Ways to Make Money in the Music Industry

While most guitar players and musicians do what they do for the love of it, let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that we wouldn’t like to make money if we had the opportunity to do so.

In fact I think earning money off of what you do, what you love doing, your passion and what you get up for every morning is a good thing: it allows you to become a musician full-time and hence do more of what you love doing, and it allows us to earn our bread doing what we love to do!

So the question is, why wouldn’t you want to make money as a musician?!

Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, here are a few things that you can do one day to start your journey towards making a living as a guitar player. (PS. Remember that if you’re serious about earning your bread and your livelihood as a guitar player, it is important to diversify – which means not being reliant on a single source of income)

1.  Start a Youtube Channel

This is one of the easiest, simplest and the most basic things you can do to start making money as an amateur guitar player. It is hence also one of the first things that you SHOULD do! Make a channel on Youtube, and join their partner program, called the Youtube Partner Program (support page here), which allows you to ‘build a new YouTube-based career’ and monetize your videos. You’ll of course need to record yourself playing the guitar, perform a bit of editing on your clips and upload them to Youtube if you want to get started with this. There are plenty of amateur and professional musicians doing this – some very successfully too!

2. Play Live

One of the more obvious choices on this list, and not to mention, one of the best ways of making money as a musician and getting some serious exposure as well. Try putting the word out there that you’re a local musician who’s open to doing live gigs. In fact, start off with performing for free at the open mic night at your local bar, opening for a band performing in your area for free, or playing at your friend’s wedding. The important thing here is to make a name for yourself. You’ll obviously not be able to command a big fee (or in some cases, any fee for that matter) initially. But once you start creating a fan base for yourself, and begin pulling a large audience, that may change for the better! My advice: take whatever you get, at least initially; your priority is getting the word out.

3. Sell Records and Sell Your Music

Another one of the obvious ways to make money is selling your music. You should most definitely look into various different ways of selling your music, because if you’re even the slightest big good a musician, there’s money to be made! There are a few things which you should consider looking into: (a) try connecting with people who like the kind of music you make, all kinds of music sells (even the so-called ‘crappy’ music has people willing to pay money to listen to it), and there are probably people out there who would be willing to pay and buy your record. (b) Make sure that the price it right; not too high, not too low, find the right balance. (c) Make it easy for fans to find your music. Try looking into avenues such as digital distribution (such as over iTunes), putting CDs at your local store, partnering up with a business, a website, or an individual who helps promote your business.

4. Teach the Guitar

We’ve already spoken about this in great depth in a previous article. But yes, teaching the guitar is a great way to make a buck or two, or much more – and become a popular musician while you do it. And you don’t need to look beyond Joe Satriani for proof.

5. Website

As a musician, I would suggest having a website anyway, whether you intend on making money off it or not. But if you do, you could put ads on it by applying for AdSense, earning through product sponsorships or endorsements (such as promoting Fender guitars on your website, if you’re a Fender fan) and/or selling stuff on your website via an affiliate program (such as the Amazon Affiliate Program). You should also use your website to sell records and of course merchandise. Which brings us to…

6. Sell Merchandise

Selling personalized merch is one of the quickest, easiest ways of making a buck or two as a musician. Initially, I recommend designing or developing your own merch (or outsourcing this to Fiverr, for instance) – start off with basic stuff such as tees, mugs, chains, button/badges/stickers, and any other merch related to the kind of music you make. Remember to have a merch table set up whenever you play live, since it sells particularly well before and after a show. Just keep the price as reasonable as possible.

7. Working with Other Musicians and Become a Freelance Guitar Player

If a band comes to your town and is looking for someone to fill-in for an open position, go for it. If there’s session word for other musicians that you can take up, go for it. Try playing with other bands in the area. Taking up small jobs will allow you to build connections, get to know people, get some exposure, and maybe even make a bit of money while you’re at it.

8. Work in a Guitar Store

Why not take up a job as a salesman in your local guitar store. It allows you to use your music skills, talents and knowledge to help other musicians. Most salesmen that you see in guitar stores ARE actually musicians working their way up. Besides, it provides you valuable sales experience, and actually make some seriously good money in some cases; salesmen are paid a base salary plus commission on each sale that they make. If you’re already a guitar player, you’ll be able to guide any person who walks in through the door to buy a guitar in the best possible manner.

