Exclusive Interview
Produced by: Rudy Manager
Edited by: Rudy Manager & Andrej Aroch
Busy Works Beats - Music Production Educator on YouTube, AI and Producer Independence
Busy Works Beats has become one of the most influential voices in online music production education, with thousands of videos, hundreds of millions of views, and a platform that has helped countless producers sharpen their skills. In this Studio Talks interview, he reflects on his journey from music lover to entrepreneur, the growth of his YouTube channel, the future of AI in music, and why producers need to think about ownership, business, and long-term independence. This interview was conducted by Rudy Manager over video call on June 11, 2026.
“Back then, there weren’t many people teaching music production online, so we were part of the early wave helping create that tutorial culture.”
- Busy Works Beats
Can you share the story of how you first got interested in music and how you eventually evolved into being a music producer?
My mom always took me to her choir practices at church, so just hearing gospel music, to me, is like hearing the highest level of music there is. Then I’d be riding around with my mom in the car while she played rap music, and I’d tell her to put on the smooth jazz radio station. As a kid, I just had a natural affinity for music. I was drawn to the actual music, the chords, the depth, the harmony, and all of that. I was naturally inquisitive about music because my mom was really into it.
Growing up, I wasn’t really in a band. I always thought the only way to get into music was through band, like you had to play an instrument. So I picked up the saxophone in fourth grade, but I never practiced, never went to band practice, and I was just horrendous. Later on, I bought a keyboard when I was around seventh or ninth grade. I started making beats on the piano, and that shifted my mindset because I’d always thought you had to be in a band. I didn’t know you could just make your own arrangements and compositions. I wish I still had that keyboard. It was a Yamaha YPT-400, and I used to make beats on it. My friends would tell me they were terrible, but once you fall in love with making beats, it sticks with you.
I was actually an artist first, and I would download beats from Hipstrumentals and other websites. People used to put mixtapes on DatPiff, and I would contribute to Hipstrumentals as well. That’s how I got my start. Long story short, I morphed from an artist into a producer because I fell in love with the craft and the overall process of making music. Around that time, there was a kid named John in my history class who had FL Studio. I think he gave me a pirated version, or maybe he was using Cakewalk. I forget exactly how it went down back in seventh grade. I was using the trial version of FL Studio for a long time, and you couldn’t save anything. Imagine playing a game like Hitman, Halo, Grand Theft Auto, or Call of Duty where you have to beat a level, but you can’t stop, you can’t save, and there’s no rewind. You just have to get it done all the way through. That was the pressure we had with the FL Studio trial version.
Once I graduated and saw my student loan bills, it really hit me. I don’t know if you have the same student loan issue overseas, but in America, it’s a big epidemic. People go to school, go into debt, and then find out there aren’t really jobs waiting for them. That blows your mind because you feel like you were lied to the entire time. When I graduated, my back was against the wall. That was the moment when I said, “Okay, I have to make something happen.” I already had my YouTube channel going while I was in university, so all of those puzzle pieces added up to a career in music. That’s when I had to decide to burn the ships and keep pushing. It wasn’t like I woke up one day, made a decision, and everything magically happened. It was all of these little pieces adding up over time.
How did your knowledge of marketing and affiliate marketing help you start your YouTube channel and build a career in music? Was there a moment when you knew you wanted to switch into music?
The reason I got into affiliate marketing was that when I started the pre med club, I learned what entrepreneurship was. I was like, “Wow, I can literally get a group of people together and create something.” I’ll keep it short because it’s a long story, but imagine you’re in university and you and your roommate are excited to build something. We were trying to join fraternities, but then we tried to start our own fraternity. It was called TKE, but it had a history of cocaine at Villanova, so we couldn’t start it. Still, we had that energy to build something from scratch, so we decided to create a pre med club around our majors.
Imagine coming out of class and asking the professor, “Hey, can I get the last five minutes of your class to tell everybody about our new club?” This was completely out of nowhere. The professors would either say yes or no, but most of them said yes. So I’d be standing in front of maybe 150 people with no public speaking skills, no special training, and nothing like that. I just had the confidence to say, “Hey, let’s work together instead of competing against each other. Let’s create this group.” Out of that, we recruited hundreds of students, and it created opportunities that didn’t exist before. We’re talking about internships at top hospitals in America, like Jefferson Hospital and Lankenau Hospital. These are huge hospitals, and we helped open doors into healthcare industries worth billions of dollars.
