6 Proven Avenues for Musicians to Earn over $2,000 per month
If you’ve tried making money as a musician, you know how challenging it can be.
With all the competition, endless possibilities, and countless hours of procrastination, It’s hard to make an idea stick.
By the end of this post, you’ll have six proven methods for earning over $2,000 per month as a musician.
Note: These methods only scratch the surface of what’s possible and are not the limit.
Sell Your Beats
Before trying to sell your beats, you need to create them.
Once you’ve created a handful of beats, you can market and sell them.
Now, depending on the type of music and genre you frequent, the way you market can change slightly.
For example, if you make more lo-fi, you can attempt to get accepted on a site like Lofi Girl and expand your audience.
Afterward, you can start selling your beats on a separate site you own or a marketplace.
If you prefer a marketplace, a few places to try out would be:
Freelance Your Skills
Freelancing is when you sell your services in an online based format.
This is a great way to earn as a musician if you prefer to earn per job. It is also a good fit if you want to work with people more directly.
You can change your marketing accordingly depending on your skill of choice and experience. Once you’ve gained some much-needed experience, look for higher-paying clients.
You can achieve this by building a portfolio site or expanding your reach on freelancing sites.
Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, and Peopleperhour are some sites to mention.
Sell Your Sample Packs
A sample pack is, as it sounds, a collection of samples in a pack.
Like beat selling, before you can start marketing your sample packs, you need to create them.
However, before you start creating, Plan out your pack by choosing a theme, target niche, and realistic goal. Once your sample packs have been crafted, you can start selling.
How you market and sell them depends on whether you want to sell on a marketplace or an e-commerce site. If you prefer the e-commerce direction, you can try sites like Gumroad or Sellfy.
If you prefer a marketplace, you can try Splice or Beatstars.
Tip: If you’re afraid of a lawsuit try to avoid using another artist’s samples in your pack without permission.
Earn Royalties From Streaming
A royalty is a payment made to the uploaded track’s rights holder.
That includes everyone who worked on said track, like the songwriter or mixing engineer.
However, when I say streaming, I mean uploading your music to sites like Spotify and getting listeners.
Earning through streams is one of the most basic ways to earn as a musician. That’s because your primary occupation is making music; all streaming requires is you upload what you made.
If you use this method, use a music distribution service like Distrokid or CDBaby. These services make it easier to upload to multiple sites with nothing more than a small fee.
If you don’t want to use a distribution service, you can manually upload your music to sites like Spotify, Soundcloud, or Bandcamp.
Create a YouTube Channel
Let’s face it: it doesn’t need to be said how lucrative YouTube is.
However, something usually overlooked is how well you can promote your other income streams within the site.
If you’re selling beats or samples, you can link in the video description to boost your traffic and sales. Another bonus is creating some long-form content about the topic of your choice.
This could be a nice change of pace and can expand the type of content you offer.
Create and Sell Courses
Do you like the idea of teaching others?
If that’s the case, then a great source of income would be creating an online course. Creating a course can be lucrative since your teaching topics can be vast, and your marketing potential is high.
Once you’ve planned the course material and have a finished product, upload your course to wherever it fits your goals.
If you don’t want to build a fully-fledged site, upload to sites like Udemy and Skillshare.
This is the more accessible approach because of the existing audience within the sites
Conclusion
Now that you know these methods, does that mean you must use them?
No, if you don’t like these methods, that’s fine; there are plenty more.
Although, it would be wise to have more than one income stream built for more security.
Lastly, be patient. Nothing here will make you rich quickly, as all these ideas require work and time.
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