How to make money as a music producer online

Today, more and more people are starting to work as independent professionals who don’t have a permanent employer. Music producers are no exception, and there are many ways to earn money and feel more free and independent. That’s why we’re going to tell you about several areas in which a producer can develop to earn a decent income. We would also like to emphasize that his work will actually be carried out online, and today most services are available online, so no problem, let’s move on.

How to make money in the music industry

If you start analyzing the market and think about it a bit, you’ll realize that a music producer’s knowledge can perform a wide range of tasks if you do some preparation and adapt your knowledge to each specific task. In short, this does not mean that a producer can only produce. Specialists earn a lot of money only from consulting because experience has a very high value. We will talk about this a little later. We hope you understand the idea. Let’s get down to the business areas where you can make decent money.

How to make money from music production

First, of course, let’s look at the work that a music producer usually does – creating music. It’s a common thing – a producer works in a studio (either his own or a rented one) and is busy recording, arranging, mixing music, and other related tasks. This is a classic producer’s job, meaning that he or she can work for the studio owner as an employee or as an individual specialist.

It all depends on the experience they have. As a rule, young producers start working in a studio as an employee and receive a fee for their work. As they acquire more skills and experience, they start getting paid more money. Some continue to build their careers and receive high fees, while others want to start their own business and provide production services on their own behalf, so they plan their business and raise their own capital.

How to make money selling your music or songs

If you produce music under your own name, it’s likely that all or part of your music is released on a record label. Of course, labels pay royalties from the sales of your music, but this is usually a small amount of money. Only if you are a well-known music producer can you get a good income from sales. Otherwise, it can be recommended as a way of additional promotion and gaining a certain status. After all, it’s a high mark when the best labels publish your music and distribute it through their sales and marketing channels. Even if you don’t get high percentages from music sales, your growing popularity can lead to invitations to festivals and high fees for concerts on the big stage.

Today, there are many platforms and services where an artist can publish their music and merchandise, and the platform’s employees are engaged in making sure that more and more people visit it. Accordingly, you will receive a much larger portion of the proceeds from sales. Also, musicians now have the opportunity to conveniently and affordably release music on vinyl discs or cassettes, and these media are gaining popularity again. For example, Bandcamp allows you to sell all your physical goods and make good money on it. Do not forget about your own website, which belongs only to you, and only you decide how much income you will receive from the online store you host on it.

How to sell jingles, music, and beats on audio stocks

For quite some time now, there have been stock stores on the market where music producers publish their instrumental tracks or jingles for radio, podcasts, or video screensavers. Such sites are very popular, but over time, they have become highly competitive. In the past, you could register, create a profile, add your tracks, optimize keywords, and earn a good income. And if you increased the number of tracks you added, your income grew as well. Now it’s getting harder to do this. The algorithms of the platforms are constantly changing, and moderation of tracks can take not just a few days, but possibly weeks. You have to write even more music to reach a larger audience. As a main income, stock platforms are not a good idea, but if you work hard and do good preparatory work, it is quite possible to earn good money.

How to sell your songs or tracks to artists

There is one way to make a decent living from creating music – ghost producing. Let us tell you more about this method. We can divide this method into two areas: it’s an algorithm similar to regular custom production: a musician or any other person hires you, explains to you what they want to hear when the work is completed, and the producer gets down to business. Another direction is creating tracks and adding them to so-called ghost producers’ platforms, where they will be sold as a finished product in an online store. That is, when a DJ or artist visits such a site, he starts listening to tracks until he hears one he likes. He adds it to the cart, pays for it, and downloads the finished track, which was previously created by a ghost producer. That is the customer and the artist have no contact at all.

The advantage of this method is that the producer decides what kind of music to create and what should be in the final version of the track. The more diverse and high-quality music he creates and uploads to the platform, the more money he can earn. It’s quite an attractive business because a music producer plans his own day and controls his work. If you, as a producer, are interested in this way of earning money, we are always happy to cooperate with new producers, so check out our offer to become a ghost producer and start making money doing what you love.

