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How to Make Money as a Musician!

We’ll teach you about every stream of revenue available to musicians!

First and foremost, make sure you have all of your music registered with a PRO. In order to receive the money you may be owed, all songs you’ve written must be registered with a PRO like BMI or ASCAP, and sound recordings must be registered with a service like SoundExchange. With these two steps taken care of, you will be able to earn royalties for your music.

Now that you’re able to earn money through royalties, the next best way to keep the cash flowing is to monetize your Youtube and social media videos. Every time your music is used in a video, whether on your channel or someone else’s, you’re entitled to any ad revenue generated.  Many digital distribution companies can help ensure you get the money you deserve.

With these sources bringing in your revenue, a more fun way of making money is playing gigs. While these may be few and far between during COVID, the world is beginning to open up again and you can finally get back to performing. You can find gigs through websites like ReverbNation Gig Finder. These events do tend to be more corporate, so finding local venues through networking is just as important. If you plan on sending emails to different venues or industry professionals, an Electronic Press Kit will be extremely helpful. You can create an EPK through Canva, Adobe Spark, and Shopify’s Press Kit Builder. An EPK will definitely boost your overall professional aura. For the time being, online concerts can also be profitable. If you haven’t read our post about online concerts, head there to learn about monetizing your music live streams.

Lastly, selling merchandise through an online shop can be both fun and profitable. If you aren’t ready to deal with ordering and shipping items yourself, a site such as Redbubble allows you to upload designs, then prints and ships for you when there’s an order. For bands who are ready to take a bigger step into merchandising, an online shop builder like Shopify allows you to create an online store; however, you will be in charge of making products and shipping them.

We hope you find these tips helpful, and let us know if you use any in the comments section!

Powderfinger Supports MusicCares Relief Fund for Musicians

In recent weeks, COVID-19 has devastated our music community, leaving thousands of music creators and professionals without work and an uncertain future.

But we have the power to help.

The Recording Academy® and its affiliated charitable foundation MusiCares® have established the COVID-19 Relief Fund to help our peers in the music community affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.

While the Recording Academy is best known for Music’s Biggest Night, the GRAMMY Awards Telecast, we serve the music community year round, by providing emergency aid through MusiCares, to the advocacy work we do to protect musicians’ rights.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE!

Please join us to help keep the music community alive and thriving, giving it as much as it gives us.

Community Radio Fights to Stay Live (and Weird) Despite Coronavirus

Community Radio is growing like crazy right now:  “Beth Arroyo Utterback, WWOZ’s general manager, can look at the server that feeds the station’s signal online and see that listenership has jumped globally in the past week from 32,000 to 40,000. That’s in addition to the 80,000 people stuck inside and tuning in locally via 90.7 FM, up from 70,000 according to a recent Nielsen study.”

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Important Takeaways From Taylor Swift’s Master Rights Predicament

Guest post by Scott McCormick of Disc Makers Blog

On November 14th, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift dropped a bomb on Twitter, saying:

It’s been announced recently that the American Music Awards will be honoring me with the Artist of the Decade Award at this year’s ceremony. I’ve been planning to perform a medley of my hits throughout the decade on the show. Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun have now said that I’m not allowed to perform my old songs on television because they claim that would be re-recording my music before I’m allowed to next year. Additionally … Netflix has created a documentary about my life for the past few years. Scott and Scooter have declined the use of my older music or performance footage for this project, even though there is no mention of either of them or Big Machine Records anywhere in the film.

This caused Twitter to melt down. Continue reading

Yes, There’s Now A Zillow For Song Royalties

If you own a home you most likely know about Zillow, a website that makes it easy to find out how much your house, and others in the neighborhood, is worth on the current open market. It’s great if you’re buying or selling a home, or just for fun to play a “What if” game or two. Now there’s something similar available for song royalties as well. Royalty Exchange has just launched its “Know Your Worth” app that collects many streams of information and makes your royalties easy to understand in a way that hasn’t been done before.

According to the company, “The app analyses songwriters’ public performance statements from their PRO, and automatically produces a personalized report with details that until now were unavailable from a single source.

