Passive income for musicians has emerged over the last decade as a transformative way for artists to find financial stability and support their work. In a time when traditional revenue, like album sales and live performance, are on the decline because of the rise of streaming platforms, it is vital for musicians to explore ways to diversify their income.
Passive income refers to income that you receive from creating something self-sustaining, like selling books, courses, royalties, and more. While many finance gurus might mislead you into thinking that passive income requires little to no work upfront. Know that this is not the case: passive income streams do take a good chunk of time to set up. But, the benefits of having a self-sustaining income stream taking care of itself while you work on your own music and live your life later are almost essential for any creative field.
This article explores 8 passive income streams for musicians and how to set them up, so you can forge ahead in navigating the changing dynamics of the music industry and build sustainable, long-term financial success. I won’t be talking about good financial habits like investing, saving, and budgeting, but those are also an important part of your financial success.
No Website Required
The easiest passive income streams for musicians to set up quickly is probably those that do not require a website. I technically did this backwards, as this website started as a personal blog about music that expanded. I’ve sorted these income streams into those that require (or work better with) a website and those that do not.
1. Stream Your Music
Streaming your music on platforms like Spotify, YouTube Music, Pandora, and more is probably the easiest passive income stream to get into as musician because you’re probably already creating your own music. This is not a highly lucrative income stream to begin with (you might be making pennies for years, depending on how much of a hit your music is), but it’s probably the quickest to get set up.
I won’t go into how to create and record your tracks here, as that could be an entire degree’s worth of knowledge, but I will tell you how to get tracks onto these streaming platforms.
Most of these music platforms don’t let you submit directly to them, and even if they did, it’d be a real headache and waste of time to individually submit music to every platform. Instead, you’ll have to use a music distribution service to submit your music on your behalf.
There are so many labels like this out there, but after playing around with multiple options, I use Distrokid and Soundrop to distribute my music. Distrokid has a flat fee of $23–$90 annually, depending on the plan, and you can upload any original music without any additional fee. If you want to do covers, however, they’ll charge you $20 to take care of royalties and copyright, which can be a lot just starting out, which is where Soundrop comes in.
Soundrop does not have any annual fee. Instead, they have a $0.99 per song charge, so you’re only charged for the music that you upload, and you’re only charged once. This makes it much more approachable for those just starting out and who don’t want to dip into other income to pay for a distribution service.
This is what I do: Distrokid for originals and Soundrop for covers.
Both of these services also add your music to social media libraries, so if one of your songs happens to go viral as a background song on TikTok, then you’ll get income for that as well.
2. Sell Your Music on Stock Platforms
Stock music refers to music that’s available for creators to use in things like videos and movies. When you place music in a stock library, the intention is for someone else to use it in a creative way, without having to get your permission, fill out copyright paperwork, and so on.
When your stock music gets used, the creator who used it pays a royalty back to you. An example of this would be similar to when you distribute music onto social media. When people use your music as the sound on their TikTok video, you’ll get paid a royalty for it.
Stock libraries go a little deeper, though, and are intended for longer works, like Youtube videos, films, commercials, and more. Some stock libraries are royalty-free, meaning that the creator who uses your music will pay an upfront fee and will not pay royalties later. Either way, you do get paid for your work. The only frustration would occur if a video went viral with your music in it, and you don’t get royalties for the popularity of the video. This is something to think about when choosing to list your music as royalty-free or just general stock. Most stock music tends to be royalty-free.
While you can sell your stock music on your own website, this is one where it makes a little more sense to list them in larger stock libraries. Some of the best ones include AudioJungle, Pond5, Epidemic Sound, and Audio Network.
One important aspect of stock music is that it is meant to be in the background and is non-exclusive, meaning it’s meant to be used in many different locations.
3. Compose for Video Game or Film (Sync Licensing)
Similar to creating stock music to sell from libraries, you can pursue what’s called sync licensing. This arguably has more upfront work to it, but it has the potential to make you larger amounts of money at one time.
Sync licensing involves being vetted to be included within a specialized music library that video game companies, TV productions, and films look at. There’s a much higher level to entry than in stock libraries, but if you get in, you’ll get big connections (and likely more exposure!).
