The hardest part of making music is not crafting memorable melodies, but justifying the time involved by making some money. Since streaming services have proven they can’t pay the bills even with millions of plays, we came up with four services to help you monetize your music. Here are four more:
Ustream
Live concert streams aren’t rare, but charging for them hasn’t become commonplace yet. This space is ripe for artist exploration with the potential of plenty of profits. There are a few different services specializing in music streaming like Vyrt or Evntlive, but Ustream.tv is probably the most mature at this time. Artists, put on a virtual tour and save your fans some gas money.
Chirpify
Their name implies Twitter, but Chirpify allows artists, as well as other merchants, to sell both digital and physical goods over most social networks. The idea is to bring the store to your followers, having them reply with a specific word like “buy,” then allowing the automated transition to take place in the background. In addition to possibly leveraging a huge social following, Chirpify also only charges 5% plus $0.30 per transaction, with enterprise pricing going down to 2.9%. Gumroad is another very similar service which charges 5% and a $0.25 trisection fee.
Soundslice Pitch Perfect
Sell your music again, in a different form. Soundslice is starting to make it possible for artists to sell tabs of their music for other musicians to play along with, exactly as it should be, without a lot of guessing. Soundslice offers a pretty amazing tool for guitarists which syncs the chords and tabs to a song, even allowing you to play at half speed with no pitch loss. Opening up the opportunity for artists to charge is a nice touch. This may be thought of as a niche product, but as of 2011, sheet music was a $2 billion/year market. Plus, it only takes a few seconds into the Soundslice demo to convince most people this is an amazing service.
PledgeMusic
Sure, Kickstarter is great and works well, but PledgeMusic is an entire site dedicated to crowdfunding tours, albums, and gigs. Artists like Slash, Minus The Bear, Lissie, and other top-tier names are all currently using the site to fund their future music. The site makes it easy for listeners to browse current projects, but also lets artists make campaigns profitable even if the goal doesn’t quite hit the target.
[Image: Flickr user Bob Mical]