It’s Not Just About the Money

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Image by TW Collins via Flickr

 

Am I rich?

Yes, of course.

Before you get the wrong idea of 100+ feet yachts, lux­ury cars, pri­vate jets, Caribbean island vaca­tions, Crystal for gar­gling, white pow­der to coat the inside of my nose with, etc... — that’s not what I meant.

I’m talk­ing about the intan­gi­ble riches, the joy and sat­is­fac­tion of doing some­thing you love and are pas­sion­ate about.

Personally, I feel really for­tu­nate to be able to make a liv­ing with music. No soul-sucking cubi­cle job for me.

Contrary to the cliché of the starv­ing musi­cian, there’s actu­ally a wealth of options avail­able for gen­er­at­ing the cov­eted pieces of paper with the dead pres­i­dents on it.

Just to give you an idea — here’s how I’ve made money with music in the past:

Actually, quite a long list. And there might even be a cou­ple of odd tasks I’ve already forgotten.

Before you say, “Yeah right, judg­ing in band con­tests, that’ll really bring in the dough,” remem­ber, I didn’t say any­thing about impres­sive amounts of money with any given activity.

And...

This post is not about the money.
(There’ll be future posts deal­ing with more hands-on music busi­ness related topics.)

So what do I mean?

Pride and Stock Music

I license many of my com­po­si­tions on stock music sites. One of my top sell­ers is a jin­gle style track called “On the Run.” Depending on the stock site and their vary­ing pay­out per­cent­ages, I get between $1.50 to $5 for a single-project license sold.

Don’t get me wrong, as pocket change-ish it might seem, it’s still nice to get com­pen­sated for your com­po­si­tions. Even at the $1.50 level it does add up over time. (A stock music site PayPal com­mis­sion pay­ment came in handy when I wanted to pur­chase the WordPress FlexSqueeze theme license I’m using for AdvancingMusician.com.)

But there’s other rewards besides the money.

It’s reward­ing to receive pos­i­tive feed­back and com­pli­ments from cus­tomers as well as peer com­posers. I felt a strong sense of pride when the track became the fea­tured item at AudioJungle, a large stock music site.

And what’s really excit­ing for any com­poser is to expe­ri­ence his track in action.

Space Rush iPhone Game

Here’s the YouTube promo video for the iPhone game Space Rush. Game devel­oper Nick Patrick adapted the clas­sic “Falldown” from the TI-83 and ported and refined it for the iPhone.

Have a look:

So I’ve made $1.50 in com­mis­sions for sell­ing the sin­gle project license for my track “On the Run” — and that’s cool. But what’s been worth even more to me was the kick I got out of see­ing how Nick used my track in con­text, giv­ing me a sense of indi­rectly con­tribut­ing to his own creation.

Looks like a really cool game. I don’t have an iPhone. Yet. But when I do get me one, it is a must-have down­load to me. Hey, the promo video used my track — I almost have no choice here.

Actually, there’s already an updated ver­sion of the app avail­able for download.

You can down­load a lite ver­sion of the game for free:
Space Rush Lite

The full ver­sion is avail­able for $0.99:
Space Rush

My Plea to You

Please, should you ever hap­pen to use some other artist’s work, a song, photo, poem, what­ever — even if you had to pay for it — please do give some feed­back or let the artist know how you used his work.

Don’t under­es­ti­mate the effect this can have. You could pro­vide the moti­va­tional fuel for the artist’s next creation.

Related posts:

1. Space Night — A Tribute Music Video

Tagged with: AudioJungle • iPhone • making money • Space Rush • stock music

Filed under: Business

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