Most sync licensing libraries have exclusivity clauses with them. This means that the person or group who uses a specific song or piece of yours are the only ones allowed to use it (aside from you putting it on a streaming platform) for a given amount of time. That’s vastly different from stock libraries, where everyone can use your music as long as it’s still in the libraries.
Because sync libraries are so specialized, you’ll want to do your own searches for libraries that match your style of music: country, EDM, pop, etc.
If you’re still confused about the difference between stock and sync libraries, this video’s very helpful!
4. Social Media Content Creation
As a musician, you have a specialized set of skills that you’ve developed over the years. Playing an instrument, reading sheet music, the way you understand music, using your favorite DAW, and so on. You can make money teaching that to others or sharing your opinions about all things music.
Selling courses is listed under website-required below, but if you don’t want the hassle of setting up a website or figuring out a course platform, you could teach for free on social media. Once you get a certain number of followers, many social media platforms will allow you to monetize your channel.
Content creation is a slow passive income stream for musicians to start, as the first few followers are always the hardest to get. Once you get going, though, and have hundreds of videos out, those will continue to bring in income to your channel.
While there are many great platforms to start on, I highly recommend getting started on Youtube. You might see the slowest growth there compared to places like Instagram and Tiktok, but they do have the best monetization program, so getting started sooner rather than later will help you. You can of course post the same videos to all platforms, but I recommend focusing on longer form Youtube videos and experimenting with some shorter videos here and there.
If you don’t want to teach, other things you can talk about are your favorite equipment, software (which DAW do you use and why?), musical experiences you’ve had and how you understood it, and so on. What music do you love to listen to?
The possibilities are endless. Just think about topics you end up ranting to all your friends about, and record them!
Additionally, if you talk about your favorite equipment and software, you can use this as an avenue for affiliate marketing, but I’ll talk about that in the website-required section. In other words, content creation gives you multiple streams of income in one, if you set it up to do so!
Website Required (or Recommended)
Having your own website is almost a given nowadays. It serves as a homebase for your passive income operations. You can host links to your profiles on streaming platforms, have a newsletter sign up, write blog posts or publish video updates, and so much more. Even better nowadays, you don’t have to know any code to create a website, as there are tons of platforms with drag and drop editors.
For the income streams for musicians listed below, most of them you technically can do without a website, but they likely won’t be very profitable without the ability to drive traffic to a central location like a website.
I do acknowledge that having your own website does cost some money up front, so that’s why I’ve listed these income streams later in the article. Having a website does not have to break the bank, though.
How do you create a website?
There are so many website creator platforms out there, so how do you choose?
You want something stable and that uses good search engine optimization practices (SEO), like how the website creates meta information for search engines to look at. For this reason, I recommend avoiding Wix, as their websites are known to crash, and their meta-practices leave a lot to be desired.
My recommendation is using WordPress for your website.
There are a couple of ways to use WordPress:
- Hosted completely on WordPress.com (a little pricey but more convenient)
- Host your site using places like Siteground and use WordPress.org (the WordPress software) within it.
I’ll do a separate article (forthcoming) on the differences between the two and how to set either option up, but if all of this sounds confusing, maybe just stick to WordPress.com and having WordPress take care of all your hosting and security.
If you’re not ready to set up a shop or add any fancy plugins (like I’ll discuss below), the WordPress.com plans are pretty affordable.
If you’re ready to take the plunge and self-host, this article helps explain the process a ton. From experience working as a WordPress consultant, I highly recommend Siteground for your hosting, as all the others seem to be less reliable and go down a lot.
Now that you’ve theoretically taken the plunge into creating a website, here are some income streams that you unlock by having a website.
5. Affiliate Marketing
I already mentioned this one under 4. Social Media Content Creation, but affiliate marketing as a passive income stream works even better when you have a website as a homebase.
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing refers to recommending products to other people, and if they buy the product at your recommendation, the creator of the product will pay you an agreed-upon amount for doing advertising for them. Most software platforms have an affiliate or referral program. If there’s software you love, just Google the software name and “affiliate program” or “referral program.”
