What’s up, everyone?
What are you guys doing today?
I want to talk about four different ways to generate passive income as a music producer.
And for each of them, I’m going to tell you how hard it is to get started, how hard it is to make $100 a month for me, and how hard it is to maintain and grow for me and my business.
As of right now, in April of 2021.
These four sources of income generate about 15 $100 a week in more or less passive income.
I’ll tell you why he quotes in a sec.
But before we get into the video, I need to put out a little quick disclaimer.
It took me a long time to get to the point where I am right now.
And it’s gonna take me a long time in the future to get to where I want to be.
There’s no get rich quick scheme.
There’s no like, do this for a week.
And next week, you’ll be sitting on the couch playing video games, making millions of dollars just doing nothing.
This is not how it works.
This takes a lot of work time, dedication, patience, and a little bit of frustration.
All right, make sure you hit the like button so we can be a friendly algorithm and make sure you watch the video all the way through.
The last steps are just as good as the first ones.
I don’t want you to miss out.
All right, let’s go.
So what is passive income and why do I love it so much?
The reason why the quotes at the beginning are because nothing is truly passive.
It always requires more to maintain it, to grow it and to even start it up at the beginning.
I call it passive income, anything that detaches time from money.
So, in other words, when you work a job, even as a music producer, where you’re paid by the hour, by the minute, by the week, the month, whatever it is, your time is directly connected to the money that you make.
You work at a certain amount.
And the reason why I love it is that, in a way, it allows you to buy back time from society with your work so that you can dedicate that time to something that you truly care about, which could be growing your business or doing something else.
But you are in charge of your own time, especially for creative people.
Right now I’m talking to music producers, but this applies to anybody that’s in the creative space.
This allows you to monetize your intellect and not just your work.
Alright, the first one we’re going to talk about today.
No surprises here.
It’s YouTube.
I love YouTube.
I have a deep connection with the platform.
I love making videos, I love talking to you guys, I love the community.
This is just the one that I enjoy the most.
So I put it first on the list.
Now how hard is it to start a YouTube channel?
Well, the act of creating a YouTube channel is super simple.
The barrier of entry is zero, it’s free, you just click create a channel, you pick a name, you’re ready to go, you can just pull up your phone, record a video, and put it
So it is super easy to actually create the channel.
But of course, to grow it, there’s a lot of work that goes into it that is way beyond music.
And it has to do with video production editing, learning how to talk to the camera, coming up with content.
There’s a lot that goes into it.
Now let’s get to the second question.
We’re going to try and answer each of these.
How hard is it actually to make $100 a month from YouTube?
Well, so to even monetize your channel, you need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours.
This is the bare minimum to get the channel monetized.
If you look it up, which I did before shooting this video, the average channel takes about 90 videos to get to the monetization point.
So that’s not easy at all.
So anybody that wants to start a YouTube channel and within a week be making a bunch of money.
That’s not how it works, it’s pretty much virtually impossible.
It takes time.
In fact, if I were to give you a piece of advice, I would say think about at least a year, a year and a half of content that you’re just putting out with nothing in return.
But I can guarantee you that it’s hard, but it’s worth it.
Now, let’s say that you’ve reached that number, and you finally monetized how hard it is to make $100 a month, the average RPM on YouTube, which is how much money Google gives you.
For 1000 views, it’s about $2.
This number varies tremendously.
Some channels have like less than $1.
Some channels have like 20 plus dollars per 1000 views.
But let’s just take the average number for this particular calculation.
So when an RPM of $2, if you wanted to make $100, you would need 50,000 views, which sounds like a huge number, but it really is.
Remember, it’s 50,000 views not just on your last video or your last few videos, but on your entire catalog of videos.
Now, let’s say you’ve been posting videos for a year.
You’ve got like 8090 videos on your channel.
That means that all those videos combined are generating revenue forever.
And that’s where passive income comes in.
For example, this video that I made in December of 2020 generated me $612.
36 this past month, even though we’re already in April, and it’s gonna keep generating money over time for kind of ever and at this point, that’s truly passive income.
I don’t have to do anything.
It’s just they’re generating money.
I don’t even have to look at it.
Now let’s get to the third question.
We’re gonna try to answer each of these.
How hard is it to maintain and grow again?
It’s pretty hard, but it gets easy.
I remember everybody telling me this, and now that I’m in this position, I can tell you the same thing because it’s the truth.
Your first 1000 subscribers are the hardest one to get, not only because your channel grows, you get more views and so the algorithm is friendlier to you and promotes
But it’s also because you get better at making videos.
Your videos are higher quality, your process is streamlined so you’re faster, you know what you’re doing, you know how to edit them.
It doesn’t take you a week to make a video, and it’s just a lot faster, more fun to honestly have a process here.
We go with number two, which is simple backs.
First question How hard is it to get started?
It’s super hard.
Not only do you have to come up with the idea for the pack, but then you have to design all the sounds.
You have to organize all the sounds, you have to commission an artwork or design an artwork, which takes forever, come up with the concept for a website, design the website, but the pack on there and then come up with a marketing plan to promote the pack.
There’s a ton
So I’m not gonna lie, it’s a ton of work to get started.
So question number two, our desire to make $100 a month from sample bags.
Well, if you think about it, a well-made sample pack, you can probably sell it for between 30 and $60, somewhere in that range.
So let’s just think $30 is the lowest possible price.
If you want to make $100 in a month, you only have to sell four of them.
