Money-making strategies for musicians

Knowledge base
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An old proverb claims money to be the root of all evil. It’s a perfectly valid choice to keep your art separate from your money-making activities. However, there are only so many hours in a day – while the making, recording, and distributing of music all have costs in terms of time and material resources.

If you’re here, chances are you’re looking for ways to at least break even – and, hopefully, be able to live from your music altogether. So, here are some more or less established pathways for turning your art into other forms of value.

The more of these you try, the more familiar you will become with how the extant media ecosystem works, and thus the better you will be able to establish more equitable alternatives.

  1. Mutual aid. It’s not just about soliciting donations. Establishing a network of people with shared values can be essential for surviving capitalism. Bringing to the table the music to express those values can gain you the moral and material support to move forward.

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  2. Sell tracks and albums. Listeners can buy music directly, either as a digital download or on a physical medium. In the digital realm you are relying on the listener not choosing to obtain your music for free. Physical releases can make for memorable artifacts in their own right.

    • Online:
      • Faircamp is a static site generator that allows you to put your releases behind custom payment links (“soft paycurtain”).
      • Mirlo is a user-friendly space to help artists sell digital music, receive financial support, manage mailing lists, and share with their supporters. Details of our collaboration with Mirlo can be discussed in the Projects > Mirlo category
      • Bandcamp is an established player in this space, with a relatively decent ethical stance.
    • Offline:
    • TODO add more links here…

  3. Rent music. Subscription-based services are popular and convenient; however, as oligopolists, they keep the lion’s share of the profits, plus get to define the market and the expectations of the listener.

    • Bandwagon is an ethical discovery engine and streaming platform for your music. Its business model is TBD 2025. The following forum category is dedicated to our collaboration with them: Projects > Bandwagon
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  4. Play live. Use music as a lead generator to sell merch and concert tickets. Depending on location, access to larger venues may be monopolized by companies such as Eventim and Live Nation – but nothing stops you from contacting unorthodox venues directly.

    • The Events section of this forum enables members to announce their live dates!
    • Gancio is a platform for standalone/federated event calendars outside of centralized social networks.
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  5. Play covers. While few public gatherings are as welcoming to original art as they ought to be, having live musicians play at a function is a traditional status symbol. Put together a set with your personal spin on it, get that money, and reinvest in your thing.

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  6. Play DJ sets. Use the taste you’ve cultivated as a musician to share your favorite other people’s music with the crowd – then blow people’s minds by mixing your original work into the set.

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  7. Make soundtracks. Join forces with a cinematic project, a videogame, an art installation, or another intermedia endeavour, to bring an immersive sonic experience to a less cornered market.

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  8. Sell stock/background music. Similar to soundtracks, but with a more commodified relationship. Submit your music where people can buy it for their project wholesale.

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  9. Sell beats. Your beats and backing tracks can enable lyricists to get the word out to a larger audience.

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  10. Sell building blocks. Sample packs and synth presets help beginners and pros alike to get started more quickly.

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  11. Teach music lessons. With high-quality video conferencing and prosumer gear, teaching music online becomes viable. Help bring a learner up to speed who may be unable to find a good teacher in their immediate area.

    • Jitsi Meet is the premier FOSS P2P videoconferencing tool. It’s a simple webpage, no downloads necessary! Many instances of Jitsi Meet are run by volunteers around the Net:
      • Here’s a list of Jitsi servers by :cat_face: CHATONS :cat_face: which you can try.
      • And if you find yourself paralyzed by the choice, you can always have jitsi.random-redirect.de pick one for you (their full list is on GitHub)
      • Note that some, but not all instances of Jitsi may require login with a social account. To skip that, just try different ones until you come across one that doesn’t. (Once you find one, don’t abuse it – instead, if you find it helpful, it’s a good idea to donate to the org that hosts it!)
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  12. Obtain grants. Trusting the market as final arbiter can end up turning the planet into a blob of grey goo. Thankfully, various public and private institutions alike realize this, and offer funding and residences for artists who aren’t too keen on playing the music industry game. Instead, you get to play the art world game – which may be a better fit depending on what you’re after.

