Helpful ReplyAre there any artist here that actually getting paid.

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drma173
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2016/02/11 14:25:22 (permalink)

Are there any artist here that actually getting paid.

What distribution company do you guys use. There are many out there like Tunecore, CD Baby and ect. I know You Tube pays royalties if you use Adsense with them. They are paying me pennies from a cover song that I did.

Spotify pays depending on their venue and logarithm. I know if you have an average 200,000 thousand plays a month you can actually make a living. Here the calculator that does all the math for you http://spotifycalc.com

Do you guys promote your music? I use Facebook a lot to promote my music. The worst mistake that independent artist are doing is giving song for free. Even if you were to upload it on sound cloud or YouTube not downloadable, you still are giving it away. Because once they like it or sub your page it is know in there online library.
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jamesg1213
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/11 15:14:03 (permalink) ☄ Helpfulby daryl1968 2016/02/11 15:15:31
Promote...not sure about that really. I post on Facebook when I have a piece of music online, I suppose that counts. Sold a few CDs.. These days I make music because I enjoy it, and I really don't mind giving it away. I have no illusions about making money from it. That's a young person's game

 
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daryl1968
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/11 15:22:44 (permalink)
100% agree with James - there is nothing wrong with sharing a song for people to enjoy (whatever your age).
As soon as you throw in the money making aspect, it becomes something very different in my opinion.
Better to have your stuff out there being heard and enjoyed than being paranoid about it being stolen or not paid for. If it's good enough, you'll make some money.    
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rbecker
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/11 15:52:06 (permalink)
This question gets asked now and again on the forums. I think last time it was either on the sonar forum or maybe the coffeehouse. Subject something like: "How to make money with sonar".
 
I tried Taxi a some years back for three years. Nothing doing. Other have tried Taxi with the same result. I briefly tried the youtube/adsense route, but took my only video out of "monetize" pretty quick. Like James and Daryl, I felt kind of weird with the ads. I just wanted to share it. However, I may try again with my next video.

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Guitarhacker
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/11 16:37:14 (permalink)
I got some music into film and TV shows last year and got a check from BMI...  and just got the 1099 from them as well for tax purposes. 2 made for TV documentary films and 2 "reality" TV shows (Beverly Hills Pawn & Hollywood Hillbillies) used my music.
 
I tried TAXI for several years and got a few tunes signed but to this day, nothing has happened with those songs... they just sit on the shelf somewhere collecting dust.  Tired of spending money and spinning wheels, because it seemed they were "returning" everything I was sending as opposed to forwarding it..... I took it upon myself to find other music libraries and publishers who would represent my music and have the industry connections to get things done.  It just takes time, lots of music, and patience to get the cuts for your cues.  I even have a few European publishers handling some of my music in the old country.

Some of the plays of my music were in Europe & Canada so I guess I can say I'm an internationally known composer and musician. 

If you're looking to make money in this business... a band in a club is the best way...sell your CD's to fans and you can make a decent living.  Placing music in libraries for film and TV is ok, as long as you're writing what the industry is looking for. You won;t make a lot but it's cool to get those BMI royalty checks quarterly.

Doing the spotify, pandora thing.... man, you got get hundreds of thousands of plays to make enough for a hamburger, fries and a coke.  That's crazy.  I'll pursue film and TV.... since I can do it from the comfort of my home studio and don't need to play gigs and drive home at 2am.
 
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jkoseattle
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/11 16:42:09 (permalink)
jamesg1213
Promote...not sure about that really. I post on Facebook when I have a piece of music online, I suppose that counts. Sold a few CDs.. These days I make music because I enjoy it, and I really don't mind giving it away. I have no illusions about making money from it. That's a young person's game




Hear hear! Every time I hear someone ask about how to make money doing music, I tell them to jump off that train to nowhere immediately. As soon as it becomes about making a living, there are all sorts of things you become required to do that will take up enormous amounts of time and energy and which you might not be very good at and which have little to do with your initial music-making passion. Promotion, drumming up gigs, traveling, demoing, playing stuff you don't want to play, etc., etc. If you discount the abstraction of "Look at me I'm making money doing music" then it's really kind of a lousy job. And in the modern world of streaming and home studio and all, trying to be a traditional musician for a living is sort of like wanting to be a farmer when there's free corn falling out of the sky everywhere.
 
As for me, I love the fact that I've been doing it for over 30 years and have never been burned out, can not do it when I don't want to, can explore some idiosyncratic niche, and don't have to answer to anyone. Meanwhile, I earn a living doing something totally unrelated to music. I'm so so so glad I took this path.

