August 19, 2026
The question every producer asks before opening their DAW. Here are the three questions to ask about an artist before you commit a beat to them.
You've got a list of artists you could make beats for. Some you actually like. Some you know are popular. Some you saw someone else blow up on last month. Picking the wrong one wastes a beat, a title, a thumbnail, and a week of your time — so before you commit to an artist, run them through three questions.
Liking an artist's sound isn't the same as that sound having a searchable audience. Plenty of artists have real streams and a real fanbase but almost nobody typing "[artist] type beat" into YouTube — usually because their fans aren't the type beat crowd, or because the artist is early enough that the search behavior hasn't formed yet.
Check the actual search volume before anything else. No searches means no one is going to find the beat no matter how good it is.
Two artists can have identical search volume today and be in completely different situations. One's climbing month over month — more people discovering the sound every week, which means more room to grow into. The other already peaked and is holding flat or sliding, which means you'd be arriving at the exact moment the opportunity stops expanding.
Rising demand with mid-size volume beats flat demand with high volume almost every time, because you get to grow with the artist instead of fighting for scraps of an audience that's already been claimed.
This is the one people skip. Search the artist's name and look at how many channels have uploaded for them in the last 30 days, and how established those channels look. Hundreds of results from channels with real subscriber counts means you'd be a brand-new channel walking into a fight that's already been won. A handful of small or inactive channels means the door's still open.
Demand without a competition check is only half an answer — it's why an artist can look perfect on search volume alone and still be a bad pick.
An artist worth your time clears all three: real search demand, that demand still climbing, and competition thin enough that a new upload has a real shot at ranking. Miss any one of the three and you're either invisible, arriving late, or fighting uphill against channels that got there first.
Most producers only ever check the first question, if they check anything at all — they see an artist is popular and start producing. The two who catch the second and third question are the ones who consistently land in artists' actual rotations instead of sitting at 40 views.
This is exactly the check Beatoptic runs automatically. Instead of manually searching demand, tracking whether it's rising, and counting competitor uploads for every artist you're considering, it scores all three against real YouTube data and shows you which artists currently clear the bar — so the question "who should I make beats for" has an actual answer instead of a guess.
Get early access at beatoptic.com
Posted by the beatoptic team — built by a producer, for producers.