In my position as a spinner of plates in the creative industries, I find myself regularly explaining a few things which I think are important for young musicians and creatives to know about. Out of pure laziness, I’ve put a list here so that I can send them this instead. So here you go, here’s how to make money in the music industry.

1. Gig fees

“We’ll get out there and play a few gigs and use the money for recording”

It’s a great fantasy, but it’s getting harder and harder to pull a profit from gigging at a pub level, especially if you want to do original material. If you’re honest with yourself about how much your music career is costing in terms of equipment and equipment maintenance, petrol, rehearsal studio fees and hours worked then it’s not the funding mechanism that you might think it is. In most cases you’re probably working a day job in order to pay for your music job. Depressingly, you might be surprised how long that remains true for, I can tell you the bars that many of the “successes” of the local scene work in.

There’s a movement to try and ensure that venues and promotors don’t stiff musicians on dodgy ticket splits and “pay to play” deals. The truth is that at the lower levels, even the gigs where you are getting paid - you’re running at a loss. If you’re a 4 piece band that gets £100 for playing the local ‘Slug and Lettuce’ you probably think you are doing quite well, but £25 each doesn't cover your costs. It’s not sustainable and it’s important not to pretend you are in profit.

All is not lost. If you accept that you are running your gigs at a loss, you can look at it from the other end of the telescope. How much am I paying and what am I paying for?

First and foremost, is it a fun adventure? - the best gigs I’ve ever played cost me quite a lot of money. Does it build a new audience for you? Slug and lettuce in your home town at £25 profit might be worth far less than a decent gig in your neighbouring town at a £25 loss. Is there cross promotion surrounding the gig? You should ask promotors/bars/venues/bands where they are promoting and which media they are talking to. Your photo in the paper, song on the radio or a social media narrative might be worth more than that £25 profit to play to 20 of your mates.

As a ballpark, I would say that musicians should be getting £100-150 per head per gig to break even, otherwise you’d better be really enjoying it or there should be additional indirect payment via one of the methods below. Without being well known, the only place you are likely to get those fees is wedding and function work, but my word of warning would be to keep an eye on your priorities and objectives. Before you know it, you’re arriving home in the early hours of the morning and sleeping it off the next day for the benefit of playing Proud Mary to some drunk bridesmaids for not much more than minimum wage.

2. Physical Sales

Physical sales can be a whole blog on its own. Depending on how many people you are bringing to your brand, merch(cool industry speak for merchandise) can still be an important income to make gigs worthwhile. There was a time when even amateur bands were gigging with boxes of CD’s and could expect to sell enough copies to double their gig fees at most gigs. Since that time sales have went down as costs have went up. I see bands still having success with CD’s but surely it’s a dead format by 2021? I wouldn't know where to play a CD these days.

It’s all about knowing your audience. Vinyl is expensive to produce, but if you have a following in the right demographic it will be your biggest money maker. Just be aware of inventory costs. There’s 100’s of bands with 480 vinyl albums in languishing their mum’s garage because there was a special deal on pressing 500 in bulk. Vinyl can also take months to produce, so to make it worthwhile might take some advance planning.

T-Shirts require lots of different sizes, and are your audience really the T-shirt wearing type?

Posters are fun and can be relatively cheap - the gig might have a poster anyway and it can be a good memory, but it’s ephemeral. Does anyone want to buy a poster from my 2016 tour? There’s only 95 left.

You can get clever and creative in this area. If you know someone who can print t-shirts or posters, or design merch - hook up with them. You can promote their Etsy account and they can promote you.

3. Online Sales

So far I’ve pointed out that you’re not going to make money from gigs or physical sales, to add to that, one of the biggest disappointments is how little money you’re going to make from online sales. i.e. Spotify is the Devil

20 or so years ago it was a wonderful fantasy that music had been democratised. Everyone had access to the recording and distribution means. You could make music in your bedroom and then distribute it to an increasing audience of adoring fans. The mansion in Beverly Hills and the stadium tour were in the post. Sadly we’ve weathered a period where we battled formats and platforms and methods and ended up in a situation where the music industry is controlled by a few key players who are every bit as corporate as the world that they replaced. There’s a reminder of this every time you see 0.0003p arrive in your account when you get a Spotify play.

All is not lost though. Assuming you don’t have enough clout to fight the system from without, you should do what you can to take as much advantage of it as you can from within. The only way to make money from online sales is to accept that they are a component of your career/hobby rather than the be all and end all. Whether you like it or not, your audience are now accessing your music on Spotify/Amazon Music/Apple Music/Youtube so you should learn to take advantage of them as much as possible.

