How I earn money in the music business💰✨

My name is Cara. I'm an artist, songwriter, and music producer, and welcome to my home studio. Today, I'm going to be answering one of my most frequently asked questions, and that's how I earn money in the music business.

Now, back in the day when I was living in Los Angeles as a full-time songwriter, I would make these little posts called "Advice by Cara," and I would basically just be documenting my experience as a songwriter in Los Angeles and helping people with how to negotiate splits and basically how to do business with DJs and other songwriters and producers. So this is just kind of an updated version of my "Advice by Cara" videos.

Now we all love to make music; we all love to be a part of creating something beautiful and magical. But there is also a business, and so if you aren't participating in the business part, you're just making music for fun, and that's totally okay. You can do that. Not everybody is meant to be in the music business, but everybody can make music. But if you are actually interested in being in the music business, I'm going to walk you through every single revenue stream that I have as an artist and music content creator.

So let's start with my music catalog. I've been in the music business for 10-plus years at this point, and so I've written a lot of songs in that time span. And while I'm not as heavily writing songs today as I used to, I still have a massive music catalog that I collect royalties on. So let's break down all the ways that I collect on that music catalog.

When I was actively working with some of the biggest DJs in the world, I would get either a fee or an advance for my vocal. So a fee and an advance are two different things. A fee is a flat rate where you get paid for your work—say it's $1,000—and you get that $1,000, and you get to keep it. And according to whatever deal you come up with for splits on the publishing and the master, you would collect on that in addition to your fee. If you got an advance—say they gave you a $1,000 advance—then you wouldn't be collecting royalties until that $1,000 was collected on their end. When that song comes out, you have to recoup that advance before you actually see any more royalties from that release. So don't get confused between those two things: a fee and advance. Make sure when you are making your contracts with your co-writers and your co-producers that it's very clear on what you'll be receiving.

Okay, moving on to royalties. There's two sides to every song. We have the publishing royalties, which is the composition. So the publishing is being split between you and all of your co-writers and producers that made the song. So anybody who contributed to the lyrics, melodies, and the production would be splitting that publishing. And there's also a master side, and that is typically what the record label owns. So would you like to teach my audience about master royalties? So the master side is typically owned by the record label that's putting out the song and the artists that are on the song. All of this is deal by deal basis; you really have to work with your team for whoever you made that song with to figure out the splits for your master and your publishing. It's different for every single release, so I can't give you guys exact numbers, but that's up to you. So if you are an artist on a song—say you're a featured vocalist on a song—you really want to keep and retain part of the master. The master royalties are paid out by all of the record labels that own that master. Say you're working with a big major label, and they're keeping 70% of the master, and you and the other artists that are on the song are splitting the other 30% of the master, then you would be collecting royalties from that label. So those master royalties are typically paid out two times per year. It's different for everybody. I know there's labels like Monstercat that pay monthly, but most record labels pay out twice per year.

I've made many mistakes in my career, and there are many songs where I had done a buyout. And a buyout basically means I just got a flat fee for everything, and then I don't collect any master royalties. If you have a music release with a label or if you're just putting things out independently with your friends, it's really important to retain your master and your publishing because you do want to collect that money down the road. While buyouts can be really exciting because you're getting paid a fee right away, you're sacrificing all of the money that you can collect afterwards.

So as I mentioned before, master royalties are paid out by the record labels, and your publishing is paid out in multiple different ways. We have performance royalties that are paid out through our PROs, which are ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. And depending on what country you live in, there are performance rights organizations in your country that pay out your performance royalties. I personally am with BMI. I've been with BMI since the beginning, and I've had really great experience with them. BMI pays out quarterly, so I get four payments from them every single year for all of my music catalog. And they are basically collecting performance royalties for any songs that have been placed on television, that have been performed live, that have been performed on any sort of online service—or Spotify, Apple Music, any digital platform where your music is being being played or sold—or any sort of radio station. That's where all of that money is being collected, and then it gets paid out to you. Actually, pretty cool to look at the statements that BMI gives me because I can see exactly where my song was being played, how much money I got for that performance.

