VLOG - How To Make Money As An Independent Musician, Episode 1 - an Introduction
TRANSCRIPT
Hi everyone!
So you may be wondering: why should you spend your valuable time watching these videos?
So this first one is just an introduction so that you know who I am and it's not gonna be a waste of time hopefully!
So I am a musician and have only been so for a couple of years but one of the things I noticed that was I created some music and I came across SoundCloud put my music on there excitedly hitting refresh waiting for everyone to listen to it and nothing happened! A familiar story!
I went to bed and woke up the next day all excited and..... still one listen! And that was when groups were still around.
There's some amazing talent on there I mean you know if you've been on there; better than a lot of the stuff, well most of the stuff on the radio, with like 23 listens in a year or something - absolutely crazy!
So I decided to do something about it!
I am a programmer as well so I created a website called http://www.AtomCollectorRecords.com.
People are not willing to listen to other people's music. You see all the time - they just say: "hey listen to my stuff and they
just send you a message or they put a comment on saying "yeah great track" and you know they haven't even listened to it!
So how do you encourage people to actually listen and get involved (and that's the key here - get involved) so that you know they're commenting and interacting with you and you build a network, which is the most important thing?
So what I did was I created this website, the idea being that you listen to somebody else's music for at least 60 seconds and by doing that you get a credit and you use that credit to put your own track in play.
Other people listen to it and if you don't listen you don't get listened to, as simple as that!
So yes you can go and pay for plays on internet radio or you can go and pay a service to get you loads of listeners, which may be fake bots or whatever or, you know, accounts of people not really interested.
So this way you can basically add any site that allows an embedded player: SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Spotify and Spotify playlists as well.
So that was like step one and it worked really well and I went off and concentrated on Facebook as well as Twitter. I have two two main Twitter accounts: one for my music which is the Juxta account you can see behind me JuxtaMusicUK and then the other one for Atom Collector Records AtomCollector and we've built up quite a nice community.
It's all going swimmingly. We've got a nice lot of people signed up to the site, using the chatroom, message boards. etc. That was fine and I just concentrated for a year or so building up the membership on there.
It's totally free to use and that's great if you just want people to listen to your music but it's not going to earn you any money.
Then I came across something which I hadn't even heard of a month ago called "The blockchain". Now as a musician you don't need to know any of the technical stuff behind this but let's just say it's a new way of distributing almost anything on the internet and it goes across thousands of different computers and they all link together to secure this information to basically do trading of any sort, music being one of them.
Now there are ways to earn what's known as "cryptocurrency". You've heard of Bitcoin unless, like the cliche says, you've been "living under a rock"!
I'd heard of Bitcoin but I didn't know anything about the technology. So anyway let me just give you a brief outline. What it allows you to do is put things online and get rewarded in cryptocurrency.
So there are sites popping up all over the place for all different things you can think of but the most interesting ones to me were the ones to do with music.
So there is a site for example called musicoin (which I'll do an entire video on in the future) that allows you to get paid every time someone plays your music and you get paid immediately! It goes straight into your "digital wallet" as they call it.
There's also a site called Steemit which is where you may be watching the video from or you may be watching on YouTube.
Steemit is like a blog that allows you to post absolutely anything. So you can put your music videos, you could write about production procedures that you use, your live gigs, whatever, anything to do with music. Talk about the guitar that you've just bought or the software you're using and every time someone votes up your posts (if they think it's good enough) then you get a vote up that will turn into cryptocurrency as well.
And there's another site which actually pays you in real money so you can refer lots of people in and they can just go about the things they normally do on a daily basis: surfing the web, chatting, playing games, etc. You get a share of the advertising revenue and it also gives a little bit to charity so it starts to put the power back into the user and the musician.
So I'm going to be talking about all these different sites and there will probably be more I'll come across that I don't know about yet so please help me if you know of any that I haven't talked about by posting comments, preferably on Steemit.
Please follow me on Steemit so that you can see all the updates. I post my music and also everything from Atom Collector Records as well.
Join our groups on Facebook I'll put all the links in the comments after this so you can see them.
So that's going to be the crux of this series. Each video will be a different service that allows you to earn a little bit of money. The idea being that it won't just be one service that you use, say Steemit and nothing else, but a little bit from lots of different places doing lots of different things. Each one of them will add up hopefully to a decent income.
I'll take you through the earnings that I receive when I do these things and I'm also very open to suggestions and criticisms of what I'm doing because this crypto thing is brand new obviously. I didn't know anything about it as I said a month ago so I'm learning as I go and I want to take you on that journey with me!
So please subscribe and follow me on Steemit, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and sign up to http://www.AtomCollectorRecords.com and get all your music on there and that will start to build your network, which is the most important thing you can do!
So until the next video - this is JJ saying goodbye and make awesome music!
Great vid my friend! Gonna follow!
Thank you very much! By the way I don't think it's advantageous to vote for your own comments just your own posts. I'm not 100% sure about that though!
This is brilliant! This is what underground artists need to hear in 2018!
That's great the hear! Thank you John!
Great post and video. We can highly recommend AtomCollectorRecords.com it made a huge difference for us - check it out!
That's great to hear! Thank you very much.
John this is gold. Very nice information and something to actually do..
Thank you very much. I guess I have the right profile icon then :-)
I saw this yesterday on YouTube. Really good work and as an artist myself it makes more sense follow someone making the same journey as me instead of "experts".
Looking forward to follow this series.
Thank you very much Jon!
Great post John, and fantastic work on atomcollector.com, is a great promotional and networking tool for independent musicians!
Thank you very much. These are exciting times!
The way to go!
thanks, I joined not long ago and have had one decent pay-off last week with the open mic. I followed and will be keeping up. cheers, Mark
That's great to hear!
Thanks you.