If you think about it for people, it’s not that many, especially if you have a little bit of an audience on social media.
But even if you don’t, for most people, it’s not that crazy.
Now, of course, as with everything else, this only works if you can provide real value if the pack is actually truly valuable to people.
And if the pack is actually truly good, then let’s move on to question number three.
How hard is it after you made this $100 to actually maintain it and grow it into something big?
It’s actually not that hard.
Like once you make the packets on the website, it’s just sitting there, you don’t need to do any sort of maintenance or update or anything like that.
It’s just it’s sitting there just selling I can guarantee you that as long as it’s good.
And people actually find value in it like they download it and they love it.
I can guarantee you that it’s going to sell as an example my last sample back trilogy, which is a link in the description if you want to check it out, even though it was released in December of 2020.
This past month I generated about $3,000 in just completely passive sales.
People like it, people recommend it.
I make YouTube videos, people get to see them, and the circle continues.
Alright, let’s go with number three.
This one is royalties.
Now I do make some money from royalties from a few songs that I did for an old TV show that I scored years ago and some other little stuff.
But I wanted to talk to someone about this that actually makes a living with royalties.
So let’s go lapel Dre.
Yo, what’s up, dude?
I’m making this video about passive income, and you are the Spotify passive income God for producers.
How hard would you say is it to start making passive income from Northeast Spotify?
So as far as like, you know, Spotify, music streams go?
I would say it’s definitely hard.
I mean, it’s not hard to make money because you can make like $1.
So if you want to just get your feet wet and just make a couple of bucks, it’s definitely not hard to do that.
But I would say it is hard to get to the point where you’re making a living from it.
Okay, for sure.
Well, that would be kind of like my second question, which is kind of how I’d be structuring the video.
How hard would you say it is to make $100 a month?
Like, for example, how long did it take you to get to $100 a month?
I would say yeah, it just depends on your foundation.
But for me, I got my first $100 when I got out into my first playlist, right?
So you know, that’s kind of going to be different for anybody.
But yeah, I ended up getting like a connection with somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody how to playlist, and they added me to their playlist.
And that’s when I got like my first 100,000 streams, right?
And then, so yeah, that’s how I really got my first over $100.
But before that, maybe it was like $20 this one, right?
This month, you know, I’m saying, once you get that started, how hard would you say it is to actually maintain and grow?
Like, do you have to keep posting stuff like it was a YouTube channel?
Or have you noticed that just by posting the size that you have those just keep going?
That’s a good question.
Because it differs on the type of music you make.
If you want to maintain it, you wouldn’t want to keep giving people what they weren’t like what they came to you for.
So whatever, like a song that made you go viral or whatever, keep giving them something similar to that.
But as well as just being consistent overall, at the end of the day, when it comes to streaming and just making money on it, the more streams you get, the more money you make.
So the more songs you drop, let’s say you’re getting one stream, you release a million songs.
At least, you know, a few $1,000, right, I’m saying, so yeah, just like with everything else, it takes a lot of time to get over that initial slump.
But once you get through that, then it starts piling up because you have a catalog that’s just generating money, you’re making more songs, you just keep growing.
And then it just gets quote-unquote easier and easier.
And like Andrew said, it’s also a game of quantity.
Like if you released a million songs and each goal, one stream each, you would still have a million plays.
But even if you increase the numbers a little bit, let’s say you’re able to get 1000 plays on a song.
That means that if you release 100 songs in a year, you’re going to have a million plays, which is not a ton of money, but it’s a few 1000 bucks.
And last but not least, number four, we got selling beats your beat catalog.
Let’s go with the first question.
How hard is it to get started?
Well, I’m not gonna lie.
It’s actually pretty hard to like the practicality of it.
It’s actually really simple.
You just have to open up a beat search account, have some beats ready, upload them and you’re good to go.
But the hard part is that you need to make incredible beats.
You have to think about the fact that everyone is selling beats online at this point.
So you’re competing with world-class Grammy-winning multi-Platinum producers from all over the world like that’s who you’re competing against.
So your stuff needs to be good.
Let’s move on to the second question.
How hard is it to make $100 a month selling beats?
Well, similarly to the sample packs, it’s actually not that hard.
If you do the math, like a lease usually goes, an mp3 lease goes for about $30.
So as long as you can sell three or four of them, you can get into their $100 range.
Ultimately, though, and this might be tough to hear, but trust me, it’s constructive criticism.
90% of the people who cannot make a single sale for, let’s say, a few months, the chances are their beats are not exactly at the level of quality they should be.
So my advice in that situation is to really focus on your sound, develop and make it sound better, and then focus on selling beats.
One thing that I know for sure, though, is that good beats are really rare.
And when an artist finds a producer that makes beats that fit them, and they like the quality, they like working with the person, they’re never going to abandon you, they’re always going to work with you like forever.
Let’s move on to question number three.
How hard is it to maintain and grow that $100 once you got Well, in my opinion, in this case, the hardest part is to get started, especially if at the beginning you focus your energy on building an email list?
So everybody that you work with, everybody that you get in touch with, tries to build an email list.
So then you can build that list over time, you can build a real connection with all these people that are part of your list.
And over time, they can become customers, they can start trusting you, they can see the value in you and the value that you’re offering to them and, ultimately, they will be with you for a very long time.
Well, this is it for this one.
If you enjoyed the video, don’t forget to subscribe button notification bell.
I’ll see you guys in the next one and, as always, be positive and positive things.
