Let’s be honest. Making a living is tough. I haven’t had an employer since 2000 when I lost my last corporate America job. After spending three years looking for work, I finally turned to the Internet. Fortunately, I was able to make some money for a while until some changes in the SERPs crashed my business like the Hindenburg. Now I’m starting all over again. That’s why I finally decided to get into my lifelong passion…music.
But this site isn’t my only egg, so to speak. One thing I’ve learned from my change of fortune is that you really can’t put all your eggs in one basket. So let me ask you. If you’re doing music for a living too, how many eggs are in your basket? Actually, how many baskets are you using because that one basket may just go away tomorrow. Trust me, I’ve been there and it’s not fun.
So what I’m going to do in this article is point out a few ways that you can use your music writing to make a living so that you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. I’ll try to keep this as generic as I can while still kind of using my own examples. Don’t want to get too specific so as not to shoot myself in the foot, if you know what I mean.
One way to make money with your music is of course to put together a site of royalty free music like I’ve done. Now I have to be honest with you, this is a long shot. The reason is not so much that people don’t download short tracks. It’s that technology has made it so that it’s very easy to download music that normally comes with a price tag. In spite of thousands of downloads from this site, I haven’t sold one of them. And I kind of expected that.
So then why put up the site? Or why not just make the downloads free? Well, there’s kind of a psychology to that. If people are downloading music that comes with a price tag, they feel like they’re actually getting something of value. Doesn’t matter that the track is the same track whether it’s free or $1.99. The perceived value makes it more desirable to download at $1.99, even if it’s not paid for.
Plus, the site gives me exposure. It’s my web presence. It’s my way of saying “Hey guys, here I am. Have a look around and see if there’s anything you like.”
But what it really does is pave the way for custom scores. If people who download my music like it and someday have the need for longer tracks, like say 10 minutes of a Celtic score for a video, they might consider hiring me for a custom royalty free music track. And that’s something that they will have to pay for. So think of the downloads as kind of like a loss leader.
However, this site, downloads and custom scoring aren’t my only eggs. After a few months, I realized that relying on just this site might not be a great idea, so I decided to diversify and branch out into other areas.
One other area that you could consider is hooking up with sites that sell services or products that lend themselves to working alongside music. I don’t want to get too specific there because somebody is sure to steal the brilliant idea that a friend of mine came up with.
What you do is offer this site an affiliate program for sale of your musical product. My product consists of several CDs of music that they can sell along with their main product. They’ll make 75% commission on every sale. That’s a pretty good incentive.
In addition to this, you could set your product up over at some affiliate showcase like Clickbank or JVZoo. That way other affiliates can find it and try to sell it to people in that market.
Another thing you can do is hook up with video makers. These can either be marketers who create videos or sell their own software to make videos. There’s lots of stuff out there that fits into this category. Most of the video software out there doesn’t even come with music and the ones that do feature music that isn’t all that great. The one that I am targeting is rather poor in the area of musical inserts. You can certainly work up some kind of JV deal with these people to supply music for their products.
Of course you can always buy one of these products yourself and create your own videos for people complete with music. Now I realize that this means a bit of a learning curve having to learn a new piece of software in a medium that you may not be too familiar with, but it’s worth the effort. The more you can do, the more marketable you make yourself.
I am personally pursuing all of these things. I don’t expect every single one of them to pan out or to be of equal value, but I figure by branching off into these several areas, I give myself a better shot at making a few bucks online with my music.
Now, how do I balance all this out? After all, this means doing quite a few different things all at once. Well, I make a schedule and I stick to it. Yeah, I know, easier said than done. Well, nobody said any of this was easy. But if you can learn to break up your day and devote a specific part of that day to a specific task, you’ll find that eventually, everything gets done. Overnight? Not likely. I am not even close to being finished with any of my projects. In fact, I project that it won’t be for another year before everything that I’m doing is in place. But once it is, that means several possible income streams instead of putting all my eggs into one basket and praying.
Anyway, it’s something to consider when planning out YOUR musical future.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim