10 Ways to Earn Income as a Musician in 2018

If you are a musician you are either a freelancer or an entrepreneur. At the core, this is the truth. You either take “gigs” for pay or you start a business (band, agency, etc) and generate money that way.

The employee model is almost never desirable, few young people say “I want to grow up to earn a salary at a steady job in the music industry.”

For some reason though I feel like musicians think of themselves as this weird class of creature. They live inside the music industry and are bound to its customs and rules. It involves a lottery mindset of thinking the right single person or entity needs to discover you. It’s also a quickness mindset where anybody who doesn’t succeed by 30 is deemed hopeless.

Those ideas make no sense to me.

Like I said at the start - musicians can be freelancers or entrepreneurs. They don’t need to generate money by any of the traditional music ways. Not even by “2.0” methods like the various donation models.

I don’t think each band is alike. The business model for a band can be anything. It’s silly to think of it as one “music industry” where everybody is on a single playing field.

Here are a few off-the-top examples of income generation models for people/groups who would be labeled “musicians:”

(1) Social Media Success

Either revenue from YouTube, Steem, Medium, etc, or by selling sponsorships on content. This is what “social media personalities” often do.

(2) ECommerce & Physical Retail

The oldest trick in the book for making money. Create goods, sell them. Hip-hop artists are best at this because they team up with fancy fashion brands. Tyler, The Creator is an example of a guy who creates amazing clothing (look it up) and sells insane amounts of it at high prices.

(3) Donation Model

Some people do generate ridiculous sums of money off of Patreon and other sites. If your personality is suited to this kind of thing, it can be lucrative and it’s a diverse income stream.

(4) Steem-funding

As I do. You don’t even have to generate a lot of music, you could just blog about your life and other interests to generate money.

(5) “Busking” i.e. Street Musician

Not for the faint of heart. Consider your local climate and what it’s like during the coldest months of the year. With that said, if you can play for 7+ hours at a time (with short breaks) without leaving your spot, you could make hundreds of dollars in a single session.

(6) Backing Musician

There are still a lot of paying gigs for live musicians to go on tour with big acts. These are some of the most competitive gigs in the industry because they pay you to literally ride around (or fly around) and play to crowds of people. For some people this is the dream gig, but you won’t get to flex your creativity as much as you might want.

(7) Write Music for Films/Commercials

Long hours, difficult conditions, and you may have to move to NYC/LA or another film hub. This is a difficult path so you should pursue it more based on passion than based on anything else.

(8) Day Job

I hate to admit it but there are some amazing musicians with day jobs. For example all the guys in a band I recently reviewed, [Car Bomb], work in finance or technology or something… and they write the best executed, most progressive, insane metal breakdowns ever. So I can’t deny that this strategy may be viable.

(9) The Label Route

Another one that, if I’m being honest, does exist but in a different form than you might think. There are some people who are involved with a scene, get on the right label at the right time, and are able to grow along with the label and have “tenure” by knowing everybody so well. If you see a cool up-and-coming label in town, go for it, but it will take a long time and theres no guarantees.

(10) Cover Band

If you like popular music, there’s a lot of money to be made in covers. Go where the tourists are for best results, or get into weddings. The high end of income for this path is insane, you can be wealthy.

(11) Surprise Me…

There are dozens of other options out there. From live streaming to releasing a song a day to who knows what else, maybe you’ll 3-D logos and procure arts funding from cities around the world to travel and do projects, maybe you are the one who figures out how to generate A.I. playlists of non-stop “original music,” maybe something else. There are so many possibilities.

What’s The Point?

The point of this article is to illustrate the value of creativity and original thinking on the money side of your music career. I believe that this is a liberating topic, not a compromising one.

Empowerment in the world of 2018 is about procuring adequate financial resources for yourself as a starting point. These strategies are designed to be accessible to anyone with a computer and some internet.

I haven’t solved the world here, and I know there are other problems, and I hope that for you, and maybe some of your friends, this list will be valuable.

What’s your best income idea for musicians?