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Other Creative Sources of Income

So if you get a more sizable audience so let's say you're even bigger band you can start doing things like charging for appearances, license your persona, act in tv, commercial speaking events and get honorarium for that these types of things become within reach and you need to be aware of it because now your business person and you hit that certain level well, this opens up a whole another realm of possibilities that you can touch on right. In fact, artists that have tapped into their fan bases for other sources of income that actually is within reach even is a medium size group. Jonathan colton who's somebody we talked about earlier actually started to make a cruise vacation gets a certain cut of like all the people doing the cruise but then they do the crews so that he can perform for them and they could hang out with him and there's a group of very committed fans that do that they have the money and it's actually enough of a source of income from him to dr things it's great and bro...

ad noggin bars she brought up multiple times they do ireland tours and they were able to basically tour ireland for free because their fans wanted to hang out with them. These things become possible because your fans love you at that point couple more how to make money from your skills as a musician well, we had questions about this at one point, which was how do I become a session player? So we have some slides on that that could help you out. You basically make money by playing on recordings. It's usually work for hire arrangement, so you're not composing music for other people. You're just showing up in order to record apart for somebody, right? The main thing is if you can get hooked up to your local studios, you actually could do very well with this. Because if they recommend you like I need a bass player there a bass player, then they put you on the list. You might get regular work out of it before you get to know those studio owners, the better advertise their services at local music stores to these tend to work really well with any place that musicians hangout actually was pretty good. And of course, you can start using the thing we talked about earlier having cute q our codes of your sample music and then people can actually check you out. It's not just a dead piece of paper sitting there, not all recording is local. You can record on the internet so there's things like session players dot com, which is great from the other point of view, if you have a recording and you need to find a didgeridoo player and there aren't any locally you can get a didgeridoo player you could get some replaced the kodo you could get somebody who plays the tabla or whatever it is that you're looking for it's out there session players on the other side of the house will let you audition for them and actually do your services on it it's very easy they ship the tracks through the internet and then you record your track at some local studio and they'll connect via skype and listen in and make suggestions and then after this is all said and done uh they'll just ship the tracks back and now they have the recorded track and they pay for a session. So this is this is gone really all over the place and it's really open things up, you could also make money is a gigging musician basically any artists that's out there and looking for I've done this before myself I'm just a sax player and you give me some sheet music and I'll show up with whatever of my four sacks is that you want me to bring out and I'll fill in on any chair that you want me to fill in just start playing sex for hire you need toe charge by the hour or flat rate whatever it is usually work for hire arrangements the key thing here is that you need to connect with local musician communities and stores and recording studios and other places where they're looking for people like this. Our band actually found our drummer by posting it, added our local store, the drum pad, which is a drumming it's, a store it's in the region. I think it's, one of the top drum stores on all these cells, drum so there's a lot of ads that go up there. You'd be surprised how easy it is to connect there's online communities where you could just meet with other musicians. J p folks, just plain folks, totally free, we suggest it. Craigslist obviously, is a good place to look. Gig masters is an event booking service in orderto book yourself out and banned mix is sort of like a musician classifieds, but it's also sort of a linked in for musicians issue have a platform, and if you're looking for a sax player, I'm on there and I've had people reach out to me saying, hey, we have a funk band. We're looking for a sax player, and I'm like over busy with our nineteenth album. Sorry I can't do this right now that I'd love to help you maybe we'll talk at some point and this kind of thing happens there's accompanying gigs if you can do accompaniment there's some good money involved in that salary positions there's a lot of options here, man we could spend hours doing it but we don't have hours to talk about it so just a couple more points making money is a composer you can advertise your song writing services and bill it out provide samples to what you've created and you know, one of the things that we recommend is you we provide a page on our site with descriptions of our instrumentals with links to them showing the kind of work we khun d'oh I we always parcels in the heads of people looking and they just want to know what kind of music do you write? What does it sound like what's going on with it? You could target particular licenses like podcasters video game designers like you want to do video games go to the game developers conference that's where they're all hanging out looking for musicians we talked about this earlier there's an organization called like wild world, which we also talked about in the music section to connect up with people well there's also interestingly enough not only craigslist but this site called a lance and we talked about him for finding services that you want to fill in like you're looking for a graphic