Need to receives a commission to your musical abilities? 

As a musician, there are extra methods to earn cash than ever earlier than. Dozens upon dozens of how, the truth is!

When you ought to, in fact, prioritize sure income streams as an artist who creates unique music, there are occasions — maybe while you’re first rising your profession —while you simply gotta pay the payments. 

And in that case, placing your music abilities to make use of positive beats a job outdoors of music, proper? Particularly if your musical side-hustle helps you keep sharp as an instrumentalist, arranger, producer, educator, or content-creator. 

That can assist you get a way of the big selection of choices on the market, I’ve put collectively an inventory of 75 methods you can also make cash out of your music, grouped by class for simple scanning.

Streaming & Digital Gross sales

1. Streaming Income: Earn cash from streaming exercise while you get your tracks onto platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, or TIDAL.

2. Digital Downloads: Promote MP3s, WAVs, or FLACs of your tracks on platforms like iTunes, Amazon, ReverbNation, Bandcamp, or your individual web site.

3. Social Video Monetization: Receives a commission when folks create social content material utilizing your music in movies on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Fb, and extra. 

4. Monetize Your YouTube Channel: Generate promoting income from viewer exercise by yourself YouTube movies, and use further creator instruments to monetize subscriber engagement.

Music Recording Work

5. Music Manufacturing: Put your producing abilities to work for different artists. Receives a commission in factors, upfront charges, co-writer splits, or no matter different association is smart for you and your collaborator. 

6. Engineering: Are you good at recording, mixing, or mastering? Let different artists know! This is usually a nice income between your individual recording initiatives or excursions. 

7. Session Participant: Obtained abilities as an instrumentalist or vocalist? Are you fast at studying and arranging tunes? Recording periods will be an effective way to receives a commission whereas not tying up an excessive amount of of your time without delay. You may attend periods in particular person, or do distant session work from your individual house studio.

8. Studio Operator: Do you personal loads of recording gear that goes unused while you’re not making music? Possibly it’s time to contemplate renting out your studio to different engineers, producers, and artists. 

9. Cellular Recording: Whether or not it’s vacation spot recording (“My band rented an airbnb and we need to flip it right into a studio”) or capturing reside audio for different bands at their reveals, generally having a conveyable studio could make all of the distinction in getting the job. 

Music Publishing & Licensing

10. Mechanical Royalties: Accumulate this type of publishing royalty when your unique songs — together with covers by different artists — get streamed, downloaded, or pressed on CD/vinyl.

11. Efficiency Royalties: Earn this music publishing cash when your unique music is carried out reside in venues or publicly broadcast on radio and TV.

12. Sync Licensing (Songwriter Aspect): When you write your individual songs and retain the publishing rights, you will get paid an upfront price — and in some circumstances, ongoing royalties — when your music is positioned in movie, TV, video games, commercials, and many others. 

13. Sync Licensing (Label Aspect): Similar goes for the “recording” facet of the equation. When you personal your individual tracks, you’re the label, and may receives a commission for sync placements.

14. Compose for Music Libraries: Prolific composer or producer? You would write music for music collections which might be particularly curated for sync licensing alternatives.  

15. Promote Sheet Music: The unique supply of “music publishing” income! Relying in your style, this is usually a massive vendor. (New Age Piano, anybody?) However don’t simply consider notation; you may additionally do chord-charts, tablature, lyric sheets, and extra.  

Reside Music Performances

16. Touring and Reside Reveals: Play reside and receives a commission. This income might come within the type of ticket gross sales, door splits, bar percentages, or a assured price from the venue proprietor. 

17. Residency Gig: Similar type of cost choices as above, however a residency is a recurrently scheduled factor. It could possibly be “7 nights in a row in July” or “Each different Thursday all 12 months.”

18. Home Concert events: Play intimate concert events in personal properties. These will be nice fan-building experiences and enable you promote loads of merch, whereas decreasing stress for large turnout. Plus it can save you on journey bills if the host places you up for the night time.  