Spotify(followed hotly on it’s heels by Amazon Music and Apple Music) is a music discovery platform, so the advantage isn’t in sales, but trying to play the algorithms so that your music becomes associated with similar songs in your genre and you can ride their coattails to a certain extent. More about that here.

Apart from that its just a case of spread betting. Be on all the platforms and keep up to date with what you can do to keep the numbers up. Online sales are part of the greater whole, so if you are consistently playing the social media game and growing your numbers and staying active, then the activity you see in your online sales will reflect this.

After around 15 years of putting content on the internet and getting 0.0003p every time someone interacts with it, my collective accounts make me roughly enough money to pay a month of rent each year.

One additional point of interest is that it can be surprisingly easy to get into the iTunes Charts. Depending on the time of year and the genre that you are producing under, targeted sales can result in some fun social media which can then drive sales.

4. PRS/Writing/Sync

Assuming you are a musician who writes their own material, PRS is one of the main reasons I am writing this article. I am astounded how many musicians I have to explain this to and how many musicians have been “meaning to get round to signing up”

PRS stands for Performing Rights Society. There is at least one in each country an due to a few strange quirks of history, their job is to collect money on behalf of people who write music. It costs a one off fee of £100 to sign up at www.prsformusic.com. Then you register your songs(and their ISRC codes if they have one). Then when that song is played(it doesn't matter who by) you get money. The amount of money you get is based on algorithms which no one understands but basically the more people hear the music you wrote the more money you are paid.

This happens in several ways but the main ways are you get played on the radio in which case you get paid automatically or you tell the PRS website that you played your songs at a gig and they are registered like that.

So…. if there’s 4 of you in the band and two of you are the song writers you play a gig with 10 songs to 100 people. You go online and you say what you played and when and then every quarter PRS send you money. It’s only a few pounds here and a few pounds there at first, but if you growing your brand in all the other areas then it soon mounts up and it gives you an extra wee carrot for getting a support slot in front of a bigger audience. You get a statement through every quarter and it’s fun finding out that you made 7p cos you were played in an exercise class in Estonia.

Through this method you are a paid writer. It doesn't matter who plays your songs, so if you have a teenage singer songwriter cousin doing the circuit who is a great wee singer but hasn’t got great songs, you can have them go out and earn you both money by collaborating on some writing. The same goes for any collaboration that you do. If you are asked to help put together someone’s recording(As a musician or arranger or producer) you can raise it as a discussion as to whether you are getting a percentage of the PRS or not. On the right project, this can be more lucrative than your hourly rate and it can pay you for decades. It can also be a good thing to spread around so that everyone has a vested interest in the project’s success.

Once you’ve realised that in many cases writers are paid better than performing musicians, it can put a new spring in your step or at least give you an additional revenue stream on top of the £25 you got paid to play the slug and lettuce.

If you want to level up this skill then the doors you are looking to open are that of ‘Sync’. Sync(synchronise) refers to getting your music into TV/Film/Radio. Sync agents and publishers are tasked with hooking your music up with these opportunities. It might result in more 7p’s from an exercise class in Estonia or it might result in six figures when your song gets played in the latest blockbuster. This is one of the biggest revenue streams for music worldwide. I’m no expert, but if you want to dip your toe in then google “how to get a sync agent?”.

There are various services online that let you upload your music. Some charge a subscription fee and some take a cut of your PRS(so they take a cut of your gig at the Slug and Lettuce). You should read the small print very carefully, but in general the big money making opportunities are hard to get unless you have a few doors opened by people further up the tree. You are also competing with people who have spent years learning the skills required to quickly write and record high quality music that meets a brief. Good luck!!

A musician who regularly gigs(in front of an audience), writes and records should be making at least a couple of months rent each year from PRS. More importantly it’s where the big bucks are as you grow your brand.

This is relevant to the UK. If you are reading from somewhere else, check here:

5. PPL/Performing/Recording

PPL is analogous to PRS, except it’s for the people that perform on a track(not live in the slug and lettuce but on a recording). This one is free! No one off £100 fee, so you have even less excuse not to be doing this, yet even fewer people know about it.

So the writer(could be you, might not be) has a PPL writer account. They register their tune that they’ve recorded along with it’s ISRC code. You have a PPL performer account. You register that you played bass on it, or glockenspiel or Backing vocals and maracas. Then when that recording(recording, not song) gets played somewhere(i.e the radio) there’s a wee bit of money that gets paid into your account.

