Anyone here actually making MONEY selling your music on line?

Alot of us here have written recorded and produced alot of music that is in various stages of finished, and ALOT of what I hear is really good and some of it is just outstanding. Personally, I have a ton of stuff pretty much ready to go and although I like to share it with people, I wouldnt mind actually making some money from it to compensate for all the work that goes into the making of a song from the birth of an idea, to honing it, and then spending anywhere from a few to as many as 100 hours producing even an individual song.

I have sold music in the past, for televison, radio, etc, but just about all of that was either through production companies I signed contracts with that I really just sort of fell into, and they did 100% of all promotions and distribution/selling marketing, etc, the kind of stuff I want to do now, myself. This will all be aside from The country band I play in and doesnt have anything to do with contracts or obligations I am under with them.

SO: I wonder..... are any of you here actually making descent money from marketing your own music through either your own websites, or myspace/face book, etc? What ways do you market and promote your music? Do you use sites like itunes and CDbaby to sell your stuff where they get a descent percentage or do you do it all 100% self contained? It is always uncomfortable talking about money, so we can keep the answers vague if we like, but I am REALLY curious to see what kind of money people are able to generate from selling their own completely independent unsigned music mostly on line, or at shows that are/were heavily promoted online.. Any and all ideas, experience, and advice on the best ways to go about this, do's and donts, etc would be awesome. I want to hear first hand stories from people that actually DO it and have either already had descent success or at least have gotten the ball rolling and can see the potential based on sales they have started to generate.

Can you make good supplimental money doing this? Can you actually make a LIVING doing this? I know some people are.

So, assuming the music will back it up............ How?

So, what do you know?

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I use cd baby and they in turn put the music on itunes and other services. I get a check from them almost every month. It's enough to buy lunch in a nice restaurant. I don't spend any time promoting. I'm pretty sure if I spent a bunch of time promoting, the check would pay for dinner instead of lunch. I sold way more through a distributor, and way more than that at gigs. I would be very interested to hear about people making a living primarily by selling music on the net.

Thanks for the real life story.

How much promotion and how exactly does CD baby, for exampler, do to promote your music, if any? Or do you feel like the few sales a month you had, had almost nothing to do with cd babys promotions and mostly because of the few people you sent there yourself?

Personally, I am willing to do quite a bit of promotion myself as needed.

CD baby does almost nothing to promote an individual band. They encourage you to promote, and provide advice on how to do so. Most all of our sales were people that went there because they already knew about us, or perhaps some were browsing on their site for similar sounds. I have had people call me to ask where to get the cd, told them cdbaby, then seen a sale a day later. CD baby gives you the name of the people who buy your cd, and also breaks down income for digital downloads and paid plays. They are good, but they won't sell your product for you. If you gig, you'll sell more there and some of those people who didn't buy at the gig will buy online later if they know where to go. If you have a contact at a store that sells music, ask them to request your cd from their distributor. The distributor will call you and you will have a distributor who may do a lot better than cdbaby.

I do all this as a hobby, but I'm treating it more and more seriously as time goes by.

For me, I sell the most CD's at gigs. I play small places (coffee houses, that sort of thing.) So we're not talking about huge audiences. But I do sell CD's. People hear the music and if they like it a lot or love it, the CD is a nice physical artifact to take home from the experience. At a show, you have no competition - they can buy your CD or not. You have a captive audience.

Online it's another matter. Online they have to LOVE your music to want to buy it. And you're competing with every musical act in the world. That's why I've switched to a new model online of giving away the 128k mp3 files and letting people name their own price for the higher quality files or the physical CD. I did sell some CD's online through CDBaby, and those sales were sort of out of the blue, but not enough to add up to much.

MartinC is right - CDBaby is a great place to send people to, but you have to do the sending. Some people will discover your music on CDBaby just hunting around, but it won't be many.

Making a living from selling original music online alone is probably borderline impossible. You'd have to sell something like 300 CD's a month or so. I'm sure there are people who do that, but doing that would be extremely difficult.

No....

I have sold some, but then word got around about how much I suck, and the sales have dwindled.

I have sold some, but then word got around about how much I suck, and the sales have dwindled.

LOL, I'm just cutting to the chase and not releasing my "music" to the world at large.

Im not making a living off selling music, however im about to embark on a similar path, and after alot of reseaching options decided to host my own sales engine instead of using a seperate service. Its possible with open source content management systems such as joomla, to DIY and set up your own store that uses paypal micropayments.

I also recommend you check out www.indiebandsurvivalguide.com (im halfway through their book).

It has alot of great ideas on marketing yourself and ways to set up web sites for bands.

It always comes down to marketing doesn't it. You could be fricken Led Zeppelin and if no one knows you you ain't sellin' {censored}.

One way I've seen people getting a lot of hits lately is posting themselves on Youtube playing a cover of the top songs on Billboard or most popular songs in their genre, alot of them just with an acoustic and they are getting a boatload of hits. This has to be translating into sales and a draw when they play.

Example

Billboard Top 100 # 1 Song

The Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling

Here's an example of a band that capitalized on this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-yvm8HpNEw

and another girl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJMK2SUssXs

Just make sure you post your myspace or band site in the description or bio area...

Ha! I'm gonna post this to my blog now...

Looks like a good web site - thanks for the link.

Why?

I'm not trying to be a wise guy. I just think that hits on youtube are maybe good for maybe getting some people to go visit your website, maybe. I have serious doubts as to how many of those people will buy a CD, or happen to be in your area where they can go to see a gig.

Wouldn't work for me. If I go looking on youtube for Alan Parson's "Eye in the Sky" and I come across a guy in Arizona who recorded a cover of it, I'm not likely to visit his site, and there's no way I'm going to go see him at the local coffee shop in Arizona, when I live in Florida.

