How I earn money in the music business💰

my name is Cara I'm an artist songwriter and music producer and welcome to my home studio today I'm going to be answering one of my most frequently asked questions and that's how I earn money in the music business now back in the day when I was living in Los Angeles as a full-time songwriter I would make these little posts called advice by Cara and I would basically just be documenting my experience as a songwriter in Los Angeles and helping people with how to negotiate splits and basically how to do business with DJs and other songwriters

and producers so this is just kind of an updated version of my advice by Cara videos now we all love to make music we all love to be a part of creating something beautiful and magical but there is also a business and so if you aren't participating in the business part you're just making music for fun and that's totally okay you can do that not everybody is meant to be in the music business but everybody can make music but if you are actually interested in being in the music business I'm going to walk you through

every single Revenue stream that I have as an artist and music content creator so let's start with my music catalog I've been in the music business for 10 plus years at this point and so I've written a lot of songs in that time span and while I'm not as heavily writing songs today as I used to I still have a massive music catalog that I collect royalties on so let's break down all the ways that I collect on that music catalog when I was actively working with some of the biggest DJs in the world I

would get either a fee or an advance for my vocal so a fee and an advance are two different things a fee is a flat rate where you get paid for your work say it's $1,000 and you get that ,000 and you get to keep it and according to whatever deal you come up with for splits on the publishing and the master you would collect on that in addition to your fee if you got an advance say they gave you $1,000 Advance then you wouldn't be collecting royalties until that $1,000 was collected on their end

when that song comes out you have to recoup that Advance before you actually see any more royalties from that release so don't get confused between those two things a fee and Advance make sure when you are making your contracts with your co-writers and your co-producers that it's very clear on what you'll be receiving okay moving on to royalties there's two sides to every song we have the publishing royalties which is the composition so the publishing is being split between you and all of your co-writers and producers that made the song So anybody who contributed to

the lyrics Melodies and the production would be splitting that publishing and there's also a master side and that is typically what the record label owns BS would you like to teach my audience about master royalties so the master side is typically owned by the record label that's putting out the song and the artists that are on the song all of this is deal by deal basis you really have to work with your team for whoever you made that song with to figure out the splits for your master and your publishing it's different for every single

release so I can't give you guys exact numbers but that's up to you so if you are an artist on a song say you're a featured vocalist on a song you really want to keep and retain part of the master the master royalties are paid out by all of the record labels that own that Master say you're working with a big major label and they're keep being 70% of the master and you and the other artists that is on the song are splitting the other 30% of the master then you would be collecting royalties from

that label so those Master royalties are typically paid out two times per year it's different for everybody I know there's labels like Monstercat that pay monthly but most record labels pay out twice per year I've made many mistakes in my career and there are many songs where I had done a buyout and a buyout basically means I just got a flat fee for everything and then I don't collect any Master royalties if you have a music release with a label or if you're just putting things out independently with your friends it's really important to retain

your master and your publishing because you do want to collect that money down the road while buyouts can be really exciting because you're getting paid a fee right away You're sacrificing all of the money that you can collect afterwards so as I mentioned before Master royalties are paid out by the record labels and your publishing is paid out in multiple different ways we have performance royalties that are paid out through our Pros which are ASCAP BMI and seesac and depending on what country you live in there are performance rights organizations in your country that pay

out your performance royalties I personally am with BMI I've been with BMI since the beginning and I've had really great experience with them BMI pays out quarterly so I get four payments from them every single year for all of my music catalog and they are basically collecting performance royalties for any songs that have been placed on television that have been performed live that have been performed on any sort of online service or or Spotify Apple music any digital platform where your music is being being played or sold or any sort of radio station that's where

all of that money is being collected and then it gets paid out to you actually pretty cool to look at the statements that BMI gives me because I can see exactly where my song was being played how much money I got for that performance I'm also signed up with a company that collects my neighboring rights royalties and I'm not even going to lie I don't know all the details on what neighboring rights exactly are it's just another Revenue stream that I've been collecting for the last few years since actually having music being released so as

an artist on all these different songs you know I want to make sure that I'm at least collecting as much money as I possibly can now let's talk about my publishing situations a few years ago I signed with a major publisher this particular deal was a 50/50 co-publishing deal so they basically collected 50% of my publishing and so I had to recoup that deal and after a few years of recouping that I was able to move on to another deal which I'm in currently and that's an Administration deal so the difference between a c-pub and

an Administration deal obviously the c-pub they collect more money but in that deal they were more creative partners with me in the sense that they were putting me in sessions so I was being set up in all of these different rooms through my publisher and with the administ ation deal I have they're simply just collecting my money so even though I'm not in my co-publishing deal anymore I still collect royalties from them twice a year the same time frame is when all of the record labels send out their Master royalties that's when I'm getting my

statements for my co-publishing deal and even though I'm not in that deal anymore they still own that music catalog that I created while I was with them the last way that my music catalog generates money is through sync licensing sync licensing is when you place music on television movies trailers video games it's basically when a company pays to use your song in their content and they're not owning the song They're simply paying to get permission to use it so there's two sides to sync licensing the master and the publishing just like I was talking about

before let's use a $40,000 ad for an example $20,000 goes to the master and $20,000 goes to the publishing so whoever owns each side and whatever their percentage is that's what they're going to be collecting from the master in the pub and what I personally love about sync licensing is that it gives you an opportunity to make a lot more money for your work when you place a song with another artist or if you're releasing music with a record label sometimes it can take a while to start seeing those royalties come in but with sync

licensing you get an upfront fee whenever I do get a sync placement it's always so exciting because I know that I'm actually going to get paid a fair amount for my song so every year I do manage to get a couple sinks and they definitely range in size the largest sink that I've ever gotten was a Walmart ad and that paid a lot of money so now that we've talked about all the different revenue streams that my music catalog generates let's talk about content I actually started this YouTube channel during the pandemic because I wanted

to solidify another Revenue stream for myself and actually build a platform independently so that I could keep 100% of the profits with my music catalog everything was always a big group project so I would always be working with multiple different co-writers and producers and record labels although I have hundreds of songs released I don't own 100% of any of those songs and so it's split up between a lot of people so what's nice about my YouTube channel and my content creation is that I get to keep 100% of it and there's a couple different ways

