Making Money With Your Songs
While Waiting to Make it Big

Intro

Although it seems easy to tell people how much money they are going to make if they "make it", it's not so easy making a bit of money while you wait. I haven't figured out how to make a living in songwriting, but I have come up with some ways to help pay for demos and such. What I'm offering here are untested ideas and I don't offer any guarantees of any kind.

The Goal

I'll state the goal here so you'll know where we're going. The rest of the article will give a step by step how-to.

The goal here is to sell some copies of your songs. I'm assuming here that you are a songwriter and have your own material. In order to sell your songs you'll need to do two things. You'll need to create something to sell and create some kind of demand for your songs.

Creating Something to Sell

Song Demo

The first step in creating something to sell is creating a recorded demo. For pitching songs I've been told many times that a simple vocal guitar rendition is enough; but for creating something to sell this is not going to do it unless you're a killer guitar player and can make each song sound pretty unique. You can get help creating a demo at sites like songdemos.com which list many different song demo services.

How Many Songs Do You Need?

One is probably not enough, but you don't have to wait until you get fifteen either. You probably need enough to make it worthwhile for someone to buy a CD. For example a five song CD could sell for $5. Or a bundle of a five song download could also sell for $5.

Creating a CD

It's pretty easy to create a CD now days. I'm not going to go over that here. One new development is the ability to print right on the CD instead of printing a label and sticking it on. The labels can come off and stick inside a CD player and this will make the buyer regret the fact that he bought a CD from you. See the article on printing your own CDs. The cost of printable CDs is only about .32 each and the you can get a printer for less than $99.00.

Creating a CD Case

The traditional jewel case is not too friendly to carry around because they are so fragile. A good alternative is the DVD cases. They have some CD size cases and some Slim cases. Slim cases cost about .23 per case. You can print the cover on your ink jet printer and it slides behind a plastic window. It gives it a nice look and you can bang it round quite a bit without worry.

Cost of CD

So the cost of your CD is about .55 (.32 for the CD and .23 for the case). It takes a bit of labor to create each one so you might want to figure in some time for that as well. Kids love this kind of stuff so you might be able to get some help from them. Don't go hog wild producing CDs until you know the demand and you're very happy with all the packaging and the production on the songs.

Perfect your Package

It's not a fast process so you if you know you're going to sell 1,000 per week this is not the way to go, but it's a fantastic way to test the waters and get things right before you go off and spend $3,000 making 1000 CDs.  I know a lot of people who have 950 CDs in a closet. Also I've heard many comments made about CDs after they have been reproduced like "where's my name?" or "Did you want to put a copyright on this?".

If you do your CDs one at a time it gives you time to perfect your package. You can make changes as you go. Also it's common to want to make changes to some the the tracks as well.

Sell Your Songs

There are basically two ways to sell your songs directly to people yourself. First you can sell your CDs and second you can sell MP3 files of your songs over the Internet.

Selling the CDs

Selling your CDs is best done in person. Selling CDs over the Internet means people will have to wait for delivery and this is a strong deterrent to sales. On the Internet you can sell your MP3 Files.

Selling at Your Gigs

When you sell your CD at your Gigs it makes it easy on yourself and the buyers. See a separate article on an affective display stand to sell your CDs. It's a self-serve kind of thing so it is possible that a CD or two might get ripped off, but remember you're only paying about .50 each for them. So should you loose two for every extra $10.00 sale you make, that's still a good deal. It's hard to imagine you'd lose more than two in the whole time you're selling CDs.

Getting a UPC Code

You can get a UPC bar code if you want one. You'll need one if you want to sell your CDs at Borders or places like that. You don't need to pay hundreds of dollars for these. You can get one for as little as $10 at the Indie Arts Alliance. Keep in mind that you probably don't want to be changing too much on your CD after you've created a UPC code.

Selling MP3s

You can sell MP3s from your own web site. You'll need a PayPal shopping cart for digital downloads. There are a few of them out there and they're not too expensive. You won't need to process credit cards. PayPal does all that for you. If you want to make about a buck a song you'll have to charge something around $1.25. PayPal takes a minimum of .30 plus a small portion. So make sure you offer bundles for less to encourage people to buy the bundle.

Creating a Demand

There's certainly the old fashioned way to create demand,
which is to travel around and play your songs .But here in California the places are literally few and far between, and most of the people are there to sell their own CDs and not to buy yours. No places pay you to play anymore. They either let you pass the hat, sell your CD or give you a share of CDs they sell.

Internet Sales

You contact people on the Internet. There are a few places where you can make yourself known like music.download.com and garageband.com. These type of sites are only good to get your web site URL published. It's best to centralize your online presence on your own site. Don't use any thing other than a ".com". If your name is taken try adding music or songs to your name to create your domain name.

Once you have your web site up and people can find you via google don't expect anything to happen.

Promoting on the Internet

The golden rule here is to go where no songwriter has gone before. Find sights that might be interested in your music and offer to let them play a song or songs on their site. People very much respond to a song that seems to be just for them. You can even target your writing to groups, but the pitfalls here are obvious. You might get too targeted or trite or corny in your songwriting.

Glenn Bennett