This includes:

  • A dollar range estimate of the catalog’s fair market value
  • A full accounting of the lifetime and last 12 months earnings for the catalog provided
  • A list of the catalog’s top-earning songs
  • The catalog’s top sources of revenue by format (radio, streaming, TV/Film, etc.)
  • Year-over-year trending data for all earnings, top songs, and top formats

Finally, it provides the first-ever analysis of what each songwriter earns in public performance royalties on specific streaming services through a metric we call the “Latte Index”—or the number of streams on each service needed to buy a Starbucks Latte.”

While the app provides a good look at a catalog’s worth, it’s not all-encompassing, as it just looks at statements from ASCAP and BMI. If you have a foreign presence or are signed to SESAC, then you won’t know the full picture of the song or catalog’s worth. That said, Know Your Worth is a quick and easy way to at least get a feel for its value.

If you’re an aspiring songwriter, this app probably won’t mean much to you, but if you’ve had some success and you’re wondering about the value of your song catalog, the Know Your Worth app is a quick way to find out.

Read more: http://music3point0.com/2018/08/17/zillow-song-royalties/#ixzz5OqbZi7m5
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Primus Returns with Humor-Tinged Tales of Dark Cynicism on The Desaturating Seven

The twisted trio that is Primus lives up to its colorful reputation with their new ATO Records release, The Desaturating Seven. Comprised of Les Claypool, Larry LaLonde and Tim Alexandre, this will be Primus’ 9th studio album and will be released Sept. 29.

The Desaturating Seven continues Primus’ tradition of drawing inspiration from children’s stories, succeeding their 2014 album, Primus & the Chocolate Factory. Les Claypool shares that the inspiration for their new album was a bedtime story that he used to read to his kids: “Many years ago when my children were little kidlets scurrying around the place wreaking havoc and whatnot till it was time for bed and book time, my wife turned them on to a book called The Rainbow Goblins by Ul De Rico. The dark imagery and beauty of the art struck me immediately and I thought, ‘this would make good fodder for a piece of music.’” Continue reading

Music Industry vs. YouTube

The battle between the music industry and YouTube continues.

According to new data from RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), revenues from recorded music in the U.S. grew 11.4% in 2016 to 7.7 billion. Paid streaming music subscriptions (such as Spotify and Apple Music) have instigated the music business to encounter its biggest gain since 1998. Streaming platforms have generated a majority of U.S.’s music industry revenues.

However, according to Cary Sherman (chairman and CEO of RIAA), not all streaming services are able to recognize the value of music. This is especially important because physical CD sales and download sales are declining. The remaining pillar of sales in the music industry (music streaming) needs to be sufficient enough to compensate for the loss of CD sales and downloads.

YouTube has been at the forefront of not compensating artists fairly. In a recent essay, Sherman wrote:

“For example, it makes no sense that it takes a thousand on-demand streams of a song for creators to earn $1 on YouTube, while services like Apple and Spotify pay creators $7 or more for those same streams. Why does this happen? Because a platform like YouTube wrongly exploits legal loopholes to pay creators at rates well below the true value of music while other digital services — including many new and small innovators — cannot.”

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Google Introduces Way to Connect with People Searching For Your Music

Google is formulating a new feature that will make it easier for musicians to connect with people searching for their music.

The feature is called “Posts on Google”, which allows a verified musician (or business) to create a post that will appear directly to search results. Likewise, the post will appear first in the Google results. If fans are searching for a band on Google, they will be provided with verified and reliable information through this feature.

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The Daybreakers Rock New England

Back in June, rootsy blues-rock band The Daybreakers released their first full-length album. Since the release of the album, the group has been playing shows frequently within the New England area and getting airplay on radio stations across the country. We discussed the band’s passion for playing live gigs and the process of recording their LP with bass player, Matt Schairer.

You play both small pubs and crowds of 500 plus. Do you prefer the intimate gigs or the large ones?

The bigger the better for us. We are constantly striving to improve our reach and book bigger and better shows. The small intimate gigs are great as they provide the opportunity to showcase some different songs and subtleties, but the big shows are always the most exciting.

You’ve played many shows in New England. Do you have a favorite spot in the area to perform?

We have played the past three summers as an opener at Indian Ranch. That is always a great place to play. We have also had a lot of success at a local club in Franklin, MA called the Black Box. They have booked some big time acts in that room and we have had a fun time when we’ve had a chance to put a bill together there.

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