Nightmare Difficulty Side Hustle: Selling My Music: Episode 1
Crowded market? Check. No experience? Check. Let's do this!
Welcome to Nightmare Difficulty Side Hustle: Selling My Music, where I embark on the daunting journey of monetizing my music for fun and profit, even though I know absolutely nothing about it. In this publication, I will share my attempts, strategies, business considerations & design choices AND actual results of my mission to monetize music as a “side hustle” business.
If you decide to follow along, you’ll either get a valueable playbook that may prove useful for fellow composers, musicians and sound designers. OR it will act as a sad warning to all future music biz adventurers. Only one way to find out!
A quick intro: from tech founder to hobbyist musician
I used to run a tech startup, which I sold in 2018. While this exit didn’t make me filthy rich, I suddenly found myself fairly wealthy & FREE by my own previous standards.
Besides the amazing detail of becoming a joyful full-time dad, the one ultra-obsessive hobby I picked up after selling the company was making music.
It was a childhood dream come true: for the first time in my life, I had both the money and some spare time (modulo full-time parenthood) to pursue music and to invest in my music making "capabilities" - and invest in it I did.
In my student days, I would eat cheaply for a few months just to buy a crappy mic and the smallest Ableton Live license available. Now, as a micro-retired entrepreneur, I could fully indulge in gear acquisition syndrome and got myself whatever I wanted and "needed" to pursue my "musical goals”:
The point of making music - at least to me - has mostly been absolutely self-contained: I simply enjoy playing my growing modular synthesizer, discovering strange worlds of sound and timbre, compose and refine polyrhythmic sequences, and engaging with some of the most interesting niche communites on the planet. I haven’t really published any real music outside of my immediate network of friends. In other words: it's a fun hobby.
That being said, I am a business person at heart, and while I am working on a more serious new venture, I couldn't help but ask myself: is there a way to monetize my music, in a part-time fashion? Wouldn't it be a fun challenge to try and sell my music? How hard can it be?
Of course, every ounce of business sense that I have developed over the years of running a company tells me that this is the an incredibly stupid idea, and at least so for the following reasons:
For all I know, the economic value and viability of an activity is inversely correlated with the attractiveness of that activity. In other words, the most valueable things to solve for in business are things that only few people enjoy doing. Given that, there may be no worse respective setup than music.
Thus, because music is fun and musicians are "popular", supply vastly outstrips demand, causing significant pressure no prices: there are millions of talented musicians whose sole dream is to make money with their music, and the vast majority of these, including many folks much more talented and skilled than I will ever have, fail miserably at it, even when trying full-time.
Why should I, by most standards not a hugely talented music producer, do better at this part-time than folks who work at this every waking hour of their life?
Further, I have zero experience in this field - while I’ve closed millions in sales as a sales person / CEO / founder, all of this was in B2B (i. e. selling to other, mostly larger businesses). I don’t know anything about the music business and very little about B2C (unless you count the few dozen sales of self-drawn maps I sold in elementary school.)
In summary, it would appear that trying to monetize my music as a "side hustle" is going to pose a Nightmare Difficulty challenge and will by all likelihood be met with abject failure. Further, even if I were to be successsful, there would be a risk of ruining the joy of music once this sphere of my life collides with any and all aspects of business. Hmm.
Naturally, and in light of these valid concerns, I decided to give it a try, and in this substack, I am documenting the entire process behind it. May it act as a playbook or warning for future sound business adventurers!
Join me at your own peril:
Finding the right angle: streams vs sales
As with most things, there are a bunch of different ways to monetize music. The first step in this journey is then to discard most of the options and identify an initial approach that comes with the highest odds of success - all within the following conditions & goals I've set for myself:
Must be doable extremely part-time, must ideally have a passive component and not be too dependent on a single platform, ideally selling directly to customers. Must be done with music I enjoy to make. Must have “creating music” as its core activity, so I can’t just pivot into an “accounting for musicians” app. As I said: nightmare difficulty.
The initial milestone I am targeting is ramen-profitability, i. e. 1000 EUR in monthly revenue, which I want to hit within 3 months of pursuing this. This number will make one fourth of my friends go “wow, when did he become such an unambitious loser?”, while the remaining three fourth will consider me a delusional dork, making it a possible sweet spot for a quick’n’dirty initial target/goal.
In terms of monetization, the naïve breadth-first options I'm seeing are as follows, along with my personal assessment of each option:
Become an actual "artist musician":
As a an actual musician, I would publish my music through a record label (or on my own) and generate revenues through streaming and live shows.
ASSESSMENT: DISCARD. With the exception of playing live occasionally, this isn't a part-time option at all. It is likely the most crowded space in music, and streaming revenues are atrociously low: I'd need about 300k monthly streams to hit my 1000 EUR / month on Spotify.
For scale, one of my favorite bands - Animal Collective - aka one of the most influential indie groups of all time, does 600k Spotify streams per month. WT…Nope.Sell royalty-free music as a producer:
Large productions in film, gaming and media often work with composers and producers to get exclusive music for their productions. Virtually everyone else is using royalty-free music, wherein you either use a subscription model or a one-off payment to purchase a license to use a single piece of music for your show/film/game. The benefit for buyers is that it is much cheaper than commissioning exlusive tracks, while the benefits for producers is that they can sell the same piece of music many many times.
There are a bunch of existing platforms in this space, which seem to have been extremely successful in raising big rounds of venture funding: for example, Epidemic Sound recently raised 450M EUR at a 1.4B valuation. Enough for me to conclude that there’s a large and growing market for royalty-free background music.
ASSESSMENT: PURSUE! This option is immediately much more appealing, as it in theory provides a strong passive component (re-sell a single piece of music multiple times once it is published) and seems a lot more sales-driven: instead of "selling" individual streams for fractions of a cent, you sell individual pieces of music for a reasonable price (typically somewhere between 10-500 USD/EUR, contigent on the type of license).Sell exclusive commissions as a composer / producer:
As mentioned above, some productions (mostly larger) will commission exclusive pieces of music. I'm not very knowledgable about the actual processes involved, but my base case hunch is that this will often be done by firms (i. e. production teams, made up of composers, producers, mastering engineers etc.).
The upside of this approach is that commissions should in theory be better paid, however, you don't get to sell them multiple times. A clear downside in my context is the lack of passiveness: outside of distribution, there is basically no "digital advantage" / business multiplication happening. It's very traditional, active work.
ASSESSMENT: EXPLORE. While on first blush this doesn't seem like it would fit my self-inflicted conditions above, I think it would be fun to work on commissions, and maybe there is a way to innovate around the model to set it up as a hybrid between royalty-free and commissioned, exclusive work?
Doesn’t everyone want some exclusivity, and would they compromise on it assuming that they get a better deal than they would otherwise?
There’s a decent chance I’ve missed a bunch of less obvious options to monetize music. That’s okay, as option 2 (selling royalty-free music) seems to be satisficing my main conditions for now, and I’ll be switching into depth-first, just-do-it mode.
Next up on “Nightmare Difficulty Side Hustle”, I’ll be looking to launch a royalty-free shop for my music, share details on my initial go-to-market strategy and hopefully will be able to report the first “sale”!
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