19. DJing: When you’re not touring, you’ll be able to DJ occasions, events, or venues in your hometown. On the highway? Do a DJ set at a pageant or venue between your tour dates. 

20. Company Gigs: Need to receives a commission massive bucks whereas getting into The Twilight Zone? Play at a company operate. It’s surreal. And profitable.

21. Weddings and Non-public Occasions: Carry out at weddings, bar mitzvahs, anniversaries, household Christmas events, birthdays, and other forms of personal occasions. These can typically pay higher than an ordinary venue gig.

22. Metropolis or Municipal Occasions: The annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, the summer time beer backyard within the park, the Arts Stroll. Examine along with your native chamber of commerce or metropolis council for alternatives. 

23. Festivals: It’s nice to play music festivals, in fact, but in addition analysis non-music gatherings which have reside music as a element. Beer festivals. Balloon festivals. Meals festivals. 

24. Busking: Play in a public house with a number of foot site visitors for suggestions. Subway stations. City squares. Boardwalks and piers. Simply test the native ordinances first. Get a allow, if required.

25. Be within the Home Band: Much like a residency, the place you keep put and completely different audiences come to you, search out efficiency alternatives the place you back-up different singers. May very well be live-band karaoke, an enormous band or jazz group, and many others.

26. Play Cruise Ships: When you don’t thoughts small rooms and lots of months at sea, cruise ship gigs provide you with an opportunity to play quite a bit (generally a number of gigs per day), and supply downtime to concentrate on apply, recording, studying, and many others. 

27. Nursing Properties: Whereas these aren’t glamorous gigs, they are often very significant for the viewers and also you because the performer. They will pay effectively, are often shorter units, and have the potential to turn out to be reliable repeat gigs. 

28. Digital Performances: Need to mix the unique and intimate feeling of a home live performance with the comfort of livestreaming? Play a personal, digital efficiency on Zoom, Google Hangouts, and many others.  

Music Merch Gross sales

29. Artist Merchandize: Promote merch at gigs, in your web site, and on platforms like Instagram and Spotify. Objects might vary from t-shirts to mugs to books. 

30. Bodily Music Codecs: Regardless of what you will have heard, followers nonetheless buy CDs, vinyl data, and even cassettes. Provide them in all the identical locations you’ll your merch, in addition to in file shops through bodily distribution or consignment. 

31. Restricted-Version Releases: Provide limited-edition or signed bodily copies of your music to followers. As an illustration, you may promote tour-specific recordings that may by no means once more be accessible to buy.

32. Digital merch: Not all merchandise must be bodily. You may supply PDFs of your tour diary or poetry. A digital cookbook. An unlock of a secret video. 

33. Digital “Field Set”: Similar goes for music recordsdata. You might have a trove of unreleased recordings. Give followers paid entry! Or bundle every thing you’ve ever recorded right into a digital package deal with bonus tracks. 

34. NFTs: “Non-Fungible Tokens.” These are crypto property on a blockchain that symbolize possession or engagement in some piece of music, imagery, neighborhood, paintings, or monetary association. 

Music Schooling

35. Train Music: Whether or not it’s personal classes or a teleconference tutorial, you’ll be able to assist different folks get higher at an instrument, music manufacturing, or songwriting. 

36. Music Remedy: Put your abilities to make use of in a therapeutic means that helps folks enhance their well-being.

37. On-line Programs: Create and promote a digital course. It could possibly be about your instrument, or your music-biz and promo abilities. A number of upfront work, however with the potential for it to turn out to be extra “passive” earnings as soon as your advertising and marketing funnel is up and operating. 

38. Music Workshops: Host IRL or on-line neighborhood gatherings the place studying and suggestions occurs in a bunch setting. 

39. Visitor Lectures: Communicate at colleges, schools, or music seminars. These are sometimes paid alternatives, however even in the event you’re an unpaid speaker at a music convention, it’s best to have the possibility to make a fast gross sales pitch on the finish of your discuss or promote books afterwards. 

