The first thing you want is a web site, or sites, that have a distinct sound. Take your time visiting sites, making a list as you go. Put checks next to those that sound the same and stars next to the unique sounding sites. This will save you time in the future.

More importantly it will make you distinct as you purchase your rap beats. Building your music on a foundation of unique sounding rap beats will have you stand out and help you be recognized as a musician, not a sheep.

The best, most distinctive, rap beats for downloading will be the more expensive ones. If you are serious about building a name for yourself the price is more than worth it. You get a higher quality that fewer people are using.

Of course you might be in a position that you can't afford the more expensive, higher quality, rap beats. So get creative. Strike up relationships with local artists that don't have a large following yet, or with students in the music programs at local colleges or universities. You can usually get good quality beats for less; maybe free if you offer some kind of promotional credit.

Either way make sure you build and maintain a good relationship with your rap beat "vendors". They'll start offering you their best work first, maybe even at a discount.

The very first thing you want to ensure when downloading rap beats is you have the right to use it for free. The safest way to do this is make sure the usage agreement explicitly offers royalty free use. Failing to do this could mean a lawyer knocking on your door and asking you to pay for every single distribution of every single final piece that uses the beat. Bad. Very, very, bad.

The second consideration is how widely the rap beat will be distributed after you purchase it for your own work. A distinctive rap beat can become very popular in a short amount of time online. This could dilute freshness factor so important to your success.

One way around this is to purchase an exclusive license. This means no one will be allowed to use it but you. The amount of time your exclusive use will vary and the license will cost $100 - $1000 or more, compared to $15 - $50 for a non-exclusive license.

Pay as much as you can afford and try to get a permanent exclusive license. This is particularly important for your show case pieces.

Finally, you want to make sure you get to download the rap beat and keep it. Many services only allow streaming which means you must go to the site every time you want to use. The best format for download is still MP3 because it offers a small file size with very high quality and is widely compatible with music creation software packages.

The Internet is a great place to find and download rap beats. But like in every other area of life there are those seeking to take advantage of you and your pocket book. There are things you can do to avoid being ripped off

First, try to deal with larger, well established sites. These are usually collections of rap beats from several artists where the site is acting as the middle man. This business model relies on maintaining a good reputation to in order to have an adequate supply and demand for the beats.

This doesn't mean you should avoid all small, or single artist, offers. You just need to be more careful and take it slower.

Whether you are purchasing from a large provider or a single artist here are some steps you can take to protect your investment:

1. Make sure there is contact information. Ideally this will be an email address, phone number and physical address.

2. Contact the site with a pre-sale question. I prefer an email verifying royalty free use of the downloaded rap beats. If they don't respond to pre-sale questions you can pretty much guess customer service will suck.

3. Go to Google and do a search on the company or site name and the word scam, e.g.:

"Best Rap Beat Downloads" +scam

4. Make a small purchase, maybe something that can be used as filler in a lot of pieces. After you buy email with a question. If they respond properly you're on the right track.

For the smaller companies you may want to repeat this process just to be sure.