Watch the video interview on Youtube here.
Film Courage: What are the different ways to make money as a musician?
Michael J. Epstein, Filmmaker, Writer, Musician, and Scientist: When we were kind of first getting serious in music, we thought there’s a lot of opportunity to do music licensing, and so we were working hard to try to get songs in TV shows, video games, and other things. We had a song in one of the Dance Dance Revolution games, and we had a lot of songs on mostly smaller reality TV show types of things. There was some revenue in that world, and I think as with all things that look fruitful, everybody kind of rushed into that space. There was a decline in that, and there’s still opportunity in licensing. We still do some licensing of our music; we have some music on stock sites, and we have some music available for licensing in other ways. We do make some revenue that way. A lot of my friends who are musicians, who are full-time musicians, they do session work. They get hired to come in and play on recordings. They also, many of them, play in what’s called a General Business Band, where they are performing usually covers [songs] or something else like that, and they’re playing at weddings or other events along those lines. Those are the main areas. I think original music, we have some revenue from Spotify, and now CD sales are basically over with completely. I don’t think even anybody approaches that too seriously anymore. But there are streaming services where we get some revenue. We get revenue from plays on YouTube, believe it or not, and so there are still some streams. I think, as with film, anybody who is serious about music needs to diversify what they’re doing because you can’t just say, I’m going to play in a band, write songs, sell CDs, tour, and make enough money. That’s a really rare thing. I see articles almost every day about bands that you would think are quite successful saying that going on tour just is not viable for them. They’re not going to be able to break even on…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Michael J. Epstein is a filmmaker, writer, musician, and scientist. With his production company, Launch Over, he has made theme-driven genre shorts and features that have played more than 75 film festivals and have been distributed worldwide. Prior to his film career, Michael toured and recorded with indie bands The Motion Sick, The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library, Neutral Uke Hotel, and Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. He has also published more than 40 book chapters, papers, and abstracts in the auditory and psychological sciences and has written books on crowdfunding and the logical structures of science, mathematics, and statistics.
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