You’ve already seen some examples of this in this very article. I use WordPress to host this website, so when I “refer” people, they pay me in credits that make it cheaper for me to host using them. Distrokid, the distributor I use for original music also has an affiliate program, so in recommending them to you all, I get paid as a thank you.
Warning About Affiliate Marketing
A huge caveat for this: it is so easy to take advantage of affiliate marketing and advertise products you’ve never used before. According to the FTC, you are required to have a disclosure statement that says, “These companies are paying me to promote their products, but you won’t be charged extra.” It’s important to be transparent. I have a page that lists all the companies I earn money from.
Further than that, it’s up to you to choose what you want to promote. You can promote things you’ve never used, but I personally have chosen to only promote products I’ve used and would recommend to my best friend.
How to Get Started Affiliate Marketing
Books are a great way to start affiliate marketing: what books have you read related to music recently that changed your life? What method books would you recommend to new musicians? Or even general life books are great.
Abebooks, Amazon, Thriftbooks, and Bookshop.org are all sites I have used for affiliate marketing books. They’re all easy to set up, but it can be hard to juggle four links for every book, especially if you don’t have a website.
My strategy for this is having a book page for every book I’m recommending and include all the links in the side bar alongside a description of the book and my honest thoughts about it. You can see an example of that here.
Additionally, you can talk about book recommendations on a YouTube channel and put affiliate links in the description for them to click. This works for gear or software as well.
6. Sell Sample Packs or Templates
If you’re a music producer, you know how helpful sample packs are. Essentially, your job is to play with sounds. Gathering your own collection of sounds, however, can be incredibly time consuming and has a high barrier of entry. Knowing how to position mics in a certain way, having the right kind of mic, and so on.
That means that people who want to save time, don’t have access to sound sources that you might, or who are new to making music all find sample packs helpful. You can provide them with cool sample packs, and they’ll pay money for them.
You can also sell templates: saved settings that you’ve used to get a specific sound.
The best place to sell sample packs and templates is on your own website, but you can always cross-list them on sample pack marketplaces like Splice, Loopmasters, Bandcamp, BeatStars, Roqstar, and many more. Just be sure your sounds match the marketplace!
The more places you list, the more people you’ll reach. It may be time-consuming to do all that cross-listing, but once it’s set up, it can accrue income without you doing anything.
7. Sell (e)Books, Sheet Music/TABS, Worksheets, and Other Digital Products
A final but still important passive income stream for musicians is selling digital products on your website!
Do you have a tried-and-true method for starting a new song? Do you always start with melody or lyrics? Make a worksheet about it to guide people through your process.
You can also make eBooks about any topics you’ve already made a course about! How to use software (like a manual) or things to think about when writing a song.
Think about problems that people have that you know how to solve. Think about past problems you’ve had that you figured out a solution for. Ask if other people had those problems before, then share the solution you found through a digital medium.
You could even sell a single tutorial video.
If you’re up for the challenge, you could take requests too!
If you play an instrument that uses sheet music, sell sheet music for your songs. Or sell TABs!
I recommend selling smaller items first, so you can get a feel for what you’re capable of while building up a fanbase. But then you can go for larger items like books, courses, or anything else you think of!
How Do You Sell Digital Products on Your Website?
To set up a shop on your website, you’ll need a way of showing products and collecting payments. If you went the WordPress route, you can use a free plugin called WooCommerce.
It’s what I use, and it automatically creates a shop page for you and adds the payment functionality.
Like all things WordPress, it’s super-customizable, but it also works great right out of the box.
All you have to do is add products, pictures, and descriptions, and it takes care of the rest for you!
WooCommerce also integrates with almost every email marketing service out there, so when you sell something, you can follow up with them to ask for a review or offer them something you think they’d like that’s related to their purchase. If you snoop around my shop, you’ll see I also have free products. I set it up that way to get them into my marketing funnel. Freebies are a great way to get people into your space, so they get to know you enough to trust your products.
8. Sell Courses or Lessons
Have you ever taught lessons playing an instrument? Or told anyone how to use software (DAW or notation)?