I'm also signed up with a company that collects my neighboring rights royalties, and I'm not even going to lie, I don't know all the details on what neighboring rights exactly are. It's just another revenue stream that I've been collecting for the last few years since actually having music being released. So as an artist on all these different songs, you know, I want to make sure that I'm at least collecting as much money as I possibly can.

Now let's talk about my publishing situations. A few years ago, I signed with a major publisher. This particular deal was a 50/50 co-publishing deal, so they basically collected 50% of my publishing, and so I had to recoup that deal. And after a few years of recouping that, I was able to move on to another deal, which I'm in currently, and that's an administration deal. So the difference between a co-pub and an administration deal: obviously, the co-pub, they collect more money, but in that deal, they were more creative partners with me in the sense that they were putting me in sessions, so I was being set up in all of these different rooms through my publisher. And with the administration deal I have, they're simply just collecting my money. So even though I'm not in my co-publishing deal anymore, I still collect royalties from them twice a year. The same time frame is when all of the record labels send out their master royalties; that's when I'm getting my statements for my co-publishing deal. And even though I'm not in that deal anymore, they still own that music catalog that I created while I was with them.

The last way that my music catalog generates money is through sync licensing. Sync licensing is when you place music on television, movies, trailers, video games—it's basically when a company pays to use your song in their content, and they're not owning the song; they're simply paying to get permission to use it. So there's two sides to sync licensing: the master and the publishing, just like I was talking about before. Let's use a $40,000 ad for an example: $20,000 goes to the master and $20,000 goes to the publishing. So whoever owns each side and whatever their percentage is, that's what they're going to be collecting from the master and the pub. And what I personally love about sync licensing is that it gives you an opportunity to make a lot more money for your work. When you place a song with another artist or if you're releasing music with a record label, sometimes it can take a while to start seeing those royalties come in, but with sync licensing you get an upfront fee. Whenever I do get a sync placement, it's always so exciting because I know that I'm actually going to get paid a fair amount for my song. So every year I do manage to get a couple syncs, and they definitely range in size. The largest sync that I've ever gotten was a Walmart ad, and that paid a lot of money.

So now that we've talked about all the different revenue streams that my music catalog generates, let's talk about content. I actually started this YouTube channel during the pandemic because I wanted to solidify another revenue stream for myself and actually build a platform independently so that I could keep 100% of the profits. With my music catalog, everything was always a big group project, so I would always be working with multiple different co-writers and producers and record labels. Although I have hundreds of songs released, I don't own 100% of any of those songs, and so it's split up between a lot of people. So what's nice about my YouTube channel and my content creation is that I get to keep 100% of it. And there's a couple different ways I make money doing it.

So one way I make money on my YouTube channel is through AdSense. Now, AdSense is a monthly payment that I receive from Google for my view counts. So all of the videos that I post on my YouTube channel that don't feature a commercially released song, I get to collect AdSense money for it. It stinks—it stinks! It smells so bad. Anyway, where was I? Yeah, put him outside. Oh my God. Anyway. So as a music channel, I obviously am creating a lot of videos featuring my commercially released music, and so the videos that feature those songs are getting monetized through the distribution companies that put out the songs. When the distribution companies collect those royalties from my video views, it then gets split out to all of my co-writers on the song. For the videos that don't feature commercially released music, I get to collect my AdSense money. So the more views, the more money, and so AdSense is an automatic payment that I get every month for my YouTube channel. When it comes to collecting money on views for my videos on Instagram and TikTok, I do get a little bit of money from Meta for my Instagram videos, but I don't really make any money on TikTok. In a lot of ways, short content is worth less than YouTube content, and so I have been working really hard to build up my YouTube channel so that I can create a nice income stream for myself here. And there's a lot of songs that I purposely don't commercially release so that I can monetize off of my videos because, once again, if you commercially release your music through a distributor—say you're an independent artist and you put out a song and you distribute it to Spotify, Apple Music, all of those DSPs—you're not going to be able to monetize your video. So if you're a music creator, just be aware of that.

