What are Your Revenue Streams?

Here is a good exercise: take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, write down all the ways you earn income now (you can even do this if you are a student). On the other side, write down all the ways you COULD be earning income.

Sure, some of the things you COULD do, you may not WANT to do, and that’s expected. But the point is to discover ALL the possible ways that you can earn income (within, and perhaps outside of music).  Why is this important? Well, for those musicians that want to do more than one thing, being somewhat diversified is going to be key. In other words, it’s going to help the stability of your career if you have multiple income streams. Then, if one stream dries to a trickle, it doesn’t effect your livelihood as much as if that was your only stream.

But to create multiple income streams, we first have to identify what they are. So again, what are the different ways you could be earning money? Think creatively. Another way of looking at this is thinking about what services or products you can provide. What are you good at? Teaching? Performing? Arranging? Recording? Graphic design? Websites? Social media? Reed making? Event planning? …?

One resource to check out is this list of 42 musician revenue streams put together by the Future of Music Coalition. This is a great way to understand traditional sources of revenue for musicians.  I say traditional because I think that musicians can actually come up with really interesting, creative revenue streams that aren’t even mentioned here. Onward!