How To Make Money From Your Music
KEY POINTS
- Build Your Music Catalog: Consistently create and expand your collection of music to ensure you always have fresh material to offer fans and potential buyers.
- Record High-Quality Demos: Invest in producing high-quality demos to make a professional impression on agents, producers, and record labels.
- Value and Maximize Your Music Catalog: Assess the value of your music catalog based on past sales and potential future earnings, and explore ways to enhance its worth through licensing, live performances, and other revenue streams.
The world is an expensive place, and it’s highly likely that, unless you’ve got a great job and/or very few outgoings, you’re going to need to make some extra money from time to time (or most of the time) just to get by.
Although that might not be a great situation, rest assured you’re definitely not alone, and the great thing is that there are loads of different ways to make that extra cash. One thing to look for is if you’ve got any hobbies or particular skills that could be used to make money, and music is one that could be very lucrative indeed.
With digital streaming platforms being so popular and accessible to everyone, it’s possible to make music and actually make money from it – how much depends on a lot of factors, of course. It’s hard to know where to start though, so with that in mind, here are some ideas for when you want to know how to make money from your music.
Build Your Music Catalog
If you really want to make money from your music, you’ll need a decent amount of work to sell – the last thing you want is to gain some interest for one or two of your songs and then have to make people wait for more – they’ll get bored of waiting, and even if they do stick around and keep up with what you’re doing, you’re missing out on revenue by not having a lot of music to give (or rather sell!) them.
So the first thing you’ll need to do is a lot of writing. That might not seem like something that’s possible to do, especially when you’re busy, but if you can get into the habit of setting aside a little time each day, you’ll soon start to get into a routine, which is incredibly helpful.
You might even take the opportunity to experiment with different styles and genres because you just never know what’s going to work for you and what’s going to appeal to your audience.
It’s also a good idea to invest in recording some high-quality demos because then you can send your music to agents and producers and ensure they can hear it at its very best. It would be awful if your demo was poor quality and didn’t put your music across in the right way; you could be turned down even though in real life the music is excellent.
You need to give yourself the best chance possible; a good-quality demo is the answer.
Value Your Catalog
So once you’ve got a nice amount of music in your catalog, the next step is to value it. One thing you’ll need to think about when you consider a music catalog valuation is your track record of sales because it stands to reason that the more successful you’ve been in the past, the more valuable your entire music catalog will be – a buyer is going to be a lot more interested in spending their money on it if they know people want to buy your songs.
The other part of valuing a music catalog is to consider the potential future sales. Of course, that’s always going to be an estimate, but it can be helpful to work out anyway, and it’s going to help work out the total valuation.
In the future there could be licensing deals, for example, or collaborations, and if that’s something you’re interested in pursuing, it’s something that should be factored into the cost. In most cases, it’s best to get experts to value your music catalog for you; then, you’ll know it’s accurate, and any buyers will be more confident, too.
Maximize The Value
If you get the value of your music catalog and it’s less than you would have liked, you’ll have a couple of options (assuming you’re hoping to sell). One is to sell it as it is, and just take the money your music catalog is worth right now.
The other is to try to boost your catalog’s value as much as possible to make more money. It’s really going to depend on how much time you’ve got (if you need money quickly, selling sooner rather than later might be better) and how much effort you’re willing to put in, but you might be able to really turn things around.
We’ve mentioned licensing above, and that’s definitely one option, but so is live music and touring, merchandise, and looking at alternative streaming platforms. It’s worth at least a look at what your options might be just in case you’ve got the chance to do more.