artist you could find one glance allows you as a musician or a composer to say, hey, I could compose music for your project. We also talked about taxi earlier something believe that and street performances where the main point with this is that basically you need to make sure that you're doing the right license or else you could get in trouble, but once you have the license, go on the street and start playing for money, it's actually can be very some people actually do very well doing this. And finally, there are a lot of skills that musicians need, and if you can do any of these things like we're doing one of them right now, you can actually help out other musicians and still stay in the music business while making an income men. We went over an awful lot of stuff, and I want to make sure you leave at least a few minutes for questions we don't have very much. We've got a few sections like how to make money writing songs for others and negotiate your rights, how to make money selling other people's merchandiser promoting their brand where we go into detail on affiliate sales, the indie band survival guide and that's some of the stuff that we cover, but I wanted to leave just tow as much time as I could for questions which I'm sure we have generated some anybody here in the studio start with your brain's exploded way do that it seems like it's some you know it's obviously like can be overwhelming especially you're starting out yes and how do you how do you know it's like come up with new ideas I mean uh um or you know what's a good way to like go back to the drawing board so to speak if you if you get confused by all this uh does that make general I mean in our seventeen years if you get confused by other stuff there's a book I know all right that actually could help and that's a good reference guide called the indie bands of of a guy but it can be overwhelming and it can be confusing so I totally hear you on that it can also be overwhelming for musicians who have already started out and then I'll sudden they get this information they start thinking in this framework in the way that we've been talking about it and then I'm like I'm really behind the curve and I mean it's okay it's okay to take a breather tio to you know take a step back and then pick your battles and prioritized this one in particularly this lesson in particular I mean we hit you with a lot of things that were kind of like from left field um but then also stuff that there that you know it's like only and the traffic and me money teaching music oh are doing lessons or he's I've gotten really good at um mastering music, mixing music and recording music well, I could probably go into that line of work um that the point of this is to get a date of about making income number one number two we only do one thing at a time if it doesn't work, this is why we could say try things out if they don't we're trying something else because there's that many ideas to try number three I would say is that the affiliate stuff is falls under the category of things that we call checklist items you know you're affiliated with apple, you affiliate with amazon, you make your links the affiliate links and you put it out there you're done and that's easy to dio that's not overwhelming and that's a weekend's work, you take the mechanical things like we like to say and you move them up and you do first and then once you did you you'll see ok, we're making a certain income out of our music and we're doing this stuff then you could say, well, maybe I can get creative and do this kind of partnership with the local business but don't worry about that too you do the stuff that straightforward um johnny boy I'd ask questions in terms of marketing and bios do you think that wikipedia page is important because he was saying that like that sometimes when he's looking up abandoned he finds that they have a page it might make an indie band look bigger than they are which might be of a benefit or possibly not so he's asking your your opinion on it well, we talk about that in the end of an survival guide there's sort of like a like a lot of these sites have their own culture and one of wikipedia's culture cultural considerations is that they don't want you to write it yourself basically an average you know first of all it's got to be written like a reference like an encyclopedia like a on article that you would get in an encyclopedia so there's a style there but the other thing is they don't want people just throwing up marketing stuff and then just even the person himself writing about themselves and just writing a big bio and all that kind of this kind of a no no um but is wikipedia important? Yes and it's big partly because it gets pulled that information because it's it's a public it wasn't creative it's creative commons it's not but it gets pulled in treating the science like spotify and stuff so if you're like you know our bio I think the mcp turtles has just pulled from wikipedia and it's out of date but we can't wait don't go their way I've done quite a bit since I think it left off so yes it is important uh and on and then now you know a little bit of the cultural considerations so really what you have to do is kind of encourage people tio your fans and friends or something to try toe write it but then also it gets it will get edited yeah that's the other thing and they will take it down if you put it up and they don't think it's worthy a lot of ways if you want to make sure that you do establish one you need to have a lot of barred credibility I would think it's the stuff we talked about the market a lot of articles and and then other articles that could link to it that's really stronger than you linking not you but whoever writes it linking out to other articles so it has a place in the encyclopedia it's much less likely that they're going to rip it out because then there's going to kill a whole bunch of links in other place yeah but you do have to prove up your claims that you make yes that and so you have to have references and all that kind of stuff so it's a good question it is important because more and more services pull that information especially about india vance