Alternative Income for Indie Artists

Alternative Income for Indie Artists.

Every artist wants to make money from his work. But is it as easy and certain as a job? Certainly not. With fierce competition, ever-growing number of music available online and online sales at an all-time low, it is becoming increasingly difficult for indie artists to depend only on money from online sales to sustain in the industry. The younger generation does not want to purchase music or pay for it. They are more than happy with the pirated copies and free music available online. In this situation, only the most successful artists are able to make ends meet through just record sales.

You’ve quite recently composed three tunes, but don’t have the money to mix and record them. Or you’ve spent your savings on the recording process and now you have no money to advertise or promote it. You’ve bagged a couple multi-city gig offers after a tedious and expensive release campaign –but have no money to afford it. Or, worst; you’re too broke to even start composing!

What do you do when you don’t have a label endorsing your music and you need to pick between paying your own bills and paying a studio, publisher or marketing expert? It is becoming increasingly important for indie artists to look at alternative means to generate revenue streams. I have written about this in detail in my blog Raising money for Your Indie Music. While understanding music copyright and publishing is quite difficult and totally out of league from what an artist has entered the industry for, it is important to understand in order to establish alternative means to generate revenue. Because of the constant changes in the non-universal laws and treaties as well as music regulations, copyright becomes an incredibly dense subject. Like this was not enough, every country does it differently from another, adding to the difficulty of understanding the subject.

Even if it is only to know how to delegate copyrighting your music to someone else, grasp the basics of these principles. A musician’s most important asset is copyright. It can help you get exposure, turn around your career and make you money, if you understand its concept.

Originally, I had set out to write about all possible income streams that indie musicians and artists could look at as alternative means to generate revenue, but this subject turned out to be vast, so I decided to write a few posts only on copyrighting music. Here, I am going to lay out the essential concepts of publishing and music copyright.

Publishing

Income from Publishing is the cornerstone of the income of indie artists and musicians. Essentially, the act of commercially leveraging music of songwriters and composers to get them paid for it is called Publishing. This can be done by the songwriter, the musician or be assigned to a publisher. If your aim in life is to produce good music and you think the rest can be managed by someone else, then it is always better to work with a publisher. You can read about this in detail in my blog Publishing for Indie Artists. An artist has to give the rights of publication of his songs to the publisher in order to let the publisher do his work and make sure that sales are happening and profits are flowing for himself and the artist.

To help you form an understanding of methods to exploit to different rights pertaining to music, let’s begin with the fundamentals of music copyright.

Copyright

Every composer, lyricist or performing artist is a creator. A creator of art of one form or another. When you record a song or write lyrics, your work automatically becomes copyrighted. Copyright is a form of intellectual property. The one who creates, becomes the copyright owner. This right is automatically split equally if there are multiple creators; though owners are free to deviate from this equal share through mutual agreement. Copyright ownership rights are meant to give control over who can perform publicly, reproduce, create derivatives of and distribute work. Ownership rights can be fully transferred and assigned to others. Licenses of your music can also be granted to others. This is done typically in exchange for payments commonly referred to as royalties.

This article is only about copyrighting your music and generating income from it. Do dive deeper into other subjects through the links that I have provided in this article. In my next blog I am going to write about different types of musical copyright.

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