9. Offer It Up as a Service

If you’re good with the guitar, chances are that there’s someone out there looking for your services. Look on websites such as Fiverr for people looking for jingles or covers for their favorite songs. Offer your services online and offline as a session player, performer, song writer, etc. To quote The Dark Knight: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free”.

How to Set Up a Guitar-Teaching Business Destined for Success

Teaching the guitar can be a great way to spread the art, boost your portfolio as a musician, and make some money while you’re at it. If you think you’ve got great guitar skills, passion for music and want to make a living out what you love doing the most, teaching is most definitely something you should look into!

But the simple fact is that you might be a great guitar player, however it is not as easy to be a great guitar teacher. Here are a few tips and pointers on how you can set up a successful guitar-teaching business from the ground-up, and become a great guitar teacher in the process:

1. Gear

So you’re serious about teaching the guitar, and getting your guitar teaching business up. One of the first things you can do to start off on the right foot is getting your guitar gear in order – and avoid wasting time, money and energy.

Apart from the obvious, such as your guitar(s), cables and amp(s) and checking to see if they work, you’ll need a powerful computer (a laptop, perhaps?) hooked up to a high-speed broadband internet connection. You and your students will need access to download and stream audio files, as well as access tab-sheets, for instance.

You’ll also need to hook up your system with a professional sound system if you haven’t done so already. Look for professional-grade system made by the likes of Harman/Kardon, BOSE, or JBL.

I also recommend getting a few cheap acoustic and electric guitars (perhaps from a flea market, your local pawn shop, or a garage sale) as backup instruments. And speaking of spares, I would also suggest getting a set of spare cables, as well as guitar strings and picks. Trust me, getting stranded in the middle of a teaching session just because your strings broke and you don’t have any spares will make you look extremely unprofessional!

2. Teaching Space (Studio)

This is as important as the first point above; having a proper, professional studio space where you take your classes is essential. A professional-looking space will project a professional image of you, whereas a messy, cluttered, small, unorganized and a shabby looking place will quite obviously not do a very good job of making you look good, will it.

As far as a studio is concerned, you have a few choices here:

(i) Rent out a studio space somewhere, big enough for a few students.

(ii) Set a small home-office inside your home/apartment as a studio for taking classes.

In either one of those cases, make sure your studio projects a good, professional image of you; people will judge you based on how your office looks. In addition, I would also suggest setting up a video camera to record all sessions – with the consent of your students of course. Doing so will not only allow you to cover your ass (especially if you have students coming to your place alone) and protect yourself against, say, an inappropriate behavior complaint, it will also allow you to share the footage with your students so that they can review it at any time, and point out any mistakes with their technique, for instance.

(N/B: It is important to know that you also have the option to teach the guitar at your students’ homes: Personally, I would not advise doing this. You’ll end up wasting a ton of your time on road and will probably waste a lot of money on gas in the process.)

3. Class Management System

Once again, your guitar teaching business is a business. Which means that it will have two distinct component: teaching, and all other business-related tasks.

When your teaching business finally takes off, you’ll want to concentrate on the actually delivering the lessons, and would definitely want to automate (or outsource) all other business-related tasks.

Use a lessons management system (such as this one here or here) to automate many of the different aspects involved in the management of your business (such as payments, more below). Programs such as these automate and take care of a lot of business-related tasks for you so you can concentrate on the actual lesson delivery itself. A quick Google search will yield tons of results on many different classroom/lesson management systems, so you can choose whichever suits your needs the best.

Use Microsoft Excel, or your chosen lesson management system to keep a track of payments, generate bills and invoices, sending out automated emails, and other such administrative tasks.

4. Publicity and Promotion

This is one aspect of your business your lessons/class management system won’t be able to for you. And for many teachers, this might be the toughest one as well!

The objective is simple: you have to get the word out and start getting students. Offer an incentive to draw people in: free lessons for 2 months to the first 10 students who sign up.

Use any and all free resources to advertise your business: your blog, social profiles, online forums, etc. Apart from free, get flyers printed and have them put up at your local college campus, in and around your neighborhood, and the like. Have someone design your flyers/brochures – name and address of business, a bit of description, the location, and some contact information. Get a soft-copy of this as well, so that you can attach it with emails and put it up on your website.

Advertise on your Youtube channel (or make a Youtube channel for yourself if you don’t have one already). Pay someone to get a basic Wordpress-based website made for you (online presence and online publicity is essential!).

Remember, growing your business is perhaps one of the most important (if not the most important) aspects of your business, directly related to its success or failure.

