I thought of a future dilemma that I knew I'd ultimately face at this rate. I am 9 classes away from having an AA Degree in Business Administration. My plan was to get through a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration and using my business education to start a production company. Knowing that I wouldn't be fully funded right away, I thought I would aim to shoot for grants.
But another problem arose: 6 months after graduation, I would be expected to make monthly payments toward my student loans, which are fairly outrageous at the moment, let alone after the next two years when I finish a 4-year degree at USF. This would mean I'd need to come into money pretty darn quick.
So I thought of an idea that will help shoulder some of the weight so as to not bog me down financially: I should just go commercial and market my music instead of continuing to do it all for free. It's not that I enjoy charging people for my work, and it's not like I don't make music for the love of doing it. At some point, I will need to have taken it upon myself to start working toward a living at production (music and eventually film; and while I'm not a film student, I have done some time working in stage productions and a couple film productions, so I do have experience and have learned quite a bit not only from that experience, but also from spending the past 8-10 years analyzing how movies are made).
I found a website called TuneCore that provides independent music composers/artists with tools (at a price, but a price that's worth investing my leftover loan funds and income tax into) to market their music digitally. Having those tools handy made me think that I'd be a fool to not try to make some money off of what I'm best at.
Recently (as in the past few days), I've been picked up for another short film commission, of which I am not charging the filmmaker (because he is not doing this film commercially, or I would), but I WILL be using this opportunity to present my first marketed soundtrack, and after this, my music will very likely go commercial.
Just giving you guys a heads up. I'll probably still make some music specifically for posting here, but at much less volume given the circumstances.
MaestroRage
I've often wondered how successful an independent artist would be using a service like Tunecore.
Definitely keep me in the loop on the happenings behind that.
Setu-Firestorm
I can understand that. That's why I'm not banking my income on that idea; it's just to make me some money on the side (although I'm not expecting to get hundreds of dollars a month on it).
I think the idea of services like TuneCore is not to make the artists' living, but rather to get their feet wet in the industry so they're music is getting out there in hopes of it getting into the right hands. Really, how successful you are with things like that really depends on how well you advertise yourself, and I've got a few ideas up my sleeve that I learned from the Hero of Time producer.