Collaborating with other DIY Electronic Music Producers has its benefits. You learn from other producers how to do more. If you get a final product, you expose it to your listeners as well as the fans of those who participated in the collaboration.
I have collaborated with three other artists so far. (From Germany, Netherlands and Japan) When the right situation presents itself, I might want to do it again.
The first thing you want to do is to produce some tracks that show you have some talent. The more talent you present, the more likely someone will want to collaborate with you. You can post your tracks on a number of different music streaming platforms. I have some older tracks on Hearthis.at, Soundcloud and ReverbNote. Most of my new stuff does not go there anymore but it is a little gratifying to still get streams there..
Ideally, you want to collaborate with someone better than you with more fans than you or at least on your level with one or both categories. You will want someone who produces music that you like. Check out their music.
Look for another producer to collaborate with who shows some interest in your work. If you like their music, and you think the situation may be doable, contact your potential collaborator. For me, I don't want to be a part of anything contrary to my Christian beliefs, or have vulgarity. You may be able to arrange everything quite organically if all the conditions fall into place, but if you want to bring it up cold to them, what do you have to lose?
I have found that it is best to settle things on the front end. Many, if not most music distributors are setup to accommodate whatever royalty split you want to arrange if you go that way, which I do. You can offer you collaborator a nice split, especially if they have more to offer. I want to work toward getting onto the bigger commercial sites. If the end product is weak, I will NOT want to put it there. If it is not good enough for the non-commercial sites, I want to scrap it.
Another question to settle is what kind of a project do you want to work on. What genre? How many BPM? Who will do what? Often you can just ask for the stem files from someone's song and you can do a remix of the song. Stem tracks can be posted on Google Drive and picked up by whoever you give permission to do so. It works great. That is what I have done in the past. You can do this all you want on the non-commercial sites. But now, that won't work for me. My main platform is YouTube and they do not accept any remixes because of their plagiarism filters. But if the project is a new project, that will work for YouTube as long as you follow their other guidelines.
It is best if you both agree that the project is finished. Then confirm all the other distribution points are agreeable.
I hope this helps out. If you have questions, please leave them here or on the contact page. And of course, I may be in the market to collaborate.
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