All of that is to say, you have to learn how to make money and sell, but you also have to tie that into your passion. You can’t just do the passion. I think that’s the lie everybody is taught in the music industry. People think that as long as you make beats, play bass, or play guitar, you’ll be good in the music industry. No, you have to be a salesman too. You have to understand how to add value. For example, me and Rudy are building right now, so I’m thinking about ways I can add value to him. He has a Patreon, so I’m thinking, “How can I send my email list of more than 180,000 people to his Patreon?” I’m not expecting anything. I don’t need an affiliate link or a percentage of anything. I’m just trying to add value to him because if we keep building together, it’s like Jenga, where you keep stacking the pieces and climbing higher. There’s no need to compete. You actually hurt your own progress when you compete, so it’s better to build with other people. I get excited when people decide to create a platform because then I can help build with them, and we can create an alliance to build bigger and better things.
When did the idea for your famous YouTube channel first come to you? A lot of producers we speak to, including some of the top guys in the industry, mention you as one of their main influences.
It all started in a small Facebook group where I was learning how to sell beats online. Back in the day, there was a site called SoundClick.com, and it felt like the biggest beat battle in the world. Everybody wanted to be the best, everybody wanted to be number one, and on top of that, you had to sell music. It was very competitive. That was also when drum kits became important because in order to make the top beats on the website, you needed certain drum kits. People were selling drum kits for $200 back then, so there was a reason they were so expensive.
When you come up on a website like that and you’re not number one, you start asking yourself, “How do I become successful?” Then people start coming into your life. For me, one of those people was Damn Mayne Beats, also known as Ice Boogie XL. He created a small Facebook group with fewer than 50 people, and we would give each other feedback. What came out of that was me trying to help someone else in the group named Chi Chi Beats. He was trying to make a Dallas Boogie type beat or synth sound, and since I was also into sound design, I was like, “Let me show you how to make that sound.” The only way to really explain it was through a YouTube video, so I made one for him.
In helping one person, I ended up helping 100 people, and I was like, “Whoa.” It became addictive when I saw that I was helping more people. It’s a good addiction. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to put out another video to help people in the group,” and then that helped 200 more people. I started seeing the same pattern I saw in my entrepreneurial ventures in college. I would help five people, then that would turn into 50 people, then 100 people. I think, in the beginning, the main addiction was seeing that growth.
Back in the day, there wasn’t anything like that. Maybe that’s why a lot of people credit Busy Works Beats, because there really wasn’t anybody else doing it like that at the time. We were among the early people putting out that information and helping create this tutorial culture. When it comes to the successful people you interview, I’d say the main commonality is that they have drive. They have a natural passion to be the best.
How do you view your legacy on YouTube after thousands of videos and more than ten years of doing this?
When you go from one to ten, it feels amazing. But then your body gets used to going from one to ten, so you have to go from ten to 100 to feel anything again. Then once you go from ten to 100, you have to go from 100 to 1,000 to feel that same feeling again. From one to ten, you 10x. From ten to 100, you 10x. From 100 to 1,000, you 10x again. Then from 1,000 to 10,000, from 10,000 to 100,000, and from 100,000 to a million, it keeps going.
To keep feeling that same sense of growth, you have to get used to the old number and keep chasing the next level. We have 250 million views on YouTube, but in my head, it almost feels more like 249,000 views. It’s not the same as someone looking at it from zero to 250 million. When I’m already coming from 240 million, getting to 250 million doesn’t feel like this huge difference. That’s just how your perspective changes as you grow.
How do you see the YouTube space in 2026? What has changed since you first started?
I’ll be honest, and most people aren’t being honest about this. I did some research recently, and it showed that from 2024 to 2026, Google converted more than 60 percent of traditional searches into what they call AI Overviews. So if somebody searches something like, “I want to make a type beat in FL Studio,” they’re not always seeing your website, your video, or your Instagram anymore. They’re seeing Google take up the whole top section of the page with its own answer. Because traditional search is changing, we have to change our game plan when it comes to getting attention.