The second revenue stream that I have for content creation are brand partnerships. This is a fairly new development for me. I think it's been about 2 to 3 years since I got my first brand partnership with Sennheiser. So it's been a really cool experience to be able to partner with these brands and showcase all of their products in my videos. Since I'm a recording artist, I typically partner with brands that sell things like microphones and interfaces and studio equipment because that's very much on brand for me. But depending on what kind of content you create, that kind of dictates what type of brands you'll be partnering with. These sponsorship fees definitely range depending on what the campaign is, the company, and the product, but when you have multiple sponsorships every single year, you can make a lot of money. Not every single studio session that I make is a paid sponsorship, but a couple of them are. So if you ever watch my studio sessions and it has that little paid sponsorship label on the top, that means one of these companies paid me to use their product in my video. I tend to stick to YouTube content when it comes to sponsorships, but when Reels and TikTok really started blowing up, I was getting paid to do a lot of TikToks and Reels. So those would typically be videos that ranged from 30 to 90 seconds, and my YouTube videos range from 5 to 20 minutes. I get paid a lot more money for my YouTube videos because they are longer, and they do require require a lot more effort and video production and editing, and so I tend to stick to those projects when I am doing a paid sponsorship.

Moving on to my e-commerce business, I'm cara.com. My website is one of my biggest revenue streams, and this is where I sell a lot of digital downloads and products for music producers to hone in their signature sound and create music. I offer exclusive vocal sample packs, vocal templates for popular DAWs, I have presets for different plugins, and I also have some courses. I'm actually really excited for this year because I'm going to start updating all of my courses. The courses that I offer now are singing for beginners, songwriting for beginners, and how to create vocal sample packs. And these are just three topics that I picked that I felt like I was really knowledgeable about and that I could share helpful information on. Some of my bestsellers are my vocal templates, and it's basically a digital download of a pre-made stock plugin vocal template for your favorite DAW. And you download that template, and you open it up in your session, and you have your leads, your doubles, your harmonies already pre-processed for you to record your vocals with. This was something that I developed for other vocalists and artists that really wanted to start learning how to record vocals because when I started posting tutorials on recording vocals and mixing vocals, I was getting so many questions, and I was like, "Well, why don't I just make a product that would kind of ease that confusion for people to get started and to feel comfortable with recording their vocals and mixing it?" And it actually became one of my bestsellers. And every template comes with a course on how to use that template. For my preset collection, I have options for some of the biggest companies like Waves and iZotope and Serum. And once again, these are just exclusive products that I've developed over time that I thought would be useful to other producers and musicians like me. And of course, I have a vocal sample pack at icar.com. I started my vocal sample pack journey on Splice I think like six years ago now, and they ended up being some of the best-selling vocal sample packs they've ever had on the site, with millions of downloads. And so after, you know, years of having my sample packs being licensed to Splice, I just decided that it was time to put out my own vocal pack on my own website so that I can have a new pack that wasn't used by so many other producers and just to have something of my own that I could sell on my own website. It's always been a dream of mine to own my own company, and I am cara.com has definitely been a dream come true because what I love about it is that I can add products, I can update products, I can make make videos using my products and sell those products direct-to-consumer. And I'm really grateful for this website because it has opened so many doors for me financially; it actually was one of the reasons I was able to fund my debut album.

So I hope that helps to get a better understanding on the different revenue streams that I have as a recording artist and a content creator. If you have any questions, comment below. And I'm really excited to be talking with you guys again and making these videos because I have so much wisdom and information to share with you guys throughout my 10 years in the music industry. So thank you for watching, and I'll catch you guys next time in another video.