5. The Lessons

This is a tricky one. For students looking to learn a particular skill, or improve or work upon a technique, for instance, it might be a good idea to take individual classes. In such a case, book back-to-back lessons (it is good if your students see you teaching other students).

If for instance, you get a few students wanting to learn how to play the guitar, or work on a particular skill, it will most definitely be better to group them into one single class. You could even offer a class-discount to students, the more students in a class, the less each student has to pay.

It might also be a good idea to offer something like a ‘distant learning program’ to students willing to learn the guitar from you, but are geographically far away. Skype-based lessons are gaining popularity, and it might be a good idea to look into offering lessons to students from other parts of the country, or even international students!

6. Payments

Be very strict about this, your guitar teaching business is precisely that: a business. Businesses have strict rules about payments, and therefore you need to have stringent payment policies.

You can offer a couple of trial lessons to new students, but the first thing you should do is make it a policy for having students – new and old – to pay for all lessons in advance. What you could do is divide lessons according to proficiency, style, skills, or songs (like many online guitar learning websites do), and offer lessons as packages – where the more lessons a student buys, the bigger the discount he gets. In addition, use your classroom management system to send out an automated email whenever a student reaches his package limit.

A cancellation policy should also be an essential part of your payment and lessons policy. Provide students with free ‘trial’ lessons, and something like a 3-day/72-hour opt-out time period.

Draft a lesson-policy of sorts by putting all this information on paper, and hand a copy of this ‘contract’ to all new students for them to sign it. This allows you to cover all your bases, while projecting a professional image of yourself in the process. Remember, if you take the business aspects of your teaching seriously, so will your students.

Good luck! And do leave us your feedback in the comments.

Practical Tips for Overcoming Stage Fright

You might be surprised to know that stage fright is a common occurrence among musicians, including guitarist and guitar players. Luckily, it is one of those things which – with a certain amount of practice, the right attitude, and of course patience – can be overcome quite easily.

The first part of the process is establishing that you have a problem. As a musician, it is important to acknowledge that you have a problem, and that you need to do something about it.

Once you’ve acknowledged that stage fright is a problem that is holding your back, affecting your ability to play the guitar well, and limiting the level of your performance on the stage, you can start taking concrete steps in order to overcome this issue.

The first step towards conquering or fighting stage fright as a musician, a guitar player, or just about anything else, is knowing your stuff! As a guitar player, make it a point to get an ample amount of practice well before getting up on that stage. If you know your stuff, if you’ve spent enough time going through the material, you’ll be able to deliver a flawless performance, and trust me on this, it WILL do wonders for your confidence as well. Besides, you’re less likely to muck things up this way, which is a big advantage to have on the stage!

I also recommend that musicians and guitar players concentrate on the job at hand. If you’re focused on your guitar, if you’re focused on playing well and delivering a great performance, you’ll do just that! Don’t think about insignificant stuff such as how you look on stage, and what people in the crowd think about you; the simple fact is that it’s you who’s up on the stage, not them, so none of it matters.

It is absolutely essential to relax when up on the stage. Take a few deep breaths as soon as you get up there, take time to compose yourself, and remain calm. The good thing about fear (if you can call it that) is that it’s a body-reflex, which means that you can easily overcome it. When fear kicks in, your breathing become short and quick. Try controlling your breathing by slowing it down and taking a few deep breaths. Try easing up before sitting down (or standing up, for that matter) to play; develop a warm-up regime that loosens you up.

One of the best things that I can tell you through this write-up is that it’s actually okay to make mistakes. Yes, you read that right, making mistakes is perfectly fine. As a guitar player, there’s no way that you can deliver a flawless performance, and you’re bound to make a few minor errors so it is better to accept it in the first place. Heck, even the best guitar players out there – the biggest names in the world – have made mistakes on the stage. Angus Young from ACDC actually tripped over a wire and fell on the stage during one of his signature on-stage dances!

One thing about making mistakes – or allowing yourself to make a mistake on-stage – is that when it does happen, you’ll probably end up exaggerating it in your head. The truth however is that 99 out of a 100 people in the audience wouldn’t even know you mucked up, because none of those people are musicians, and hence won’t know that you hit the wrong chord, for instance.

One strategy that you can use to slowly build some confidence is to start small; try playing in front of a couple of close friends for starters and work your way up from there, building confidence as you go along.

