AudioBanter.com - View Single Post

In article writes:

Some people have earned that much and more from offering more popular kinds
of music such as rock or hip-hop. Some people can make $100,000 per year
selling their wares at swap meets, street festivals, and similar events.
Some musicians may earn $80,000 per year playing and selling CDs in the New
York subways. Some of us, though, find such venues unsuitable for personal
or business reasons. The majority of jazz musicians, and probably many other
musicians, are out of their element in such situations. And many people
cannot afford to devote full time to such risky ventures.

That's the thing when you've chosen the self-employed route - you have
to be willing to take some risks that you wouldn't ordinarily take.
Most of the people I know who have moved from a secure job to being
self-employed have re-invented themselves to some extent.

Some people are natural salesmen; most musicians aren't. That is why record
companies, promoters, publicists, and agents exist.

No? Don't they sell their music and their performance when they get on
stage? That's one of the most important parts of the gig.

As a successful independent publisher, my background and training is well
suited to producing and marketing music CDs. But I don't have industry
connections, my catalog is much to small to interest a distributor, and the
jazz market is far too ill defined to permit focussed advertising.

Rounder Records is a good example of a success story. They started out
as a group house full of lovers of old time country music. They
released a few records because they loved the artists, and in order to
support their own product, offered to distribute similar records from
other independent labor-of-love record labels. They started out
selling by mail (this was before the Internet), taking ads in the folk
music magazines and going to festivals with a van full of records.

Thirty-five years later they're a major indie label.

A small
businessman also doesn't gamble with his money; he invests it.

That's one model. Another model is that he borrows money from someone
else. Admittedly "street musician" isn't a very solid investment for a
bank so you have to look elsewhere.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo