This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
We have seen a lot of wacky and wild ways to make money over the years. It's one of the things I find most enjoyable in working on this show for you. There's just a bottomless reservoir of money-making ideas, including lots of things that you've never thought of. When I started side hustle school, I was like, how am I gonna be able to make a different episode every day for a year? Like, is that even possible?
Am I gonna run out of ideas and stories? Well, here we are in season six, a different episode every single day, year number six here. So I guess I was wrong about that, but wrong in a good way because there's just so many ideas. This brings me to today's episode, what's the latest wacky and wild way to make money? Selling white noise tracks on Spotify.
White noise tracks like background noise that you might listen to perhaps while you're working to concentrate. I do that myself. You may have seen this story circulating recently, if not, you're gonna hear about it in our listener question. I'm gonna share a few comments as well, but it is a wacky and wild way that somebody, maybe a few people have done very, very well, making lots of money, it's so crazy. So listener question basically is, is it feasible?
Now, is it feasible for somebody else? And if not, because now lots of people are talking about it, how do you find something like this in the first place? That is the real key after all. So let's look at this idea and the concept behind it, detailed question and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hey Chris, this is Ed from Boston.
I read an online story about people selling white noise tracks on Spotify. There's no music or audio book or podcast, just white noise that people play in the background to block out other sounds. Anyway, the article mentioned that some of these musicians, are they really musicians? Are making tens of thousands of dollars a month. Isn't this absurd?
And also, can I do it too? I'm not sure how to make white noise, but I figure it can't be that difficult. What's your take? Do I have a sound idea? [Music]
Ed from Boston, what's up man?
Do you in fact have a sound idea? I love that. So yeah, actually I saw this article as well. You know, is it absurd? Well, I don't know, everything's absurd.
I mean, everything's absurd, everything makes sense, right? In terms of business ideas, you know, but there's a market for it, it works. So first up, it's actually more than tens of thousands of dollars a month. The business featured in the story has earned at least $9 million. That is not a typo or a misstatement, $9 million.
I was like, man, I actually listened to white noise a good bit when I'm like in a coffee shop or sometimes on an airplane. So I was like, maybe I've contributed a few pennies of that, you know, through my subscription along the way. In fact, you know, that article mentions, there's one track titled clean white noise, loopable with no fade. And it's got 400 million streams on Spotify. So obviously they have titled that track in hopes that people are searching for certain keywords, you know, even though obviously every Spotify track or every music track is loopable, just kind of putting that in the title.
I also learned that Spotify doesn't allow you to put keywords in song titles, at least you're not supposed to, but obviously they haven't done a great job enforcing that. There is someone else, for example, who has a song entitled the Joe Rogan experience, presumably to capture some streams from people who are searching for something that is not a song, right? So can you do this now? Can you make your own white noise or whatever it is? Well, the thing is the cat is out of the bag.
So since that article was read by many people, you know, perhaps, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, lots of people are sharing it. I think it's gonna be tough. I mean, you could try, but I'm pretty sure like a lot of people are like, I'm gonna go make white noise now. So maybe a better question is, you know, what is like this? Right, and how do you find these things?
You know, the original idea was clever. It was tremendously successful. So, you know, this is why I always say thinking differently is such a valuable skill. And that just begins with paying attention. You know, like I said, I have listened to white noise or other background music tracks a lot, but I never really looked and, you know, paid attention to see, oh, you know, these tracks have a huge number of streams and there's not a lot of artists making them.
It's also like not that hard to do it. You know, maybe I would have pursued it. Like probably not. I already have plenty of projects, but the point is that I missed it. So thinking differently, paying attention, you know, go throughout life, pay attention.
I've had lots of episodes about this. I've written about it in my books. Maybe by doing that, you'll find the next $9 million simple idea, or at least, you know, something that makes extra money, you know, some good amount of extra money. That's what it's all about, you know, finding these opportunities, putting your skills to work, having a bias towards action. So you don't overthink things, you just kind of jump in and see what happens.
All right. Listeners, if you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what crazy things you have seen or what you're thinking about doing. We'll continue to feature these questions and my responses along with updates from listeners as they launch their projects. That's it for today.
New episode every single day, seven days a week. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