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daryl1968
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/11 16:49:32 (permalink)
jkoseattle
jamesg1213
Promote...not sure about that really. I post on Facebook when I have a piece of music online, I suppose that counts. Sold a few CDs.. These days I make music because I enjoy it, and I really don't mind giving it away. I have no illusions about making money from it. That's a young person's game




Hear hear! Every time I hear someone ask about how to make money doing music, I tell them to jump off that train to nowhere immediately. As soon as it becomes about making a living, there are all sorts of things you become required to do that will take up enormous amounts of time and energy and which you might not be very good at and which have little to do with your initial music-making passion. Promotion, drumming up gigs, traveling, demoing, playing stuff you don't want to play, etc., etc. If you discount the abstraction of "Look at me I'm making money doing music" then it's really kind of a lousy job. And in the modern world of streaming and home studio and all, trying to be a traditional musician for a living is sort of like wanting to be a farmer when there's free corn falling out of the sky everywhere.
 
As for me, I love the fact that I've been doing it for over 30 years and have never been burned out, can not do it when I don't want to, can explore some idiosyncratic niche, and don't have to answer to anyone. Meanwhile, I earn a living doing something totally unrelated to music. I'm so so so glad I took this path.




^^^^^^
excellent advice 
#7
whack
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 08:02:29 (permalink)
Anthony,
 
I feel your pain and since I know you I know you through previous collaborations  I know you have a super work ethic. By making it a business, it can easily derail you from enjoying what you probably love doing the most, endless hours creating at your home without worrying about it.
 
I have a new album coming out now in a few weeks which I am going to try and sell. Really, I dont care about the money at all but I feel I have actually invested money into this as a business project and so I would love to be able to recoup that money back(maybe sell about 250 copies to people that know me or like my stuff to break even). Considering the mastering, artwork, promotional video I don't think that's unreasonable to aim for or do. If I make a profit, hell the drinks are on me! Luckily I am a qualified engineer so that doesn't weigh in as heavy.
 
Really have a think about what you love to do. If you want to make  a business out of it, man unfortunetely youll have to work twice as hard get your own personal brand out there and perform, gain fans. There is a million people who do what you do so you'll have to work on a unique selling point, unless of course you stand out by having a 6 octave vocal range or three eyes coming out of your head!!!
 
 
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gbowling
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 09:05:28 (permalink)
Great advice here!
 
I agree totally. We put our music in all the places (itunes, spotify, etc. etc.) just because when someone wants to hear our music it's nice for them to find it on whatever platform they already use. We use distrokid.com to do this as it's really low cost and gets it out there. Would be nice if we could make it free on itunes.
 
We also have a bandcamp site. Which we give our tunes away for free, because we can.
 
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Guitarhacker
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 09:10:17 (permalink)
Post #6 makes a lot of sense.

The business of music and making money with it, has certainly changed. Used to be you could throw a band together with a few guys and start gigging almost immediately and making decent money doing it.  I recall a few bands where we had the gigs booked and were still looking musicians to complete the band.

I was in a town that was a thriving live music scene. But things have changed..... in NC they tighened up the drunk driving laws (a good thing in many ways) but that practically killed the club scene in the process. We saw attendance at the gigs drop off as people were scared to come out, have a good time, drink a few beers and drive home through the highway patrol road blocks, get popped and lose their license.

Currently, the club scene is dead.  A few duo's with older guys are playing the corner of the occasional restaurant that decides to try live music. Of course, this isn't a large city either..... so it may be different in a big city.
 
But with all the free music and a-la-cart sellers of tunes on the net, it's hard for anyone to make a living in the business like I and others were able to do 40 years ago. There's always going to be room for a successful artist, but you gotta make that success yourself. Record contracts are not as popular a way to do things because the record companies are trying to figure out how to stay in business as well. It's a different world for them.
 
There will always be those souls who sell everything they have except the clothes on their back and their guitar and head out to Nashville or LA to give the business their best shot.  We need folks like that. And some of them will become stars or touring musicians and become successful. Kudos to them. I wish them well. The majority will scrounge up bus ticket money for the ride home. Time for plan B.

The advice they used to reserve for songwriters now seems to apply to most all musicians across the board......
 
Don't quit your day job.

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kennywtelejazz
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 11:16:37 (permalink)
This happens to be a very polarizing topic for me ...
 
I happen to feel that it is one thing to share online some of my Frankentunes VIA social media .
It is a whole other thing to hire me to  play guitar live or in the studio ....
One of these days I may decide to break radio silence and talk about some of the things that went down ..
till then , all the best ,
 
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stevec
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 11:46:09 (permalink) ☄ Helpfulby jamesg1213 2016/02/12 12:33:52
You can make money from music?
 
 

 

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jkoseattle
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 13:23:51 (permalink)
It's helpful to think about it historically. Long ago, there was no recording industry, and music was heard only by people sitting in the same room and at the same time as the person creating music. As music was not ubiquitous, standards were necessarily lower. The very idea of hearing music at all was enough for most. The draw was not "this band will be here" or "we will perform the works of this composer". Just saying "there will be music" was enough. "Music! Wow, I'm there!" Most music was performed and heard by people who knew each other personally. That was the world's primary experience with music. It was very cheap to produce, but there was no economy of scale. Play the song once, it's heard exactly once. Economics for musicians back then were very simple. It was either "I will pay you 100 quatloos to play for this long". "Deal". Or else the music was merely part of a larger event, and no money was involved at all.
 