yeah um so good question and this kind of ties into a question that james one, two three had asked I know yesterday, randi, you said that you had a lot of positive experiences working with an agent and james wants to know, are there any important points to keep in mind when working with an agent? Will they help you out, for instance, with something like a wikipedia and guide you in this promotion, that's more of a manager's job, not an agency that usually agents are there didn't negotiate for you? They're not, although they may care about your appearance and they may help you with that offense. The most of the agents in the music business, sir, are about getting a live show together more than anything else and a higher level. Of course, they're going to be interested in negotiating with the label or negotiating with the endorsements or things like that when you're that level that this is what a manager could be doing now it's hard to pin down because in the music business it could be anybody that's doing that kind of promotion. So it's it's hard to say, um this goes back to what we talked about the very first day, the very first session about putting together a team and you really do want to have other people helping you think of each of these things part of the reason, perhaps you said earlier it's like this seems too overwhelming it's like there's so much going on. How do I know where to start? Well, the problem is the eye thing, it can't be just you or else you can't do all this stuff. It wasn't just jason and I, although we did a lot, there were other band members that pitched in, and other people we pulled in to help with graphics only couldn't do it when it was business related. We like doing that stuff I like doing market, and we have other people handling various other parts of our business is we do it if you don't pull a team together and that's why we started with it, I want to emphasize that then you are going to have a hard time doing all this stuff, and this is actually a question that came in a few days ago, I think on day one, but it applies to these alternate ways of making an income. Are there rules to advertising your services, such as teaching guitar, teaching an instrument or or whatever you're doing other rules that you want to go by rules of advertising your services uh, trying to think of it, no, and there are advertising there's advertising rules for any business, nothing in particular that way, yeah there's some of the regulations, I think well about advertising in particular, you can't make outrageous claims like I teach you guitar and it will hell you cure these diseases like that, you would want to do that, but if she's talking about it from a marketing point of view, you know, you should be very creative and where you just again getting the headspace of who it is that you're teaching, where do they hang out? Uh, make sure that you you put up posters or make the posters alive use any of those techniques that were talk about to implement all the stuff we've been talking about? Yeah, yeah, and that so a lot of this stuff is about you get your music out or your bandit or what have you, but you can use the same techniques for your skills as a musician? Yes, absolutely it's been a fast morning. We've already gone through a lot of material, so I know in the next segment we've had a lot of questions and chat room about using crowdfunding, kickstarter, indiegogo. So in the next thing I know we're going talk little bit about income through fundraising, and in particular we're talking about three rules to successful project and the number one mistake to avoid when making money so anything more to add about that before we head to break no, this is definitely a topic that musicians are quite interested in and you should be because there's an awful lot of money out there that you can tap into using crowdfunding it's such an exciting idea because you really couldn't do anything but talk to people locally, nor would they be willing to contribute ten dollars, out of pocket ahead of time to buy an album that may not appear I mean, think about it that's how it works it's like, if you do ten dollars, I get enough people contributing ten dollars I will make an album it sounds like an empty promise, and yet when it comes to doing something like a kid's starter, they'll take it donation marker until they get to that right amount, then you can hit it and there's actually other models that they do it but it's an exciting way to make money. It is something that we can turn into a checklist for you so that you do it the right way so that you get the right amount of people basically contributing. And so you can actually get more out of the people that do donate and we'll be talking about how to set up the rewards, to set up the goal the right way and to make the most compelling pitches so that it actually works very effectively and we'll be covering that in the next session great all right, well before we take our forty five minute break a few things to mention in the past few days we've had the privilege of being here in the studio personally thanking and randy brandy and jason every day for all this great information but if you're out there you've been watching in the chat rooms you've been sharing your information with us asking questions you can now give your own personal virtual thanks to randy and jason we've set up a thank you card on our facebook page so if you do go to facebook dot com slash creative live, you'll see a photo with our picture right there and feel free to leave comments there tell us what you enjoyed about this course give your thank you too randy and jason and as they come through we will be sharing them throughout the day so we just put this up about an hour ago we've already had some activity there's one in particular that I want to share so far this is from peggy wendell on facebook and this is a really great she she says like olympian ice skaters randy and jason make marketing music look simple and beautiful they broke down a complex world into easy actions that I can take I know that I don't have to do the triple axels right away but I know the steps to get there, so here I go