, music producers will also be able to launch their own subscription services to sell beats, loops, samples and other audio assets to other producers and artists hoping to get onto the K-wave as well. This would give the chance to come up with tracks with the same vibe as BTS and Blackpink. Many sellers are already making six-figure income each year simply by offering their services.
Once a song has been produced, it can then be submitted into the Gemtracks submission feature to be listed in popular Spotify playlists, reviewed in magazines, pitched to record labels and sent to other music curators around the world for exposure.
For those that are only fans of K-pop and have not been thinking of becoming artists, they would be pleased to know that there are some free resources that anyone can access without charge. One of them is the royalty-free music that can be used on any project. See this as a collection of free samples and toy files that can be used to play around in your digital audio workstation or studio.
"We don't want Gemtracks to be just a platform for existing musicians to use, but also a place that can allow pretty much anyone to become one," Jesse continued. "Basically, Gemtracks acts as support group with access to affordable assets and professionals that can help new artists get their careers off the ground."
We had a look at Gemtracks' recent update to see how easy it was to produce our first K-Pop song. We wanted something that sounded like G-Dragon but with a Taeyeon touch. A quick search in the marketplace returned a list of popular beats that could be used in our upcoming song. Eventually, we settled with a pop-EDM track by the name of "Nostalgic Vibe in G Major" that came with a fiery drop and strong 808 drums. The seller of this track had over 40 reviews, and 5-star average.
The next step was to get the vocals, which we were kindly obtained by one of our talented staff. We returned back to Gemtracks to search for an engineer that could mix the beat and vocals together, perhaps do some EQing and finally master it. All in all, the we paid less than $500 for all the whole project, and were pretty pleased with the result. We were then encouraged to distribute and market the song, which we kindly declined.
With the increasing use of technology, the gig-marketplace and now A.I. it would be interesting to see how Gemtracks would continue to change in the future to adapt to these new trends and opportunities.