By way of example, it doesn’t matter who wrote the song. So if someone decides to ask you to play on a Beatles cover. You record it. It gets uploaded somewhere, it gets an ISRC code. You played on it, you get money. Paul McCartney gets the PRS, but you get the PPL.

This little bit of knowledge makes it more lucrative to present yourself as a ‘Recording musician’. Even better, you cut out the middle man and offer to record yourself. This means writers working on a project know that they can send a track through to you and you can send a professional stem(single instrument recording) back. This isn’t essential, but it makes you more attractive as a potential performer.

2020 brought us lockdown and this was an area where lots of musicians had to diversify into. The more value for money you can provide your client the better. What can start out as a word of mouth revenue stream can turn into your most lucrative pursuit with a devoted website etc. Make sure that you see it from the producer or writer’s perspective. There won’t be a huge market for “guitarist who can provide guitar recorded through virtual instruments on their laptop” but there might be for someone who can provide professional recordings of vintage amps etc. Similarly, there will always be a market for drummers that can do a quick turnaround of of a professional recorded drum track.

Play to your strengths. Think about partnering your musical skills or gear with someone else’s recording skills.

The amount of money you can make from here is unlimited depending on where the tune ends up. The benchmark of getting radio play(PPL) is higher than that of playing a gig(PRS). i.e. you can record the greatest guitar solo ever for your teenage cousin’s singer songwriter CD, but until the recording gets played somewhere you don’t make any PPL.

It’s free. what have you got to lose!!

6. Teaching

The traditional means of creatives augmenting their revenue as a writer or performer is to teach. Very few ‘Professional’ classical musicians have the luxury of not also teaching on the side.

This can take a variety of forms. Formal teaching can be a well paid element of a musicians portfolio. There are full time and part time positions in various high schools, colleges and universities. Getting paid work in this area can vary from doing guest lectures and featuring as an expert on panels to having a paid role which requires formal qualifications and training.

Depending on the skill you are looking to impart, you can teach online or privately. There are a variety of websites which hold registers of music teachers and can help facilitate this.

7. Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has become an established means of using the internet to get your customers to pay for a product in advance. This can be a good way of generating recording costs in advance, but it comes with a number of caveats. There are various platforms which allow you to collect money from your audience. They charge different percentages and work with different models, so shop around.

One of the problems with crowdfunding is that it requires some planning. It’s great for front loading your recording costs before the vinyls are printed, but then once you deliver to your customers, you have no revenue stream and lots of vinyl left over. Anyone who was going to buy it bought it in advance and you are unlikely to sell as many at your gigs. Without being able to sell your additional inventory you can’t afford to record new material and the cycle starts all over again. You could offload your surplus to record shops, but they are quite aware that you’ve already saturated the market.

Additionally, crowdfunders can make it look like you are doing better than you are. You publicly raise £10,000 and then the crowdfunding site takes 20% and then you have to pay tax on what you get, but on paper your audience think you have £10,000 to spend and don’t need further support or that you’ve frittered it away. You're less likely to get a good deal from your producer when they know you have a budget of £10k.

Planned properly they can be a wonderful tool for funding recording and touring. They let you gauge the market for merch before you have to pay for it. You can also carry them out periodically and you can learn how much money you can budget for from your audience.

There are also sites such as www.patreon.com which allow you to setup personalised subscription models if that works for your audience.

8. Government Funding

There was a fifty year period where musicians sold vinyls and then tapes and then CD’s and then vinyls again and the revenue was enough to fund the music industry. Outside of this period and in pretty much every other one of the creative arts, art was funded by patronage. Rich people and governments would pay composers and painters and dancers and writers to create art - sometimes with the caveat of pushing a political opinion or agenda.

Due to this period of relative luxury for 50 years, music(especially popular music) has lagged behind all the other areas of the arts in asking for funding and accepting that it’s a key component of revenue.

I spent a decade writing funding proposals for a charity. If lockdown and Covid-19 has been good for nothing else, they have increased the number of musicians who have experience in filling out application forms for funding.

So how do you access that sweet sweet government arts funding?

The first challenge is knowing about it. If you’re serious about working in his area, then you have to understand where the money is coming from. In Scotland it is all administered via a government body called Creative Scotland(www.creativescotland.com). This is a good place to start, you should become familiar with the different parts of their website and find out where new funds are announced. You can also find out who has had money in the past. This gives you an idea of the type of organisations and the level of individuals who receive the funds. Government funding can be a self fulfilling prophecy, so it can be a good idea to get involved in projects which are getting funded. The powers that be from the funding bodies are likely to be attending the events as are other parts of the local industry structure. This can make them valuable as networking events.

