Do you make a full time income in music?
Which sources of income do you have?
For example:
Composing Projects
Production Projects
Sound Design
Touring/Musician
Licensing & Royalties
Education/Teaching
anything else?
I want to see how many members can make a full time living in music, when you add up all your income sources. And it would be nice to see the spread of income sources, which ones seem to work better.
PS. If you make a full time income and run your own business in music, I am interested in connecting with you more for possible interviews, features on my website, and special opportunities etc.
hello
in fact i work ina industrial group as an computer ingeneer (i manage a lot of proces, writing a lot of documentation, and have a lot of meeting with other industrial group) it is my main income
i have no income from my music because i think that i am not an enough good music composer to get money from my music, perhaps one days i will earn my first $ from one of my composition and this days will be a very great pleasure for me
Well first of all congratulations for a great career in engineering!
Second, I think you can definitely make an income from music, at least part time extra income. But good music is not enough, I think we need to work hard to build relationships in the industry, and work with branding, marketing and pitching yourself etc. It’s building a business like any other, except the product is music and sounds.
yep you are right you can have composed a great symphonie but if you know nobody or if you have no relation ship it will be very hard to devellop your own business with your music
I do make a full time living from music. My sources of income are working as a composer for film/tv/games, music reviewing for a library, teaching composition and music production in college and working as an arranger/orchestrator in the pop world.
Thanks @Mikael. I’m not connected to libraries but I am starting to work on that. Currently, most of my royalties come from streaming - primarily Pandora radio.
Really, streaming? I would never have guessed, as music streaming has got such a bad reputation from composers and artists making practically nothing. I’m glad you get some results from it, may I ask what style of music gets you the most streams?
Full-time in music here, main areas of income are trailer / production libraries, custom commercials, royalties (T.V) and film, pretty much in that order.
I defintely used to do work in more diverse areas but I’m now honing in on the what makes me happy and provides enough of an income.
@Mikael, new age music, or you could call it ambient, emotional piano, or other similar name. It’s instrumental with piano as the primary instrument. In fact, some of it is just piano - solo piano. I’ve been releasing consistently the last 12 years.
My main focus will be finishing up a new trailer album and searching for some film projects as well.
Also thinking of broadening my library music work, mainly tv libraries that will add to my royatly income as the regular payments are good to have in a gig based industry.
So I took that as trailer/production libraries is what works best for you in terms of total revenue?
I haven’t dived into trailers myself yet as it feels like there is so much competition, as all composers seem to want to go into this field right now =/
Beautiful minimalistic, yet emotionally rich music Joseph! Very relaxing while at the same time a lot of details and groove variation. Piano playing is amazing!
Correct, its now the larger portion of my revenue, before I did more bespoke work, mainly for commercials but I prefer the library music workflow.
Trailers are definetly competitive although I’d say there aren’t that many people actually getting placements and even fewer relying solely on trailers for an income. The upside is the license fees are good but its quite a long road to get there, 1-2 years to see any money and thats provided your music is up to scratch.