Richard has some great points, as usual. It's difficult to sell music for most acts--most people (myself included) have used Facebook and MySpace as an additional tool to supplement things, but it's difficult for most. There's a guy that I know that has played in well known and international cult acts, and even he told me that he became resigned to the fact that selling 15 cds a year is what he expects. I've got great reviews at alot of places, but it's not really helped. What I do is have Google Ads worldwide, and that's helped a bit--what i've found is that there's next to no bands doing it in the genre that I play in, so that gives a bit of an edge to it. I've also put a "if you wish to preserve the continuity of music that exists out of the corporate reach, please consider purchasing something. Thanks", which is not my favorite thing to do, but it's the reality scope for artists in non-commercial genres that aren't easily categorized, and considering that the Adwords add up in cost, I think that's a fair tradeoff. I've had more sales that way....not tons, but way more. It helps pay for expenses and website maintenance and so on.

I think the best that most can hope for--whether you're great or not--is being lucky to register on anyone's radar, considering the competition, and that you're no longer competing with local bands, but international acts in a world where we have alot of entertainment to compete with (movies, internet, etc), not to mention competing with other bands in genres, which, if you think of it, is the laws of supply and demand. One person pointed out that even on campus radio, there is only so many songs that can physically fit into the 24 hour timeframe, and if you consider all the music submitted to those stations, your odds of getting in there aren't good, either.

There is also a reason why alot of obscure and punk and esoteric recordings had limited runs of 100 copies in the 80's or 90's or even today--they can't possibly be making money, it's a writeoff, the labels and investors do it because they believe in the power of the music. If you're a more mainstream artist, you may sell more than more obscurist type artists, but as to whether you're paying rent and bills and not having to have a day job, no one I personally know is doing that. Even the cult acts around here have a hard time registering on any international radar, simply because it's way tougher to crack the US market to go and tour there anyways.

Getting back to the online thing, it's tough to get anyone to pay for anything, period. Games, movies, music, entertainment. Look at all the donationware, it's not technically "free", they usually state "please consider donating something to our developers". I think that once you take out the personal and physical edge of being in a store or encountering someone face to face, that it's not even necessarily a theft thing, it's a convienience thing--people want it right now, no waiting. It's a fast food mentality, no one seems to know how to wait for anything these days.

15 CD's a year? Wow.

You're right about the convenience thing. And it IS very difficult to get anyone to pay for anything. That's why I charge $5 for a CD. It costs me $2.50 to make, and I make a $2.50 profit. It's a low risk investment for the person at the club/coffee shop. My next CD I'm going to have diskmakers run 100 for me so I can get the per unit price down. My goal will be to go through all 100, but of course I will give some away. That's where I'm at. Setting my sights high at 100. Yeah, making a living doing this would be impossible.

I'm interested in how you use Google Ads - most importantly, does it generate a profit for you, or is it more of a break even sort of thing? My new CD is going to be folk/rock and I've kicked around the idea of Google Ads, but I don't know if it would be worth the money. Just curious...

I average around $2000.00 a month from CD Baby. That's for 9 CDs listed with them. It pays a lot of bills. I'm happy with it.

That's awesome! Got a link to your page?

Dude, don't leave us in the dark! Post a link to your stuff if you could. I'd love to hear the music of someone succeeding to that level. (And you might get a new fan!)

+1. A post like this needs DETAILS!

+2 I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously, what artist from Tennessee could earn that much just off CD Baby? Gigmaster = Brad Paisley?

That's a lot of CD's. Everyone here would love to move that much product. I'd like to know how it's done, definitely.

Not yet, but...... still @ it!!!!! But my goal is to make somebody else...so called rich. Money will destroy me!

99% of everyone online is only after songs they heard on the ending of Greys Anatomy, lol.

I ran your name all over the net and found your garage band site, and your myspace. Unless you're using another name I couldn't find the page where you're making all this money.

I think after making a statement like this you should at least list the page.

We'd all like to hear how you've acomplished this....

I don't believe you. 9 grand a day? Average? Over three years? That's almost 10 million dollars.

I also don't believe the guy who makes 2 grand a month on CD Baby.

How many CD's do I have that still play that are over 5 years old? EVERY SINGLE ONE. What are you smoking?

On a side note, I DO like your guitar playing on your myspace site. You can definitely play really damn good.

Greetings. I am about to embark on a new venture to try increasing on-line sales. I don't earn a living at music at this time, I have in the past, and hope to again, right now I'm an IT guy. It took a while, but I have discovered how to run an internet radio station from my own site. Well it looks like it's coming from my site, but it streams from a streaming server. The player is on my site.

The idea here is that people can listen to my music - but not download it. The play list appears, requests can be made, and this software supports LIVE input as well. The playlist links to a purchase site where you can buy a song, the CD, order a pressed CD or order the CD in various formats and get the artwork so you can burn a copy.

Part of the plan here of course is not to just offer my own music, but to offer other peoples music - all originals, no covers - thus keeping things simpler.

The best part is it can be incorporated into your, or the bands site - not on a site with 35,000 other internet radio stations listed.

The software allows me to insert and track advertising as well. So now I can stream my tunes, take requests, have direct purchase, sell the service to other musicians, sell advertising - and maybe make a few bucks. We'll see.

The startup cost is really quite reasonable, bandwidth charges could add up, but only if people are listening, and hopefully that translates to purchases and covers it.

No matter what - the site has to be marketed to get traffic or course. I'll be using all the on-line tools available to push traffic to the site. Using the radio aspect of the site, I hope to interview local acts, visiting musicians and so on to help push more traffic.

What do you think?