I make money doing it so one way I make money on my YouTube channel is through AdSense now AdSense is a monthly payment that I receed from Google for my view counts so all of the videos that I post on my YouTube channel that don't feature a commercially released song I get to collect AdSense money for it stinks it stinks F smells so bad anyway where was I yeah put him outside oh my God anyway so as a music channel I obviously am creating a lot of videos featuring my commercially released music and so the

videos that feature those songs are getting monetized through the distribution companies that put out the songs when the distribution companies collect those royalties from my video views it then gets split out to all of my co-writers on the song for the videos that don't feature commercially released music I get to collect my AdSense money so the more views the more money and so AdSense is an automatic payment that I get every month for my YouTube channel when it comes to collecting money on views for my videos on Instagram and Tik Tok I do get a

little bit of money from meta for my Instagram videos but I don't really make any money on Tik Tok in a lot of ways short content is worth less than YouTube content and so I have been working really hard to build up my YouTube channel so that I can create a nice income stream for myself here and there's a lot of songs that I purposely don't commercially release so that I can monetize off of my videos because once again if you commercially release your music through a distributor say you're an independent artist and you put

out a song and you distribute it to Spotify Apple music all of those dsps you're not going to be able to monetize your video so if you're a music Creator just be aware of that the second Revenue stream that I have for Content creation are brand Partnerships this is a fairly new development for me I think it's been about 2 to 3 years since I got my first brand partnership with Sennheiser so it's been a really cool experience to be able to partner with these Brands and showcase all of their products in my videos since

I'm a recording artist I typically partner with brands that sell things like microphones and interfaces and studio equipment because that's very much on brand for me but depending on what kind of content you create that kind of dictates what type of Brands you'll be partnering with these sponsorship fees definitely range depending on what the campaign is the company and the product but when you have multiple sponsorships every single year you can make a lot of money not every single studio session that I make is a paid sponsorship but a couple of them are so if

you ever watch my studio sessions and it has that little paid sponsorship label on the top that means one of these companies paid me to use their product in my video I tend to stick to YouTube content when it comes to sponsorships but when reals and Tik Tok really started blowing up I was getting paid to do a lot of Tik toks and reals so those would typically be videos that ranged from 30 to 90 seconds and my YouTube videos range from 5 to 20 minutes I get paid a lot more money for my YouTube

videos because they are longer and they do require require a lot more effort and video production and editing and so I tend to stick to those projects when I am doing a paid sponsorship moving on to my e-commerce business I'm cara.com my website is one of my biggest revenue streams and this is where I sell a lot of digital downloads and products for music producers to hone in their signature sound and create music I offer exclusive vocal sample packs vocal templates for popular dah I have presets for different plugins and I also have some courses

I'm actually really excited for this year because I'm going to start updating all of my courses the courses that I offer now are singing for beginners songwriting for beginners and how to create vocal sample packs and these are just three topics that I picked that I felt like I was really knowledgeable about and that I could share helpful information on some of my bestsellers are my vocal templates and it's basically a digital download of a pre-made stock plugin vocal template for your favorite dah and you download that template and you open it up in your

session and you have your leads your doubles your harmonies already pre-processed for you to record your vocals with this was something that I developed for other vocalists and artists that really wanted to start learning how to record vocals because when I started posting tutorials on record recording vocals and mixing vocals I was getting so many questions and I was like well why don't I just make a product that would kind of ease that confusion for people to get started and to feel comfortable with recording their vocals and mixing it and it actually became one of

my best sellers and every template comes with a course on how to use that template for my preset collection I have options for some of the biggest companies like waves and isotope and serum and once again these are just exclusive products that I've developed over time that I thought would be useful to other producers and musicians like me and of course I have a vocal sample pack at icar.com I started my vocal sample pack Journey on splice I think like six years ago now and they ended up being some of the best selling vocal sample

packs they've ever had on the site with millions of downloads and so after you know years of having my sample packs being licensed to splice I just decided that it was time to put out my own vocal pack on my own website so that I can have a new pack that wasn't used by so many other producers and just to have something of my own that I could sell on my own website it's always been a dream of mine to own my own company and I amara.com has definitely been a dream come true because what

I love about it is that I can add products I can update products I can make make videos using my products and sell those products direct to Consumer and I'm really grateful for this website because it has opened so many doors for me financially it actually was one of the reasons I was able to fund my debut album so I hope that helps to get a better understanding on the different revenue streams that I have as a recording artist and a content creator if you have any questions comment below and I'm really excited to be

talking with you guys again and making these videos because I have so much wisdom and information to share with you guys throughout my 10 years in the music industry so thank you for watching and I'll catch you guys next time in another video