Leveraging New Technology and Online Platforms to Reach Your True Fans, Make Money Online, and Earn Extra Income as a Musician
How should I sell my music? Where can I distribute my recordings? How else can I make money as a musician? How can I find my true fans? Should I teach online? Should I write books? What platforms and websites in web 3.0 should a musician know about?
Do you want to know…
- How you can access your music, your musical experiences, and your knowledge of musical styles, gear, musicianship, and more to create additional revenue streams?
- What approach is useful when accessing new technologies, media, and outlets for your music?
- How to create content that develops passive income strategies for musicians and other creatives?
- What secret weapons musicians already possess that makes the web the perfect place to earn money?
- What ways you can expand and develop your online presence that can both simplify and also maximize your offline activities as a musician and creative person?
- What music fans can teach us about being better musicians?
On some level, perhaps we all want to just create for a living. Even if you're not a composer or songwriter/lyricist who writes original music, you might just want to create superb performances and amazing recordings. Or you might simply want a fair and comfortable wage for your work and your playing - and for all the years of preparation and practice, and for your experience.
Unfortunately, this isn't always possible. Musicians - of all backgrounds - too often struggle to survive…
Maybe it's your region? Where you live there may not seem to be enough performance opportunities and music teaching gigs for your instrument, your particular style, your musical genre, for the given amount of musicians in that area.
So what can you do?
Should you just move to New York? Move to Los Angeles? Maybe Nashville, Chicago, Seattle, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai, or Buenos Aires? Perhaps. And it sounds like fun… But maybe you already live in one of those great places, and you still struggle to create a full, sustainable musical life.
Musicians in the Global Marketplace
Years ago, I attended a workshop given by the German avant-garde vibraphonist and composer Karl Berger where he said he followed this simple model of musician survival: with nearly 7 billion people in the world, he would be happy to find ways to get 5,000 people to give him $10 each year!
That's it -- simple math.
Sell them a recording, a concert ticket, a workshop, a book, anything…
Of course, once you can do this consistently and make that living wage of $50K, you're totally free to create your music and live your musical life any way that you choose. But how do you find those 5,000 people? How do you connect with them? How can you bring in diversified revenue streams that don't require your fans, followers, listeners, and 'clients' to become over-saturated with relentless sales of your latest project?
