How to make money from music.

[Stamped Records]

I know this is the million dollar question and to dispel some of the sarcasm let's just pretend that I already believe I can produce awesome music.

What are the best options and/or places to online if I want the music I make to get maximum exposure from people wanting royalty free stock music, generic music for advertising, instrumentals for movies and so on.....

Thanks in advance.

[Stamped Records]

I know this is the million dollar question and to dispel some of the sarcasm let's just pretend that I already believe I can produce awesome music.

What are the best options and/or places to online if I want the music I make to get maximum exposure from people wanting royalty free stock music, generic music for advertising, instrumentals for movies and so on.....

Thanks in advance.

[Stamped Records]

Double post.

[vurt]

you don't want to hear this, but...
if i was young, and interested in making money from music in the slightest, id be working my balls off to build a pootube channel
stock music is becoming a more difficult thing to sell, as there are tools now, that can knock out a simple piece with little to no effort. which means a lot of indie producers, will do their own, with others choosing someone else to do it, if they're a bit more "pro thinking" looking for something a bit more tuneful.
so the market is split
then you have to contend with the people who, like you, make awesome music, but they just put it out on cc licences, free to use, with naught but a credit

wags had a thread here a while back in this forum (ee) about stock and library music, there's a few companies you can look at in that, and maybe read what wags went through.
you may want to think of other ways after that.

playing live and building a following is your best bet, at least it's fun even if you don't make any money.

[Passing Bye]

vurt nailed it!

[jancivil]

I think vurt has nailed it with the youtube channel comment.
Stock music was bound to lose to automation, the first thing to go because of the generic sort of goal of that whole thing.
I'd say to make money with music, the olden days or now has to be approached as a fulltime job on top of the job of being a musician and making something to sell. So there are people with those chops. I don't feature myself as one of them dispositionally.

the competition for a gig where someone is just a hired gun musically, eg., film scoring, is quite stiff and your chops necessarily seriously developed to have an entry point at all, and then you have to know someone, are in LA or whatever center and getting out there, chipping away, working for people in the various ways that inform that skillset. Grassroots planting, nothing top down.

[jancivil]

for me a great example of why I can't feature myself as a professional film composer is John Williams' work in the Star Wars flicks.
director has a temp score for about everything, over time is pretty married to the temp score and the composer is for example rewriting Stravinsky with not really any choice in the matter. Not only are you able to cop Stravinsky and not sound like a total hack, you are required to 100% derive from the model for this kind of thing, which is actually more the norm than not; because it's a job/you're just an employee.

But it's taking direction, one should be a more well-rounded person than I to do that as well as that appears to require.
I've worked but establishing relationships with trust is a whole other thing than ability to perform.

The other side of this is there are people who are better oriented to business than say to care deeply about making *their* music, and they are (willing and) able to do hack work and do it long enough hours to consistently have product. for the stock libraries and that model.

I started with a naive notion of being a performing seal worth seeing onstage to the extent of paying for a ticket.
This entails being either the best there is, or you're just competitive enough while providing the audience with an engaging person, charisma and beauty. Even the not as cute ones have the charisma, or aren't looking like creeps.

[dayjob]

music sync royalties. networking. luck.

if you're a performer.. play live often. do small regional tours. cultivate a following. release music.

build relationships w/industry people so they call you when they need music. or when they need someone to play a gig etc.

basically.. you need to hustle a lot.

[BertKoor]

This is the only method I'm confident of to bring some money on the table:

I'm very successful in the music industry, already have been for many many years.
I work with big names, so big I can't name them.
I'll tell you all the trade secrets if you pay me just over what you were willing to pay.

Have not tried it, cannot recommend it. But low lifes like that do exist. Don't buy it! All scams.

I conclude there's no money to be made in music, except for the lucky few that had a lucky break because they bumped into someone that knew someone.

So it's the same as football. A bit of talent is worth nothing.

[cryophonik]

I honestly have no idea how to make money with music in the current market. I stopped caring about making money from music when I gave up live gigging 20-some years ago and have since just focused on making music in my studio for my own personal pleasure. However, I do know how to make money in photography, since that's my main hobby/second income/future retirement gig. I think vurt's advice also applies here, but with an emphasis on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, in addition to YouTube. It's a constant hustle to get it going, then maintaining a constant presence to keep up the momentum and to stay relevant. Personally, I hate TikTok and, as such, haven't really made the best use of it, but it is the latest/hottest social media platform, which means that now is the perfect time to figure out if/how you can use it to your advantage for promoting your music, directing people to your website, YouTube channel, etc. It's incredibly popular, mostly with the younger generations, so it's a good way to gain exposure, but I'm just not sure how you'd target potential clients or connections in the music industry.

Many of the models that I shoot with are in the modeling and acting industry in LA and SF and some of them are pretty much abandoning Instagram and YouTube in favor of TikTok to get noticed. There are a lot of videographers and independent film producers there as well, so I've been hearing, so that might be an area you'd want to target??? Anyway, this is all just food for thought. Good luck!

[funky lime]

flip/make/repair gear, teach lessons, gig, sell merch, have rich parents