Google has converted more than 60 percent of searches into these AI style answers, which means the traditional attention economy is starting to collapse. We went from human labor to machines doing the labor with human oversight, then to the attention economy, where the goal was getting human attention. Now, we’re moving into what I call the agentic economy. Some people also call it the no click economy or no click search. That means when somebody types in “Bryson Tiller type beat,” which used to be a whole business model, they may not actually see websites anymore. People may not even search through browsers in the same way anymore.
To simplify it, imagine the future of Spotify. Right now, you might type in Drake. But imagine a version of Spotify that knows your heart rate because you’re wearing AirPods. It knows your geolocation because your phone knows you go to the gym every day at 3 p.m. When you get there, it knows you’re in the gym. When you’re on the treadmill and your heart rate increases, it understands that you’re in that stage of your workout. It might automatically play something soothing to counteract the pain, like R&B based on your taste and the metadata around your behavior, without you touching anything.
So the question is no longer, “Can I dominate a keyword in search?” The question now is, “How do I create the right metadata and authority so the system understands me?” You have to feed these systems the right information so they understand how to pull from your data and recognize your authority. I know that sounds like a lot of technical word salad, but essentially, we need to spread out and build authority across different platforms.
For people with small audiences, the first thing I’d recommend is not just focusing on your own channel. You should spread out across as many platforms as possible. You should be collaborating with everybody on your level right now because that’s one of the main levers I’m seeing. We can’t control keywords the same way anymore. Keyword stuffing your website isn’t really going to work like it used to because Google takes so much of the traffic. Blog traffic is basically dying because Google can flip a switch and change everything.
With AI coming into music production through companies like Suno, Udio, and other generative AI tools, what advice would you give new producers who want to use AI to their advantage?
I think people twist my message. They think when I say, “Guys, study AI,” that I’m only talking about music. I don’t just mean Suno and Udio. I’m keeping my finger on the pulse so I know when we reach what people call the uncanny valley. To keep it short, I’m talking about the point where you can’t tell human content from machine content. So I’m watching Suno, Google Lyria 3, which people don’t talk about enough, and the new one that shocked me was Fender Studio Pro. They collaborated with Moises, and that was the first time I heard something that really surprised me.
Basically, this is now happening inside of a DAW, not just on a website or inside some AI company. Fender Studio Pro, which was previously known as Studio One, now has an integration with Moises. What that means is I can have a trap beat, do the piano myself, do the drums by hand, and then if I just need a small guitar part, I don’t have to grab my guitar from the garage or be skilled enough to play that exact part. I can literally type “guitar” into Moises, choose from different options like electric guitar or acoustic guitar, and it generates a whole guitar part that fills out the track. It’s not fast right now, but it can generate something in about a minute, and it sounds real. It’s not like Suno, where you can sometimes hear noise and artifacts. I was actually shocked by the quality. I’ve only tested guitar and piano so far, so I still have to go back and test more, but now AI is inside people’s favorite DAW. So if people were so against AI before, are they going to push back now, or are they going to welcome it?
That’s where I think the narrative is changing. It’s going from music producers being against AI to music producers using AI to build tools that never existed before. We’re talking about going way beyond generating a loop or making a beat. We’re talking about Ableton Live devices, chop and stutter tools that never existed before, and maybe the next underground smash plugin. We’re even talking about video games inside a DAW. That’s how fast things are moving, and I don’t think people fully understand AI in music yet.
As far as tools, I’d tell your audience to look into Codex by OpenAI, Claude Code, and Google’s Antigravity. Just get your hands on these tools. I’m not telling you to support AI, the datasets, or the data centers. I’m just saying, what’s the point of fighting in a world where you have to evolve? Again, it’s the Red Queen Theory. You can say you don’t use AI in your music, and that’s fine. Use it or don’t use it. But my point is that making a high quality song that nobody can find doesn’t make sense either. You still have to be found. At some point, we have to leverage AI just to be heard, and that’s the part everybody is skipping over. You can’t neglect the business side.