  13. Patronage. Do like the classics did and convince a person of considerable means that your art is a benefit for the world and a laundromat for their conscience – probably the second most ethically fraught way of sustaining your music after literal trapping. More practically, platforms like Patreon enable you to collect regular donations from regular people who believe in your art.

  14. Run a studio or rehearsal room. If the gear acquisition syndrome has gotten to you, operating a space that allows others to benefit from your expertise and tooling is a way to recoup costs as well as build community.

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  15. Go meta. In a world where social media captures everyone’s attention, some form of self-promotion is essential for getting off the ground with any of the above options. But streaming, vlogging, or podcasting about your creative process can also be turned into a source of revenue.

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Promotion strategies
Free at the point of use: the Market as distributed parasite
Free at the point of use: the Market as distributed parasite
Knowledge base index
2

(Working title).

Context, background, etc.;

As first brought up by @Mel in Funding for musicians & devs and requested by @icaria36 at Free at the point of use: the Market as distributed parasite - #7 by icaria36 : here’s a skeleton for a Knowledge base page introducing people to ways for monetizing their music.

Writing it certainly demonstrated to me how little I know about the practicalities of the matter! In my environment of origin there’s hardly any critical mass for anything beyond a toxic mainstream, so I’ve always just considered these… well, next to impossible.

Still, I’ve had the chance to try some of them, and if it worked at all it worked much better than expected!

Thus, at this point what I’ve written is just a general overview. I hope we’ll be able to collect more concrete information and directions of research for these options in the upcoming days.

:scroll: in 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..

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  • UPDATE: added Faircamp, Mirlo, Bandwagon, Bandcamp, vinylrecorder, Liberapay, Patreon. ppl involved with projects please review wording

  • UPDATE: added Gancio and link to Events category

  • TODO: add tools listed at faircamp/ALTERNATIVES.md at main - simonrepp/faircamp - Codeberg.org ?

    • Gotta review and itemize.
    • Might eventually split off #1 into, same as for grants, but into 2 topics:
      • “ways to sell tracks on the net”
      • “ways to have cool merch”

  • UPDATE: added Jitsi Meet for music lessons

  • UPDATE: added some more info about Jitsi instances

  • UPDATE: added OpenCollective

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EDITED: collected all updates so far in my previous post, because Discourse won’t let me post more than 3 updates in a row – who knows what’ll happen when the edit window closes for these (non-wikified) replies…

I guess that means it’s your turn, fellow music lovers! Add your favorite resources to our nascent knowledge base!

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At the risk of splitting hairs, it’s a Bible quote, and often truncated like this. The full verse is;

“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

1 Timothy 6:10, King James version

Money itself is like electricity, a form of power. It can do great harm, especially when concentrated (Wall St trading = high voltage lines), but it’s also an essential input for making many things happen. The problem comes where people prioritise accumulating it over keeping faith with their community.

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Selecteh needs a list of fair patronage platforms defined by the same principles that we define fair distribution platforms:

(…) built by community / cooperative projects with free / open source software and a fair deal for artists and users.

Are these ok? I haven’t looked at them in detail.

Discarded:

Any options missing?

Also do these distribution platforms include patronage / donation ways other than buying albums, or integrations that artists could enable?

Please help me come up with a good v1.0 list and I will update the top post accordingly.

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Comradery is a digital platform where creators can receive monthly payments from supporters, and optionally give those supporters exclusive access to posts and media.

What makes Comradery different is we are a worker cooperative democratically owned and controlled equally by all the creators in our organization (that means you!). Our philosophy is ‘one worker, one vote’, where each creator owns a non sellable share of the cooperative, participates in democratic decision making, governance, and day-to-day operation tasks.

Comradery’s structure is inspired by the democratic organization of rank-and-file led unions. Our goal is to be a resource and leadership opportunity to any creators, activists, and cooperative organizations who share our mission.

