5 Ways to Make Money Online As a Musician Revealed:
Nowadays there are a ton of different ways for musicians to make money online, so many in fact that if you are a musician you will likely find that you have so many multiple streams coming in that it’s hard to keep track. Tax time is not particularly easy for me. But I’m not going to complain about that. This article will pinpoint 5 ways to make money online as a musician so that you can easily focus on your efforts and not worry too much about all of the ways possible and instead just look at a few of the ways, the others will come naturally. If you already make money as a performer more power to you, if you don’t and you strictly want to make money online, you’ll likely be very surprised with how much money musicians are actually making these days.
With the changes over the years the term starving artist barely applies anymore…for some musicians anyway. It isn’t perfect by any means for everyone, most won’t get rich necessarily…but anything is possible I suppose depending on your audience and your efforts.
Top 5 Ways:
YouTube – YouTube has become largely one of the best ways for artists to not only attract a larger audience, but to make money from that audience as well. Not only can you make money as a partner of YouTube and get part of the ad revenue from visitors, but you can join programs like CDBaby or Tunecore and get paid every time people use your music in their videos.
They use a tracking system that recognizes your sound, how cool is that? I’ve been paid quite a bit from CDBaby/Rumblefish because of this partnership, it’s actually been one of my biggest revenues. So it’s a win-win, people use your music either with or without your permission, and you get paid. You no longer will have to worry about who is using your music (likely illegally), because you are going to get the money for the use either way. True…getting the credit for it is really nice, but I have found there are still quite a few people out there that ask for my permission before they use it. And if they do, I ask for a link back to my website 😉
iTunes – Obviously getting your music into the marketplace is essential. Using CDBaby or Tunecore as the gateway to getting your music on iTunes is a definite must. After that you can promote it yourself and drive traffic to increase your sales on iTunes, plus often times people will just stumble upon you while looking for other music and discover you. To increase your chances you can create iMixes and add a few of your own songs to the playlist as well as some other artists (a good ratio is 3 of your songs, and maybe 9 from other artists) – this can help you get your music on their pages! Be sure to rate your own playlist and add a review (maybe have a few friends do that too – the more activity to your playlist, the higher it will rank.)
Amazon – We all know Amazon is HUGE. The biggest marketplace online there is, but did you know it has become one of the top search engines too? It can work the same way as iTunes does in fact with reviews and ratings and being found next to artists that sound similar to you. So in essence, it can be a huge source of traffic to your music. It’s also a really easy way to set up a store and sell your own music from your website.
Affiliate – You wanted to make money from your own music, but did you know that you can make money from other people’s music too? As an affiliate of iTunes or even Amazon? Be being an affiliate you get a portion of any sale that happens through your affiliate link. And yes, you can have an affiliate link for your own music as well and get a little bit extra per sale that way. It’s a great way to support other artists that you like while helping you pay your own bills.
Fiverr – If you haven’t yet heard of Fiverr, where have you been? I admit, I was probably the last person to hear of it…or maybe I’d heard of it and just let it slide and escape my brain, but I’m using it now…not for music, but you could. A lot of musicians are leveraging Fiverr by creating music or jingles on the fly for people, and I know what you are thinking, $5?! Come one, but actually there is a large amount of upsells on Fiverr, so one job can typically end up paying you more than that. It can be fun and interesting too and you can get pretty creative, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, why not?
Okay, I hope those 5 ways of making money online as a musician were helpful to you. As I said, there are a ton of other ways, but I believe these have the biggest potential and are the easiest to get started with. Also, as I mentioned above that other ways would come naturally, when you sign-up with CDBaby or Tunecore you will find the plethora of other revenue generating websites that you can be a part of. Oh, and don’t forget Pandora!!!
Please feel free to leave comments below on your thoughts and ideas 🙂
Oh and if you want to learn other ways to market your music online, read my review of this place that can teach you for free.
Thanks!
Kat – OnlineStayatHomeJobs.com
