How do I make money from my songs - Part 1

Are you a song­writer who is search­ing for the dif­fer­ent ways you can make money from your songs? Don’t go any­where! This two part series will give you the answers you need.

For starters, I want to define the two types of income as it relates to you as a song­writer. One is active income, the other is passive.

1. Active Income

Active income is performance-based pay or more specif­i­cally, the money you get in exchange for your ser­vices. The major­ity of peo­ple make their money this way. You go to work for 40 hours, you get paid at the end of the week. Done deal. As a song­writer, active income is money that you will earn on what I term “one-shot” deals, where you get paid once for the use of your song or songs in a work for hire, film, tele­vi­sion or what­ever the project may be.

2. Pas­sive Income

Pas­sive income is money you get for not lift­ing a fin­ger! This is when it gets good, because pas­sive income is ongo­ing! For a song­writer, this would be specif­i­cally defined as resid­ual income in the form of song roy­al­ties. Bands like Jour­ney and Bon Jovi are still get­ting checks in the mail for their older hits. (Yeah I know, nowa­days they are elec­tron­i­cally wired but get­ting a check in the mail sounds more entic­ing!) Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believ­ing” is the best sell­ing cat­a­log track on Itunes, with down­loads in excess of 2 mil­lion and the only cat­a­log track in his­tory to gar­ner dou­ble plat­inum sta­tus. And this doesn’t include what they make from get­ting played on the radio and tele­vi­sion! By the way, a cat­a­log track is a song that has already been pre­vi­ously released. You often see older artists on these cat­a­log charts, such as The Eagles, Pink Floyd and James Taylor.

Now, let’s check out the dif­fer­ent income sources you have as a song­writer! Let’s move on to Part 2.

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