This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Today we're going to hear from an independent musician who seeks advice on skipping out on Spotify. They like Spotify as a listener, but in terms of being a recording artist, royalties for most artists are dismal on streaming services like Spotify, or at least, you know, that's a big debate, but let's focus on the topic at hand here. Is corporate licensing for background music a better option? Is it better than trying to achieve lots of streams on a platform like Spotify? And the short version is yes, at least on a direct comparative basis, and what I mean is that if you can get your music licensed with the right agency, and if a business chooses to use it, and then actually does use it frequently as store background music or hold music when you call and you're waiting on hold for an hour, then you'll definitely make a lot more money than you would for the same number of people listening on Spotify.
However, those are a lot of conditions that need to be met, okay, so I don't want to suggest it's easy. Let's look at some more details in this episode. Coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. Hi, Chris, this is Blake, and I just recently found your show through Spotify. Speaking of which, I'm an independent musician, and I've been learning about uploading my songs to Spotify and other platforms.
So far, I've got five of them up, and while it's cool to see them there, no one is listening, so I'm not earning any royalties. To make money on Spotify, you need a lot of streams, and I'm not sure that's gonna happen anytime soon. However, I do have another idea, which is store background music. You know, some grocery stores or home improvement stores, really any kind of retail locations have music that plays overhead. Sometimes it's top 40 tunes, but often it's instrumental tracks or other music they have somehow licensed.
I feel like this is a much more lucrative opportunity than Spotify for me, and my music's perfect for playing overhead while shoppers browse the aisles. So how can I get my big break? Thanks for any help you can give me. All right, great idea. Thanks for the call.
Thanks for being out there. And we've had at least one story about this somewhere in the archives. You can always search, you know, more than 1,800 episodes, completely free, www.sidehustleschool.com. You can search for a tag, you can search for a word that's been used in the title, so you can often find, you know, some example of what you might be wondering about. And in this case, like it's absolutely true that licensing your music commercially, having it played in stores or as corporate hold music, can end up paying more than the average Spotify stream.
But as I said earlier, like it's not necessarily easy to enter that market, you know, with Spotify, you can just go through a registration process and upload your music. Pretty simple. The main thing there is like, how are you going to attract listeners and fans? For the store background music idea, you typically need to work with an agency that specializes in that. So do some searching.
I looked around a little bit. One option is harryfox.com, formerly known as Rumblefish, but there are also many others. And so some of them have a submission process on their site. For others, you might need to poke around a little bit, maybe email someone or reach out on LinkedIn. And of course, be aware that some music is naturally, you know, a much better fit for this kind of usage.
Like, if you have a punk band, it might not get a lot of interest from grocery stores. Although it might, right? Anything is possible. A punk grocery store. Also a podcast recommendation.
I just heard this story recently that was so cool, just really interesting. It's about Cisco's hold music, which has been listened to millions and millions of times. That would be the company Cisco. The podcast is on This American Life. If you search This American Life stuck in the middle, or even This American Life, Cisco hold music.
You're going to hear that story that I heard the other day while I was running. So as I said, that's been listened to millions and millions of times, though, unfortunately, in that particular case, the musician didn't receive royalties. So hopefully for our caller, they're also going to be listened to millions of times and get paid. That's the goal. All right.
That's it for today. Listeners, if you have a question, something you're wondering about, an idea, you have side hustle, school.com/questions, we'll continue to feature them throughout the year. New episode every single day. Do subscribe, stream, come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.
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