40. Music Transcription: Are you good at determining complicated harmonies, blistering bluegrass breaks, or well-known saxophone solos? You would earn cash transcribing that music note-for-note. It may be work-for-hire earnings, or you may publish these transcriptions in a e book. Or on YouTube (with the opportunity of incomes advert income). 

Crowdfunding & Fan Assist

41. Undertaking-Primarily based Crowdfunding: Use platforms like Kickstarter or GoFundMe to lift cash from followers to help a selected recording, tour, advertising and marketing, or video mission. 

42. Membership Golf equipment: You need to use a subscription-model platform like Patreon, or construct your individual on-line fan subscription via your web site. In alternate for month-to-month cost, followers get unique or early entry to content material and different perks. 

43. Fan Donations: Settle for donations immediately from followers via platforms like PayPal or Venmo. These hyperlinks will be listed in your web site, livestreams, and even pinned to the highest of your Spotify profile. 

44. Livestream Assist: That is income followers provide you with for livestreaming. However not like the Venmo or PayPal suggestions talked about above, it could actually come within the type of a platform-specific foreign money or motion: Stars, Bits, Subs, and many others. 

45. VIP Experiences: Provide your diehard followers the possibility to pay for an unique expertise. Backstage passes, meet-and-greets, watch the soundchecks, dinner earlier than the present, photographs and autographs. 

Music Composition

46. Songwriting for Different Artists: When you’re a prolific author, you will have concepts to spare! Pitch your unreleased songs to different artists, publishers, or labels. Or collaborate with co-writers to make new songs. Repeatable success on this space takes loads of dedication, however might result in a publishing deal. 

47. Write Jingles: Ya know, the catchy (and generally annoying) music that performs throughout commercials? There’s cash to be made the place artwork meets promoting. 

48. Movie Scoring: Compose music for movies, TV reveals, and documentaries. Like many areas of specialization, this discipline can require loads of time and dedication. Take into account accordingly how typically and while you need to settle for scoring work.

49. Video Sport Music: In principle, this isn’t that completely different from movie scoring. Besides that gaming has its personal musical tropes, so the reference factors could differ from cinematic orchestration and sound design. Many video video games additionally function songs that turn out to be a part of the sport’s soundtrack, which refers again to sync licensing. Lastly, there’s a entire huge ecosystem of VGM covers on YouTube, the place artists do their very own inventive preparations of fashionable online game music. So in the event you play a singular instrument, this would possibly provide you with a option to differentiate your self: Halo on accordion, Ultimate Fantasy on steel guitar, Zelda on harmonica, Mario Bros on banjo.  

50. Promote Beats and Pattern Packs: Are you a prolific producer in a style that depends closely on digital music, equivalent to hip-hop, pop, or EDM? You may assist different artists get an enormous musical help by promoting your beats, production-starts, and pattern packs. 

51. Write Customized Songs: Let your followers know you’ll compose and file customized songs for particular events like weddings or birthdays. Simply make sure to cost sufficient to your precise effort and time!

52. Sound Design and Audio Branding: Create “audio logos” and “sound identities” for companies. Or use your manufacturing abilities to make sound results and audio environments for media, public areas, or different commissioned initiatives.

Retail & Venue Work

53. Report Retailer: Gig at night time and work at a file retailer throughout the day. You’ll keep on high of the newest music releases, as effectively brush up on the classics.

54. Music Retail: Slightly be close to devices? Work at a music retailer and develop your experience within the newest gear, used instrument valuation, and extra. 

55. Making or Repairing Devices: Good at fixing guitars? Carving violins? Soldering results pedals or synths? You would begin your individual enterprise or work out of an present store or retailer.

56. Expertise Purchaser: Already in communication with a big community of proficient musicians? Put these social and group abilities to make use of reserving the acts at a neighborhood venue. 

57. Venue Workers: Favor extra of the “on the bottom” venue expertise? You would be a bartender, bouncer, field workplace assistant, or venue supervisor. 

58. Reside Sound Engineer: Each good venue wants good reside sound. You would be the important thing to creating that occur. Bonus factors in the event you’re not a grump!

