Side Hustle?

 

In this conclusive step, I feel it is essential to establish in your mind how you envision becoming a musician online. Naturally, this endeavor/journey could start as a side hustle, earning a few hundred dollars per month, and then progress into becoming a full-time job. Of course, there would have to be a growth in both work/projects and also a considerable increase in 'Monetization', this is all very possible.

 

The key is patience, as to progress as an online musician, like any business, aspects such as 'Monetization' would need to be incrementally increased. To expand on this point, say you started out with charging $150 for your premium service, it woulkd seem to be quite a drastic increase to jump to $600 overnight!

Again, this is my subjective view on pricing, so maybe you could, but your repeat clients might be shocked!

 

But... there is an aspect to a price increase I'd like to touch upon, which you could bring to dealing with your 'repeat' clients.

 

When I started I charged $120 for my premium service (Full track), then as I progressed I made an increase to $180, when a repeat client returned to commision me again I communicated to them I had put my price up to $180 but added as I valued thier repeat custom for the new track they wished for me to work on I would offer a loyalty discount of $160. This, I feel, was an incentive and conveyed a positive message to them that I valued their custom, and I perhaps made them feel a little bit 'Special'!

 

A side note is 99% of them were happy with the increase and my discount, and most tipped me up to the new value anyway! A few, in fact, offered me the full $180, too!

 

My caveat with this, however, is with all negotiations, whether with repeat clients or new enquiries, be cautious of 'Dipping' too much.

 

 

For instance say a producer enquired how much it would be for the whole track (Premium in my case), if your gig clearly defines a whole track as $180 in most cases this could be them trying it on, then if you informed them of the full price and they tried to haggle you down to £100 say be wary, firstly they are undervaluing you, and secondally in my experience hagglers are mostly always a pain to work with!

 

Essentially, you are starting from a negative energy position; they commissioned you by first devaluing you, it's not a good 'Exchange' of energy!!

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All of the above takes some judgement, and there are no hard and fast rules but the key point here is to not let a potential client under-value you.

 

Standing firm with your service cost weeds out poor quality clients.

Becoming an online musician is a form of 'Freelancing', so a point I'd like you to be aware of is the fact that 'Work commissions' will and to an extent always fluctuate, so there is no guarantee of predicting a quota of work per month.

 

Some months may be quiet, but some months may be really busy.
As you progress upwards (Hopefully!) in your online music journey, garnering more gigs and reviews, your exposure on platforms will increase, thus in theory more enquiries and more work, so your monetisation per month will potentially be more predictable as time goes on, but I stress again, not guaranteed!

 

In regards to becoming a 'Pro' musician on-line, whereby it is no longer just a side hustle, I feel one would have to diversify a little more than just relying on one platform, like Fiverr, like any popular platform there is a saturation of competition , particuarly being global, there is real competition on $ rates across all the freelancing musicians, and I have and still question how high one could go $ charge wise to make a sustainable income equivalent to a full time wage.

 

So my point here, when I say diversify, is to perhaps, as an example, look to be on both Fiverr and Airgigs plus offer the same service on your website, with some Social media advertising linked straight to your website.

 

Also, from my research, if you have the time, energy, and determination, 'Working a YouTube channel' to 'Funnel' traffic to all of the above could boost your potential income.

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There is also the possibility to teach online, which I won’t go into as I have never been a one-to-one or online teacher, but it’s another potential ‘Income Stream’

Of course, creating and consistently running a YouTube channel takes a lot of work and warrants a whole other course! But my main point here is that relying on just one platform like Fiverr may be limiting to earn enough to make a full-time living.

 

There are Fiverr sellers who have done this and very successfully, one seller made a million $ on fiverr a few years back, here is his YouTube channel but he hasn’t posted for a couple of years so I am not sure where he ‘is at’ these days but there is a lot of good videos to check out, yes fiverr has changed over the years but his key principles apply and are very helpfull : LINK: https://www.youtube.com/@JoelTalks/videos

 

So, in summary and conclusion, the question ‘Can being an online musician be more than a side hustle?’ , that as they say is the million dollar question, yes it can be but it takes hard work, a flexible fluidty involving trial and error and a discipline to not just dream but to in the words of NIKE ‘Just do it!...’  START TODAY and remember ONE DAY AT A TIME....

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