The recording industry of course changed all that, making it suddenly economically viable to produce music based on its ability to generate income without a musician present. The economy of scale (perform once, listen to a million times) introduced a new way to earn a living from music, but that economy of scale was offset by a lot of expense involved in the recording, production, distribution and promotion of the product. It also raised the bar for the quality of the music. To maximize profit, it made the most sense to invest in the best musicians available. Unlike the pre-recording days, musicians were competing for business with people in far-flung parts of the world. Being good enough to play in your home county wasn't enough anymore.
 
That system worked for a lot of people, and it changed the world's perception of music as something recorded and sold as a physical product rather than as a real-time experience. But it also created a long chain of middlemen and middle-machines, all of whom needed to be paid, so the economics got really complicated, (and still are to this day). Suddenly most of the "music" industry was not made up of people creating music. There were now engineers and producers and executives and distributors and DJ's and truck drivers and record store owners and tape recorder manufacturers and on and on and on in a long chain of people positioned between the musician and the listener. The actual musicians were just a single part of this chain, standing way at one end of it.
 
(Digression: It also created a marvelous bubble in the history of the art itself by encouraging and promoting the best of a certain type of music: Pieces that are short enough to fit within the limits of the technology of records, and which was ideally suited to listening on poor-quality devices (cheap radios) in poor conditions (moving vehicles and noisy households). Also, music which was instantly likable and memorable upon initial hearing and also good enough to bear repeated, unbidden listens. This gave us "Help Me Rhonda", "Over the Rainbow" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Those triumphs couldn't exist without the constraints of the recording industry. Another bubble was the shared experience of everyone knowing the same songs across a wide swath of the culture. At the same time, everyone knew "Bridge Over Troubled Water" all across the U.S. The days of that kind of broad, shared, and concurrent musical experience are almost over for good.)
 
Now, with home studios and digital streaming, things have gone to a third paradigm, which is more akin to that of the original pre-recording days. The "distance" between performer and audience has collapsed back down again. In many cases, across all music subcultures, there is again no distance between performer and listener, eliminating the need for most of those other middlemen. There is no longer a physical product to be manufactured, making the economies of the whole venture completely different. Most of the music industry has been focused on the physical product. Now that that product is not in demand, it's a new game. At the same time, computing technology has made it so people like me who can't play drums or guitar or bass or bassoon, can make music with those sounds without needing to rely on people who have spent their lives mastering those instruments. People will say "There's nothing like live music by skilled performers", and that may be true. But in 1940 that was also true, yet hearing players on a record or the radio was close enough for most people, given the fact that it was so much less expensive. Today, my bass isn't as good as a live bass player's would be, but I can come close enough. 
So can everyone else, and that's the problem with the economics. There's free corn falling from the sky. A lot of farmers need to decide to do something else for a living.

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emeraldsoul
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/12 15:26:30 (permalink)
Geezer #7 says:
 
I remember the OP asked this question, or a variant of it, about a year ago. If memory serves. I feel his pain and we all probably do! The OP is into hip/hop so that's a marketable plus, but he'll have to scuttle along on his belly through the slime pits to get his music fairly recognized, or more likely, just plain stolen.
 
So, if you really love making music . . . then make it, get a helmet to protect you from the falling corn, and absolutely positively get and keep the best day job you can. Hopefully something you like to do nearly as much as music!
 
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gbowling
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Re: Are there any artist here that actually getting paid. 2016/02/13 08:36:26 (permalink)
If you've never read this book it's worth a read.
 
http://www.amazon.com/Hit-Men-Brokers-Inside-Business-ebook/dp/B005IEH8DU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1455369283&sr=1-1&keywords=hit+men
 
It's a bit dated and mostly talks about how things worked back in the days of radio/albums/CDs. 
 
However, a version of this still exists today, it's just morphed a bit. One thing has been proven, the vast majority of people don't "like" a song based on anything other than them hearing it a bunch of times. How many times have you heard something along the lines of "I didn't like that very much when I first heard it, but it's growing on me"
 
Without the music industry power brokers pushing your material you don't get the number of plays it requires for people to give it a chance. 
 
I bet there are a bunch of people here on the forum with original songs that are good enough to be big sellers but they don't get the backing required for that to happen. 
 
The thought that it doesn't happen any more with streaming/downloads/etc. etc. is just wrong. How do you find a new song on itunes/spotify/apple music/etc?? It gets pushed by the power brokers or it gets lost in the sea of tunes. How does it get pushed by the power brokers? The same way it always has, power, money, privilege, kickbacks, favors, drugs, etc. etc.
 
Sure there are songs among the ones that are pushed that rise to the top. And all of the songs that are pushed are professionally done. But that's also the case with millions of other songs that don't get pushed. I always wonder how many millions of great songs have been lost due to the artist never getting found by anyone.
 
This is "why" so many people on here have great advice. Many people here have been through all this, been beaten down, frustrated, taken advantage of, screwed over, and possibly even "dropped out" of it all. The music business was, still is, and as long as there are big bucks to be made will always be, a very ugly thing, which is a real shame.
 
gabo

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