Selling on the web has become one of the new frontiers of commerce. We find it hard to think of anything not being sold and bought every minute over the internet; just have a look on ebay.

Hip-Hop producers were quick to understand the powerful worldwide reach of the internet and started selling instrumentals to artists through this channel.

A couple of websites therefore gathered enormous music inventories from professional record label producers, and started selling complete instrumental tracks just like Amazon sell CDs. Pay x amount online, and we'll ship you a CD with the tracks you purchased. A new market full of opportunities was born.

About a year and a half ago we also understood the potential this new market had. Having promoted our own music on websites such as mp3.com and vitaminic.com, we realised that creating our own service would give us much greater flexibility and reach. We also had around 250-300 instrumentals sitting on our hard drives waiting for rappers and vocalists to rhyme/sing over them. There was no way we could've used all of these instrumentals ourselves, therefore why not offer artists worldwide the chance to easily obtain top quality instrumentals for their musical projects?

Hence the birth of La Cantina Productions. Our aim is to give artists who may not be able to afford to buy expensive instrumentals/beats a fair chance to get their music out there. Our typical artists are talented emcees or vocalists, desperately in need of beats, but with little cash.

So how does it all work? Artists just need to visit the website, listen to preview samples of the instrumentals and then purchase the ones they like directly online. We were one of the first websites to offer the possibility to download instrumentals immediately after payment; no more waiting for CDs to arrive through the post, high quality mp3's can be downloaded immediately.

And it doesn't end here. Artists record their vocals over our instrumentals and we then take care of promoting their complete tracks in the right places. After years of promoting our own music on the web, we know exactly where the online promotional efforts should be concentrated. Promoting music online requires hard work, but when you know where to go, the job is a thousand times easier.

So in other words, we produce hip hop instrumentals and promote the artists who use them. We take great pride in what we do and hope to see some of our most talented artists make it big over our tracks. We're not in this for financial gain, but simply for musical enjoyment.

We're growing fast and are now one of the top online production websites in a market unfortunately already cluttered with 'me too' faceless unprofessional services. We're not trying to be a business, but simply a group of friends hoping to take hip hop to the next level through the reach of the world wide web.

Jerry Spina and Stone Tone
Founders of La Cantina Productions

Find us at :

La Cantina Productions

Or, email us for further information at info@lacantinaproductions.com

['Hip Hop Beats Online,' article appeared on Fat Controller Issue #2 (the UK National Student Magazine) www.fat-controller.com]