Monetize

Music monetizing should be a fundamental concern to any real aspiring career musician. Many aspire to have a career in music but take very few, if any, independent steps to monetize themselves. This may be because they have simply overlooked and underthought their personal plan to recover their investments, because they are quite busy with the involved process of CREATING the music for the project. Monetizing is not exactly a one step stop and click process, but a lifestyle you must adopt. You must change your presentation of yourself across social media. We recommend, if you make audio based music content, to publish your music to a streaming site that pays per stream for artists BUT is also FREE for listeners. Spotify, at the moment, seems to be one of the optimal picks to publish to and promote. Spotify pays in two different ways, we have come to notice, the first being FREE tier plays coming from free listener accounts which pay roughly (.002) per play. The second is the higher PREMIUM tier plays coming from the paid ($9.99/month) premium member accounts which pay upwards of (.006) per play. Publishing You cannot simply go to Spotify and upload your music, you must pay a third party supplier distribution site such as Tunecore.com or CDBABY.com. Publishing costs roughly $10.00 per single and $30.00 per album via Tunecore.com. This may appear to be another, unnecessary, cost but the benefit in potential is great and the cost easily recoverable with dedication and promotion. If you were to spend any amount of money in recording and production, it only makes sense to allow yourself the ability to profit from every stream. An artist could gain quick viral content status garnishing a million plays in a week. If their primary foundation of the music release and their catelog is hosted on a site such as Spotify they could make $2,000-$6,000 with those million streams! If they had achieved that same success on a site such as SoundCloud or even YouTube they would not have profited nearly as greatly, if at all making less than $500 per million plays in most cases with SoundCloud or YouTube. Publishing to sites such as Spotify, ITunes, Google Play etc should be considered and funded before disc creation even should be! Promotion So you have payed and published your music. It's live and you are ready to start seeing those plays start streaming in alongside some real money now! Let's now begin preparing your social profiles. Go to all of your profiles that you have listed your SoundCloud link and change it to your ARTIST PAGE link on Spotify. You will want the first impression and point of listening interaction with someone to occure on Spotify. This way, every play counts towards recovering and profiting from your music creation. Simply listing your links will likely not be enough to fully recover even the publishing fees, though. Listing a link is what is known as PASSIVE promotion. You must also actively promote your music. We will continue to touch on ways to appropriately actively promote your music, other than simply inboxing copied links, in the next section!
Growing a fan base while maintaining and cultivating the existing can be difficult. You could feel that by trying to please new fans you may be losing old fans. This is likely to happen. There is no way around it. This part of the growth of an artist. Your changing styles should never be held against you, making you want less. You should never change your sound to continue to appeal to specific demographic. Instead, you must assess the demographic you should be targeting. You may want to consider either finding a mentor and listing 5 artists you sound similar to or model after. We will call these your model artists. Your model artists should not be large enough to routinely receive millions of listeners but they should have fan bases and social followings of either 3x yours or 20,000-100,000 followers. You will want to go through and routinely, once or twice weekly, add a few of their followers. You should then send them a personalized message asking them about the model artist you found them through.
Search Engine Tuning
Isn't it odd how some songs seem to so effortlessly find success? Meanwhile other far greater compositions fail to succeed. This is due mostly to marketing. Marketing comes in many sizes and shapes. This usually can begin the organic journey to new potential listeners most basically by the name or title of each track. A track title will usually be most visually appearing if it is shorter. This can consist of 2 or 3 words, preferably. These words should be relevant to current events or even modern pop culture in reference. For example (Harambe Loves Music). Longer titles will not turn up as high or in as many search results. Longer titles can, on limited occasions, be well suited to more dedicated and cult like bases of listeners.