You spoke about how you think Spotify might start generating its own music. How do you think that would affect the producer community, and what should producers do now to prepare for the future? What are some better ways for producers to build their own audiences?
I understand that not everybody is an entrepreneur, but there’s only one real asset online. It’s the customer’s email address or phone number. That’s it. I can build a YouTube audience, but I don’t own that following. I can’t take my YouTube audience and move them to Facebook. I can’t take my Instagram following and move it to TikTok. So I don’t own any of that. On top of that, when I put out content, the platform won’t even show it to all the people who follow me, which means I don’t really own the connection that allows me to talk to them.
Imagine going to a party and somebody hands you their phone and says, “Okay, you can use my phone. Get as many contacts as possible.” So you go around meeting executives, A&Rs, customers, and potential business partners. Then at the end of the night, Johnny says, “Can I have my phone back?” You’re like, “Wait, I just got all these numbers.” But he takes the phone back, and now you can’t communicate with anybody you just built a relationship with, no matter how hard you worked. That’s what social media is. Now it’s moving even more in that direction because they want you to pay to access the phone again. They’ll say, “You want to use my phone again? Give me $20, $100, or $500.” If you’re going to make a $5,000 deal by talking to an A&R at Sony, they want their percentage through ads.
That’s why, in my opinion, the way around this is to create systems that are more direct and person to person. That’s why I want to build with you and your platform, for example. Why are we spending money on Facebook ads when we could just talk to each other and say, “Hey, you have something new coming out on Patreon? I’ll tell my email list about it.” Even if there’s an exchange of value, whether that’s money, a connection, or something else, why would we go to Facebook to do that? Me and you could both be bidding on the same keyword, like FL Studio, and fighting each other to pay Facebook more and more money. Why wouldn’t I just go to you and offer an affiliate deal or some kind of exchange? That way, I can reach a targeted audience without paying Mark Zuckerberg a ridiculous amount of money.
I used to release music on Spotify. Years later, my credit card on the account expired. TuneCore emailed me and said my card was about to expire, so I figured I’d get to it when I could. Then I got another email saying they were taking my album off Spotify and all the streaming sites because I didn’t update my credit card. I said, “Wow, this is what they do to artists.” You have to pay them every year to keep your song on a website. That didn’t feel right to me. Once I saw that, I realized it was a whole system built around getting people to pay just to upload their music and be heard, even though uploading isn’t what actually gets you traffic.
Think about it. If you’re trying to build your Spotify monthly listeners, when have you ever sent people from Spotify to TikTok? When have you ever sent people from Spotify to YouTube? You don’t. You send people from YouTube to Spotify, TikTok to Spotify, and Instagram to Spotify. That means the traffic doesn’t come from Spotify. Spotify isn’t really a traffic generator. So why are we investing so much into a platform that never sends the traffic back the other way? We’re always feeding this endlessly devouring beast, and it doesn’t make sense as an independent artist when you understand that the real asset online is your email list.
Your email list is the only real asset because you control the communication between you and your audience. I’ve moved my audience multiple times. I started on Mailchimp, moved to Klaviyo, then moved to ActiveCampaign, and later moved to Flodesk because it was more affordable. That’s the power of an email list. Any platform can go down, and any algorithm shift can stop your audience from seeing your content. You don’t control that phone. You control the direct communication through your email list. That’s the only asset you really own online, so build that at all costs.
What I recommend for artists, producers, and really anybody is to understand cost per lead. How much does it cost you in effort or money to get somebody on your email list? Let’s say it costs you $5. Then look at your average transaction value. If someone gets on your website and spends $20 on a beat, you turned $5 into $20. That’s already a 4x return. But that’s only in the short term. Then you have to look at LTV, which means lifetime value. Measure it over six months, a year, or two years. If someone who costs you $5 to acquire eventually spends $200 or $500 with you, now you understand how to grow your business over time.