If you want to find out more we have written a separate article about the potential income of ghost producers can expect, read it, and evaluate the opportunities that can be gained from cooperation. To get more information read our article about how to become a ghost producer.

How to make money selling sample packs

Another way to earn extra money is to create sample packs. You need to study the market well and understand what samples are in demand and what is important to the buyer. If you create your own product and make the same mistakes as others, your sample packs will be no different and you will not have the desired success. Therefore, pay attention to the fact that you need to do good preparatory work and you will have a good chance to make money in this business.

Many producers simply synthesize sounds through virtual instruments, and there are a lot of competitors. If you can arrange with people who have live instruments, prepare sounds, and melodies for loops, and record and process these samples, the quality of your sample packs will be several times better than others. In any case, evaluate your capabilities and the market demand, and only then decide whether you will be interested in doing this and what potential you have to earn extra money from it.

Additional income from donations

To make money from donations, you need to have a large base of followers and fans. In addition, you have to give them such interesting content or other value that they want to send you a donation or even work on it on a regular basis. If you create a plan and offer to prepare interesting and useful content for your subscribers on a regular basis, you can create a page on Patreon, for example, and offer people to subscribe. In this case, you will receive a steady income from subscriptions every month, but you need to make sure that people like what they get in return for their subscription.

How to make money by monetizing your YouTube channel

Music producers can share useful life hacks with their subscribers, show the process of music creation, and other useful and entertaining information. If it is well received by the audience and views grow, you can earn several thousand dollars a month by monetizing your own channel, and you can additionally use the opportunity to make donations on live broadcasts and add links to other paid products in the description. Believe me, if you work hard on the quality of your content, you can earn as much as a music producer in a studio with your own YouTube channel. Pay attention to this method if you like to share information with people and bring benefits. People will definitely appreciate it.

Can a music producer be a freelancer and earn money?

The freelance market is so large that any music producer of any level can make money here, both beginners and professionals. This method is similar to working on audio stocks in that it requires preparation: analyzing competitors on the platform and creating your own offer to stand out among the huge number of competitors.

Most of the time, clients look for specialists on freelance sites because they want to save money, and there are often clients with whom it is very difficult to find a common language. Therefore, freelance work can be exhausting, and finding an order will take more time than fulfilling it. With experience, the situation can level out and a freelance producer will feel his or her own wave and be able to earn good money, so this method can be recommended for beginner producers.

How can you make money from consulting?

Above, we mentioned monetizing the experience of a music producer through consulting. If a specialist has many years of experience and is good at what he does, sometimes he doesn’t always need to be directly involved in the process of working on music. He can provide professional advice to individual specialists, and prepare recommendations and tips for them on how to work on a track or song. In addition, he can be a curator of the whole process. The more experience a producer has, the more expensive an hour of his work is.

By the way, we could also include mentoring here. For a certain period of time, an experienced specialist could be a mentor for younger producers and receive a decent fee for this, especially if he was invited to work with a well-known school.

Quite often, large and well-known recording studios have their own school where they train future professionals for the music industry. For example, such studios as Abbey Road are interested in having top-level professionals as teachers, mentors, and tutors.

Music producers who have already achieved significant achievements in their lives are beginning to think about fulfilling a certain social mission, i.e. passing on their knowledge and experience to the next generation.

Where do musicians make most of their money?

The biggest fees are paid to well-known producers with extensive experience and a good reputation. These are the people who work in large and well-known studios, who work with the most popular artists in the world. If we take it down a notch and make it more realistic for most people, we still wanted to highlight ghost production. Many artists don’t know how to write their own music, and they need it to build a career. Therefore, there will be a demand for this service and the value of writing tracks for famous artists is quite high. If you create a large number of tracks in a variety of genres, you will be able to earn good money as a producer, and if you use other ways of earning money, a music producer will be able to buy a great car, a house, and better equipment to improve the quality and productivity of work. It’s up to you to decide how to build your business.