Do people ask you how you composed or created a piece of music?
Instead of repeatedly answering everyone, you can create a course to answer these types of questions. That way, you only have to answer the question once, and people have a resource they can keep coming back to for reference.
Where Can You Sell Courses?
There are a couple of approaches to selling courses online.
You could host the course on your own website, or use a course platform. Let’s talk about both of these options.
Hosting the Course on Your Own Website
This is where WordPress really shines. With website creators like Wix, you can’t add any software to make hosting a site possible. But WordPress has a ton of extra “plugins” that you can use to add functionality to your website without coding anything, like adding a course environment to your website.
There are so many course plugins out there, but after trying nearly all of them, I settled on LearnDash.
While there are free ones out there, it’s worth it to go with the paid options, as most of the free ones make it really difficult for your students to figure out how to use the course. They’re also not as reliable and can crash or cause issues for your website as a whole.
That’s why I recommend LearnDash as my favorite e-learning plugin.
It’s so simple to use and even has the option for it to create a course for you automatically from a YouTube playlist. That means, if you’d recorded a bunch of tutorials but decide you want to start charging for them, LearnDash will automatically make that course for you.
It also has more add-ons than other e-learning software: groups, forums, notetaking, assignments, gamification, event calendars, private messaging, Slack, and so much more.
I use Learndash alongside WooCommerce, as I sell other items from my website (see point 7!), but LearnDash also has the capability to sell courses all on its own without any other plugins.
Finally, the cost. One reason why I recommend hosting your courses on your own website is because the other options end up more expensive in the long run. You can create as many courses as you want on your website, but the e-learning platforms restrict how many courses you can have to different paid tiers. After calculating the net income I made from trying both, LearnDash won, hands down. That said, if you’re only hosting courses on one website (likely most of you reading this), it costs $199. They run sales a lot too, so keep an eye out during holidays!
I’ve got an article coming soon on how to set up LearnDash on your website, so stay tuned for that!
Sell Courses on an E-Learning Platform
Likely, you’ve visited an e-learning platform in the last few years. Online courses have taken off like crazy. Maybe you even became a musician from a course on Udemy or Coursera. Those are both massive e-learning platforms, but my recommendations are actually Teachable and Kajabi.
While you won’t be listed in a huge database like on Udemy or Coursera, Teachable and Kajabi act like your own personal website for courses without having to figure out how to run a website. (I still recommend having a website but totally understand it’s hard for a lot of people!)
Teachable has been the easiest to work with as far as course creation and all of the admin things you don’t really think about. They take care of taxes for you and are just overall easy to use. And you can post your first course for free. If you want more courses, it’ll cost $39/month. One downside is a lack of community space, however, so that’s something to think about.
Kajabi is a course platform that also tries to cover marketing for you as well. You can send emails out and provide free courses to get people into your pipeline, but it does not have a free tier.
You can try it out for 14 days for free, but after that, the cost is $119/month. Overall, if I had to pick between Kajabi and Teachable, I’d pick Teachable hands down.
Why not sell on Udemy or Coursera? That’s a great question! While it is free to post on Udemy and Coursera, you lose some control of your content on these sites. They run sales often, meaning they may sell your $100 for just $1, and they also don’t let you take your courses down (although you can unpublish them, so no new students can join, but that process is really frustrating. My courses keep opening themselves back up too)
This is a big reason why I opted to bring in my own traffic and just sell on my own website, but again, I totally understand if you don’t want to deal with running your own website!
Conclusion: 8 Passive Income Streams for Musicians
In conclusion, there are so many options out there for passive income streams for musicians. They do take a bit of time to set up, but once they’re out there, they’ll keep bringing income in without you having to keep up with them.
Just to review my 8 recommendations of passive income streams for musicians:
- Stream your Music
- Sell Music on Stock Platforms
- Compose for Video Game or Film
- Social Media Content Creation
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sell Sample Packs or Templates
- Sell Digital Products
- Sell Courses or Lessons
Although it may not always feel like it, music is so important and valuable. You deserve to earn a good living doing what you love, and these 8 passive income streams for musicians are a way to make that happen.
Now go make some awesome music!