You can monetize live events, live webinars, Patreon, courses, software, audio plugins, drum kits, promotions, sponsorships, affiliate deals, consultations, and coaching. It’s infinite. You don’t even have to create the product yourself. Rudy could say, “I have this Patreon. We sell it for $100 a month, and I’ll give you $20 for every person you bring in.” I don’t have to own or create his Patreon. All I have to do is send people to him who want to be there, and I earn from the value I helped create. That’s how you grow a business. Everybody watching this should be thinking about multiple streams of income.
That’s why people are so upset about AI in music. They’re asking, “Why would you give away the part where you actually get to be directly involved?” And they’re right. But people also have to work their way up to the point where they have the time and freedom to be creative whenever they want. If a billionaire can have all the money in the world and still come back to making music, then the part where you’re directly involved in the music is always going to matter if that’s your passion. But everything else, like business building and the parts you’re not deeply passionate about, you should automate, leverage AI, or leverage other people. Why waste time doing things you’re not truly passionate about? That’s what I want people to think about.
What plans do you have for the rest of this year? You can share both your personal and professional plans.
My personal plan is to get fit. I’m eating too much food, and I’m getting a little chunky, not gonna lie. I’m around 190 pounds, and I should be around 170, let’s put it that way. On the personal side, my son is about to turn three, so I’m super excited and pumped to celebrate his birthday.
I also want to increase my charity work. I haven’t been as focused on it lately, and my charity work is giving Bibles. When I was 20, I had a divine revelation. Some people might say I was in heaven. I don’t know exactly where I was, but I know it felt way more real than this reality. Long story short, I was told three things: show love, be filled with the spirit of truth, and complete your assignment. That was what I was told. My specific assignment was to give Bibles.
Bibles cost me about $15 on average. If I wanted to give away 100 million Bibles, which is my goal, I’d need around $1.5 billion a year. I don’t have a billion dollars, so I have to figure out a way to get to the point where I can give out that many. Since I don’t currently have the money to give away that many physical copies, I rewrote the parables of Jesus in a modern way for music producers to understand. It’s called the Producer Bible, and it’s a mindset book.
On the business side, I have something launching soon. I don’t know yet if I want to promote it under Busy Works Beats or make it a separate brand, but we’re going to take the mastering tool I created to another level. I figured out a way to get it on par with the top tools in the world. I’ve tested it, and people can debate me all day, but they can also watch the videos. We beat Ozone 12, Waves mastering, ARIA mastering, Master Plan by Musik Hack, Uni-L by Tone Projects, AL-1 by Natural Audio, BandLab mastering, and LANDR in those tests. No shade to any of them, especially the producers who created those products, but I tested my tool against the top mastering tools in the world because I’m trying to be the absolute best in this category. I’m obsessed with it now.
Wow, so you created all the mastering plugins yourself as well?
I’m leveraging AI, so I want to be careful when I say “by myself.” I’m not a genius at everything. It’s built with the JUCE framework, so under the hood, there’s technically a prebuilt system. Imagine going into FL Studio and loading up plugins. In a similar way, with coding, JUCE has already built a lot of the pieces for you. You just rearrange them to do what you need.
But yeah, we’ve tested against the world’s top tools, and we beat the world’s top tools. So now the question is, how do we take this even higher? My ultimate goal, to be honest with you, is to be independent. I don’t want any dependencies. For people who understand software, when you build something, you have what are called dependencies. For example, I’m building on the JUCE framework. I used to build on HISE, and JUCE was built on top of other systems too. At a certain point, it starts to feel like there are too many middlemen. Some of them have licensing fees and all of that, so I started asking myself, “How do I create my own thing?”
But I’m not a master. I leverage AI tools just like anybody else. People can debate in the comments and say, “This is AI generated slop.” But do you know that when I go into Visual Studio Code or Cursor, I can hit the tab button and have it automatically generate code for me? That already existed. A lot of people just don’t understand it. There have already been tools that generate code, like Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.
Thank you so much for doing the interview, and I wish you all the best with everything you’re working on.
Sick, man. I’m just trying to solve problems. When you do business long enough, you get bored and start thinking, “Do you guys have problems I can solve? I’m getting bored over here.” So that’s really all I’m trying to do. I want to keep solving real problems, and that’s my goal.
Follow Busy Works Beats on Instagram: @busyworksbeats
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