Comradery rejects the “hypergrowth” paradigm of the tech industry. Instead, we focus on sustainable growth that is guided by our community principles. Below are details on how our organization works. These details explore how you can be a part of Comradery as a creator and member-owner of our organization.

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I didn’t know about Comradery, thank you. Is the platform open source?

(Is not being open source a blocker in general? true question)

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Ko-fi?

If information online is correct, they are a small limited company in the UK who received $190K in funding (which is not a crazy amount per se). But a regular company aiming to make profit, no community / cooperative driven, not open source. Looks like it should be removed.

Liberapay

French non-profit organization and open source platform. Good.

Open Collective

Started as a for profit company in the US, since 2024 is a non-profit organization still based in the US. Open source platform. Good.

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I’ve seen people using buymeacoffee.com. Don’t know much about it. There’s a few others mentioned in the comments here.

What all these platforms do is basically the same. They provide an integration with 1 or more payment processor, like Stripe or PayPal, and build easy-to-use features on top of it, like one-off and recurring payments. One could argue they’re an artifact of Web 2.0 practice, where people host their work on one corporate platform, and then have a micropatronage account on another, because the primary platform doesn’t pay creators, or is fleecing them.

Fair hosting services can have their own integrations and micropatronage functions, and only take a fair commission when processing payments. So arguably, an account on a separate micropatronage platform isn’t really needed. For instance, if you’re using Ghost to host Selecteh (or WP+WooCommerce), these functions are built in.

I can’t find source code, but it seems to be a new project. They may have plans to publish source once they’ve got their feet under them, and the code has stabilized somewhat.

To find source code for a web service, I usually look for a link on the homepage to a code forge (usually GritHub for now), or for one that says something like "developers’, and see if it’s there. Or for any mention of code license(s) on the site. It’s usually considered a selling point, so not too hard to find.

Failing that, especially for new projects, a web search for “[name of project] source code license” usually finds the repo. No results using either of those methods usually means it’s proprietary, at least for now. Although to be sure, you could always contact them and ask.

GNU.org has an essay that explores this question as it relates to network services. In a nutshell; it’s complicated.

I think it makes sense to prefer services that publish full source code, when they’re available. That way if the service operator goes evil, or gets bought out by evil, or there’s some other serious problem with it, the community has the option to set up a new service using the same code. For example, LiberaPay began as a fork of GratiPay, which is now defunct.

But for as long as the overall behaviour of service operators makes them seem like allies, I don’t think proprietary code is a showstopper. Especially when they’re just getting started.

People are often put off applying a free license to their code because they assume it obliges them to run a public issue tracker, review drive-by patches, and so on. All of which increases their workload and the risk of attracting spiky people into their workspaces.

This assumption is wrong. Using free licenses doesn’t oblige developers to make development open to public participation (Android isn’t, for example). But apparently this is what the phrase “Open Source” now implies to many people. So they drag their heels.

I’m not aware of any free license that even requires publishing code. Technically, you just have to make it available to anyone you distribute the software to, if they ask for it.

Obviously publishing code avoids that correspondence work, but you can make your code public without making your project tools accessible to anyone outside your team. Or publish it on a static site, that gets updated every time the code in a private repo changes.

So I encourage anyone running an ethical web service to choose a license, and publish their code. For transparency and accountability, and to put people’s mind at rest.

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Does Patreon count?
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Another music focused Patreon style platform is Distrosub: Distrosub Artist Manifesto - Our Commitment to Independent Artists

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From their FAQ:

Do I need to upload music?

Yes, you need to upload your music to Distrosub so fans can listen and subscribe. You maintain full ownership of your music and can upload tracks, albums, and mixtapes.

Ufff… Another place to upload music too.

What I’m learning with this very interesting conversation plus Making your own payment processor is that the situation is still quite murky when it comes to recommend platforms as “social”. For Selecteh, I think I’ll pass for now, link to artists’ music and website, and that’s it.

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Mirlo lets you do recurring subscriptions as well as fundraisers and merch (on and off platform).

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