Make sure that you reach the venue well before time and getting a feel of things. Not only does it leave a good impression on the people whom you’ll be working with, it also allows you to get comfy with the stage and its surroundings, and get rid of some of the nervousness in the process.

As a musician, opportunities to play the guitar, perform solo or with a band, and play in front of an audience (who actually paid to see you play!) usually don’t come very often. Take this opportunity to strut your stuff and show everyone how good you really are. Above all, try having a bit of fun while you’re at it! Enjoy it up there, because like what I said, not everyone gets opportunities like these!

Good luck, and I honestly hope that you rock it out on that stage!

Best Electric Guitars Money Can Buy Under $500

I won’t get into any long, needless intros here. Instead, here’s a list of some of the best electric guitars money can buy, all of which can be had for under $500 which makes them excellent bang-for-the-buck:

Epiphone SG

The SG-Special retails for around $170 on MusiciansFriend, and it won’t be an exaggeration if I were to say that it is one of the best rock guitars in the market for less than $200 right now! Anyone who’s ever played the guitar knows what an outstanding machine the Gibson SG really is, and it’s ‘smaller’ brother – the Epiphone SG is no exception. Alder/maple body, rosewood fingerboard, maple necks, 22 frets, chrome machinery, and above all, the ‘SG-experience’ in less than half the price!

Ibanez RG370DX

While the RG370DX usually retails for a tad above $500, you can find it for less than that at many online retailers. And if you’re lucky enough to do that, you’ll not only be lucky enough to get one of the best deals ever, you’ll have a brilliant instrument in your possession! 24 Jumbo frets, Rosewood fingerboard, 3 pickups, maple ‘Wizard III’ 3-piece neck, basswood body (yes!), and a lead-guitar player’s dream! All things considered, the Ibanez RG370DX is an absolutely brilliant guitar for new and seasoned rock guitar players out there – maybe even the best standard guitar in production right now!

Epiphone Les Paul Standard

For any true and pure rock-and-roll guitar player, nothing comes even close to the Gibson Les Paul experience. However the cheapest Les Paul will set you back by much more than $500. What if I were to tell you that you could get the Les Paul experience in much less than $500? Yes, because that is precisely what the Epiphone Les Paul Standard does! This guitar is perhaps as close as it gets to the real thing – you get the same signature sound, tone, playability and look, and above all, it doesn’t put a serious hole in your pocket either.

Squier Standard Telecaster

Telecaster made by Fender – not unlike Gibson-manufactured Les Pauls – can end up costing an arm-and-a-leg! However a new Squier Telecaster can be picked up for as low as a couple of hundred dollars, and like the Epiphone Les Paul, gives Fender fans an experience that is close as it gets to the real thing! And that too without costing a fortune. The Standard Squier Tele has an agathis body with a maple neck and rosewood fretboard, oh and of course, come with a selection of the same signature Telecaster finishes! At the end of the day, you go home with a $200 Telecaster that has a great reputation among professional guitar players (just ask Jeff Healey and Sheryl Crow!), which is as good as it gets!

Squier Stratocaster

Now we’re getting to the good stuff! I’m a big, big Stratocaster fan! In fact I blindly recommend a strat to beginner guitar player and just about anyone looking for a quality axe. However like most of the guitars in this list, a Fender Strat costs good money – in fact, the cheapest Strat that you’ll find will cost around or more than $600. However a Squier Strat usually starts at around $200, and the Standard Squier Strat – with an Agathis body, Rosweood/Maple fretboard with dot-position inlays, 3 Alnico pickups and the signature sound, tone and playability of the Strat and that 60s-style headstock – can be picked up for $200 on most e-retailers.

ESP LTD EC-256 Electric

The first thing that will strike you when you look at this guitar is its finish, especially if the one you have comes in an aged honey burst finish. This particular ESP looks unlike anything I’ve ever seen – gorgeous! Even though the design is an obvious Les Paul rip-off. With a retail of around 400 bucks, LTD EC-256 is a moderately-priced marvel. It has a single-cut LP-shaped mahogany body, rosewood fingerboard, ESP tuners and humbuckers (which sound fantastic when paired up with an equally-able amplifier), and one of the things that stood out for me was the fact that this little ESP is an extremely versatile instrument, equally capable of playing rock, metal, blues, and a variety of other genres.

Right, so 6 excellent guitar under $500, tough choice when it comes to picking up the best of the lot.

Which of these would you pick up and why? Do leave us a comment. In addition, if you think we missed out on a great guitar under $500, let us know through the comments below!