Once you’ve found a fund which you think you qualify for, read the eligibility criteria and the brief carefully. Basically you are trying to make someone on the other end’s job easier. If they have created a fund to increase the number 18-25 year old glockenspiel players who are playing Mozart in the slug and lettuce, then demonstrate all those things quite literally. Imagine the person who is awarding the fund to you is defending their actions to their boss. Don’t give them a 35 yr old playing Beethoven on the Xylophone in the Frog and Duck and hope for the best.

A lot of the time the thing that bands are lacking when they apply for funding is momentum. The person awarding you the fund can’t turn to their boss and say “yeah. I really liked their tunes”. They have to be able to say “well, they played here, and they did this, and they featured here in the last 6 months, and we think their career is on an upswing” See it from their perspective and try and see funding as part of larger wave of actions and work.

Funding is a difficult and frustrating world. There’s always someone whose nose is out of joint of when funds are rewarded. I was once part of a band who applied for an ‘Emerging Artist fund” and Supergrass got it. IN 2018!!!! It sucks, but you just have to keep plugging away at it. The good thing about funding is that it opens further doors for you. Someone is able to say to their boss “well this government body put faith in them, so I think we can too”.

If you’re not in Scotland, follow the money. Your local films, music festivals, arts festivals and exhibitions will be partially funded by a funding council. Look out for their logos on the posts and chase them up.

9. Ebay

It’s an inevitability that as a musician you become a specialist in the technology associated with your field. There are very few musicians can make any sort of a living without knowing the difference between an XLR and a Kettle lead(although many lead singers have tried). As a result you unwittingly become an expert in the kit for your job. Many poor musicians will take this further and become experts in getting the most out of this equipment by fixing it.

A lot of people will overlook this skill as nothing unique, but often it means that you are one of the world’s leading experts in one effects pedal, or guitar, or Saxophone valve. You also know how much things are worth on the second hand market and how to fix the common things that go wrong with them.

It can be good fun to keep an eye on places like eBay for the tools of your trade. I have a background in electronics, so it’s easy for me to say, but I have made and saved £1000’s over the years by performing relatively simple fixes and improvements to “broken” equipment. Some of it I keep, some of it I sell.

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, then the second hand market is a wonderful place to test and try things before selling them on if they aren’t for you.

When I’ve had the time to do tutorial videos of fixes, they’ve ended up with a lot more activity than most of my creativity.

My one word of warning is to know when you are beaten and not spend needless time on something that can’t be fixed. I’ve also been banned from fishing music equipment out or skips as I’m passing. The things I’ll do for love!

10.Extra work

This one is a bit left of field, but I’ve had success with it in the past and it can be a great revenue stream for people who can have long periods of free time between busy periods of work or who are able to do work in a big crowd of people sitting in period dress.

Basically in nearly every TV show and film, they need people in the background - extras. Sometimes this is just wallpaper in the background and sometimes it’s a cast of thousands running from space aliens. The TV and film producers approach a specialist casting agency who provide extras based on a brief. You sign up for these “extra agencies”. They send you through offers. You decide if they fit with your schedule. The casting agency send your details to the film and TV producers and if they decide to use you they send you the details. You show up. They pay you.

It can be far from glamorous, but in some cases it can pay quite well. In my experience, the more specific the brief, the higher you are paid, so you kind of have to be in it to win it. When there’s a need for a 6’3” beardy trumpet player in Glasgow then I’m quids in.

The drawback is that you are treated quite badly. You are essentially cattle as far as most of the roles are concerned. There are rules for minimum wages and maximum hours, but if you don’t like long days sitting doing nothing with little to no information about what’s happening then it’s not for you. I’ve sat for 16 hour days ready and waiting to be called on set only to find out after 16 hours of waiting that the scene has taken a different direction. You still get paid either way, so if you find a way to use the downtime then you’re quids in. I’ve never been on a set which hasn't had other musicians there filling in some downtime.

Extras agencies can be keen on unique talents that allow them to service as many briefs as possible, so having people with musical skills on their roster is quite popular. If you then perform in the finished product, you get the PPL(and the PRS if you wrote it) so it can keep on paying you for a long time and then your wages sky rocket.

Google “extras agencies” and then spend a day registering for them all and filling in all your details. Some will ask you to upload headshot photos and some will ask you to come in to register. It might not come to anything, but it could also be a week of work at random when it ties in with your downtime.

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Ten Revenue Streams for Musicians