Originally Posted by djs13

I'd like to paint a quick picture before I get to my question. I've been brain storming about multiple start-ups and most of them are product based which posses a huge problem for me because I'm moving into a dorm in three weeks. I had an awesome beer pong idea that Australian Investor and a few others helped me with, but I'm probably going to have to put it on hold because of my living situation.

The beer pong idea did help me develop the theory that intangible (online) products that you can download would be a great fit for me. Now for the second part of the story.

I'm a drummer and I listen to mostly rock music from the '60s to '90s. My friends are HUGE rap guys but I never really understood it until a couple weeks ago when they popped in a mix of songs from guys like Kanye West. Some of the songs were actually pretty good, but they all had individual beats like a rock song. The thing I noticed is that rap beats are even more diversified because you can use so many different sounds whereas rock is confined to a basic acoustic sounding drum set.

For the past week I've researched rap producers and beat making and it's an interesting business. If you type in "rap beats for sale" in google you'll find a long list of individual people selling their beats for prices from $5-$100 a beat. And this is where the entrepreneur in me got thinking:

There may be opportunity for a site like elance or ebay where rap producers can list their rap beats for sale and grass roots rappers can buy the beats. The producers would name their price and then my company would take a percentage of the exchange. There could be a section where rappers can post some of the things their looking for and then different producers can bid on the project and supply them a beat. It would kind of be a cross between ebay and elance for hip hop music.

But here is my question: there are plenty of people selling their rap beats online. But how do I know that this type of site would be in demand? I'm not a rapper nor do I know any rappers, but it seems to me that if there is demand this site would be profitable because it's helping out both the producer and the rapper.

Thank you!