You're probably sitting on money

In my never-ending quest to learn how to earn an income as a musician, I discovered the world of stock music.

Stock music is music available for licensing to be used in other media such as movies, documentaries, video games, YouTube videos, etc. It's royalty-free music for which you sell a one-time fee to other people so they can use it in their own projects.

If you reach a point where you have a lot of unfinished projects, music that is good but not great, you're probably sitting on money without knowing it.

In music licensing, you have two types of websites: microstock and stock.

Personally, I focused my energy on microstock because the barrier to entry is very low (anyone can join).

However, if you have great music that you really worked hard to create, you'll want to reach out to a stock music website where you need a contact.

You'll also want to make your best music not royalty-free because most of the money you'll make from it will be from royalties.

That being said, high-end music licensing is not what this email is about, but if it's something you're interested in, I recommend this website.

My experience selling music on microstock websites

In 2019, I decided to upload my music to as many microstock websites as possible and got income from only one of them: Pond5.

Pond5 has a great reputation in the music licensing field and they are a serious company. You'll need to provide an I.D. to be accepted and each musician who joined is manually approved.

This is to prevent fraudsters who resell the music of others from polluting the site with duplicates.

To my surprise, what sold best was my ambient atmospheric drone music. I experimented with other genres and got very little from them, but it might be because I'm better at ambient than any other genre. I suggest that you go with what you have, as long as there are no lyrics or talking, it'll be good!

If I had to do it again, I would focus all my energy on Pond5 and maybe another website as a backup (most likely AudioJungle, even though I don't like their contract).

That's it! I hope it helped! :)

Have a great Friday!

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