Different Music Professions

59. Music Journalism: Write present previews, album opinions, function interviews, and extra. It’s possible you’ll discover a chance to do that as a side-gig to your native newspaper or arts weekly. 

60. Musicology, Criticism, Editorial, and Curation: Put your deep data and keenness for a selected style to make use of. Train others about that historical past. Or make music suggestions and thrilling connections for listeners. 

61. Member of an Orchestra: Jazz, Classical, Ballet, or the pit-orchestra for Musical Theater. When you’ve got nice technical facility in your instrument and reliable sight-reading abilities, you may make a residing in a big ensemble.

62. Non secular Music: Whether or not it’s the organist in a cathedral, the guitarist in a praise-and-worship band, the cantor at a temple,… many religions have music as a part of their common service. 

63. Voice Expertise: When you’ve got singing voice, you would possibly be capable of translate these dramatic abilities to offer voiceovers, audiobook readings, or character voices. 

Model Collaborations

64. Model Sponsorships: Accomplice up with some firm who shares your values and aesthetic, and receives a commission while you rep their merchandise, companies, or mission. 

65. Endorsements: Get discounted (or generally free) services and products equivalent to devices, music advertising and marketing instruments, or music manufacturing software program. In alternate, you agree to make use of that gear in public and supply testimonials.

66. Affiliate Advertising: Promote a sure product in your web site, do gear opinions, and hyperlink to the producer or retailer, and earn a fee on any gross sales. 

67. Be an Influencer: “Influencer Advertising?” Simpler stated than accomplished, however… if in case you have a big social following, you could possibly monetize that spotlight by doing product placements or promo shoutouts. 

Miscellaneous

68. Books, eBooks, & Audiobooks: I suppose this might go beneath the “merch” part, however that’s extra concerning the remaining product and gross sales. Changing into an creator is an endeavor all its personal, in fact. However in the event you already show a knack for lyric-writing, you will have longer-form literary expertise too. It could possibly be fiction, non-fiction about musicology, essays about band drama and tour mishaps, and even written instrument instruction with accompanying illustrations.

69. Music Running a blog: I discussed above that you may write opinions for an present publication, however you may additionally host opinions by yourself website within the hopes of monetizing your weblog via advert placements and affiliate income. 

70. Podcasting: Begin a podcast about your music, adventures, or different pursuits. When you get ample engagement, you’ll be able to monetize via advertisements, sponsorships, or listener help. 

71. Competitions: These could possibly be rap battles, songwriting challenges, bluegrass competitions. There could also be an entry price, however that additionally means there could possibly be an enormous payout in the event you win. 

72. Interactive Music Experiences: When you’ve got combined media or web-development abilities, you may create an immersive real-world or digital expertise. Emma McGann’s multi-player “Monsterverse” RPG in Discord is a good instance. You may ask your followers to pay to take part, or you should utilize it as an opportunity to drive merch gross sales on the finish of the expertise.

73. Consulting Companies: Musicians need assistance, stable recommendation, and networking connections. Are you able to mentor somebody in administration, crowdfunding, digital promoting, or one thing else? Present that technique recommendation in alternate for a price.

74. Open-Supply Collaboration: That is while you make some inventive work accessible for others to make use of, with out a clear concept of who will collaborate, or what precisely will outcome. Making stems downloadable for remixers is an apparent instance. You may approve your favourite remixes and formally distribute these tracks, splitting any income the remix generates. However artists like Holly Herndon and Grimes took it one step additional with AI fashions of their vocals. 

75. __________: Sure, a clean house, as a result of if there are 75 gadgets on this record already, there’s sure to be many extra methods to earn cash out of your musical abilities. And I needed to depart room so that you can think about your individual prospects. Have enjoyable!

Conclusion

Most musicians won’t ever deal with each merchandise on this record, and that’s fully nice. They shouldn’t. All of us have our personal specialties and pursuits. Finest to concentrate on what’s rewarding, each by way of private progress and revenue.

However hopefully this lengthy record provides you an summary of your choices as you make a profession of your music, and as you complement your major music earnings sources with further income streams.