How To Make Money From Your Music (Songwriting As A Business)

We all want to do what we love as a means to make money, but how do you do it? Songwriting in itself has a huge spectrum from novice writers and pro’s, each with varying degrees of success. The ones that are successful happen to adopt a certain mindset that’s used in nearly all entrepreneurs: business. This article will let you in on some tips to help you make more money from your songwriting.

Photo by Hunters Race at Unsplash

Part-Time Or Full-Time?

You don’t need to be working full-time to be making money from your songwriting. The good thing is you can go however fast or slow you want, assuming you know exactly how to write the songs that will get you the money!

You can write songs pretty much wherever and whenever you want nowadays. Even working as a grocery store bagger, the only thing allowing and preventing you from writing songs is your own brain. Granted, it’s definitely smarter and easier if you can write things down and limit your distractions, which you can't do while working another job. Staring off into the abyss while someone is trying to tell you something maybe isn’t the best way to make friends or keep your place of employment 😂

Be it you work on the weekends or while you aren’t doing anything at your current place of employment, you can definitely get some songs written to add a little cushion to your bank account.

How Do You Make Money From Your Compositions?

Well, the unfortunate answer is that it’s really hard to make money from the songs you write purely for your pleasure; it mostly depends on if you have a decent sized audience or not. If you want to go this route, you’ll want to focus on audience building first, and then monetizing once you have a good backbone. Here’s a link to a previous article I’ve written about growing your audience.

That shouldn’t stop you from making money from writing songs though! This is not the only way to earn money from songwriting. The problem here is you’re looking at trying to earn money from one or more of the following:

• A small amount of invested fans

• A big amount of uninvested fans

• Fans without a lot of money to spend

• People who haven’t had enough time to build trust and add value with

So if we know this isn’t working, we have to look elsewhere if you aren’t willing to put in the time and effort into building a loyal audience.

So the question is, how do I find the people that are basically the opposite of what wasn’t working?

Well, businesses are a good example of this!

These are the places that:

• Have money

• Have a need for your work

• Don’t need time to build trust (to a degree) because you’ll be making them money or growing their audience/customer base

• Have their own audience they can sell to

While it may not be exactly the songs you would like to write (depending on the work that you get), you’ll still get to be creative and put your own style into it.

These will mostly be commercial jingles, background music, etc. They are what is in demand the most!

While art can make you money, it’s extremely difficult because there isn’t a defined need for it; you might have to pivot slightly to think in terms of business. What you’ll need to do is look for opportunities you can provide value for your songwriting, and treat yourself like an entrepreneur and invest in the things that will get you business!

Tips For Making Your Art Into A Business

As mentioned in a book called “The 4 Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferris, there’s an acronym for the steps you should follow to grow your business: DEAL.

D stands for Define Your Goals, E for Elimination, A for Automation, and L for Liberation. Since songwriting is something that you love doing, maybe you don’t want to follow through with the liberation part. But, these are the key things to help you grow your business/side project into making you some extra money, and to be able to scale it.

Define Your Goals: you want to make money from songwriting. Okay, but what does that look like? Write out some definitive goals, no matter how seemingly unachievable or extremely simple/easy to accomplish, find out the steps to get you there.

Elimination: Eliminate anything getting in your way of these goals. This would mean cutting out extra TV time, sleeping in, whatever you need to be productive. Eliminate slow, ineffective processes, and any and all distractions.

Automation: now that you’re being productive, you may find a ceiling to your productivity. This is where automation comes in; this could mean writing out checklists to keep you moving, getting software or processes that speed up your workflow, or even hiring someone out to do the repetitive stuff that limits your growth.

Again liberation may not be something you want to do if songwriting is really what you want to do in your free time so I’ll skip over that. However, I’d highly recommend reading this book if you ever wanted to get serious into monetizing what you love!

In order to help with your automation stage, I’ve created a free document you can use to help you write your songs with better quality, and faster! It includes something I call the Top-Down Songwriting Pyramid. Head over to the blog homepage and subscribe to receive email notifications of new blog posts (some of the blog posts aren’t posted on social media!) and you’ll get this free document to help you with your songs! You can unsubscribe at any time, no strings attached, so there’s no reason not to! :)

-Michael