100 Percent Profit Selling MusicThe typical commission when selling royalty free music online is 50%. So half of the money from the sale goes to the library. If you choose to promote and sell music on your own you can get 100% of the profits on each and every sale.

Many composers think that the music libraries takes too much money for their service, but a lot of the money is spent on promoting the music library and getting new customers. By doing the marketing yourself you can however keep 100% of the profits if you do it the right way.

How can I sell my music without creating a webshop from scratch?

A service like licensequote.com makes it easy for the not so technical user to create his own platform for selling music online. They handle all the technical stuff all you have to do is to implement their code on your website and you’re good to go.

The same goes for youlicense.com. If you go Pro you get access to a very similar setup, but take a look at both services and decide which one fits your needs the best.

  • Licensequote.com cost $50 a year.
  • Youlicense.com cost $100 a year.

The reasons for using one of these services are that you get a complete system with previewing of tracks, searching for music and of course buying and downloading the tracks.

The biggest challenge is promoting your music

The hardest part about selling your music is to get noticed by the buyers. It’s not an easy task to get traffic that will convert into sales. The music libraries can therefore take a high commission as they know how hard it is to keep relevant visitors coming to their websites.

This should however not make you give up on starting to selling music by yourself. The low startup fee of $50 a year at licensequote.com really makes it worth giving a short.

As I see it the following plan makes good sense if you want to start making 100% profits from your royalty free music:

1) The first thing you need is to get at good website up and running. The purpose of this website should be to promote your music. This website will be your main hub for promoting selling and your music.

You can create an excellent website by signing up with HostGator >> use their one-click-installation of WordPress >> buy one of the professional Genesis WordPress themes from StudioPress >> and make sure to install the plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast.

You should also create a Google Analytics account for your website. This way you get detailed stats about the visitors on your website.

Now create profiles for your website at: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, SoundCloud and Google+. Every time you create a new track or album make new post at your website about it and update all your social media profiles with information and link back to your main site.

The more good links you get to your website the better your rankings in the search engines will be. Make sure to mention your website at as many relevant websites as possible.

2) Keep working at your website by posting new articles that target keywords that has to do with anything related to buying royalty free music. The more relevant articles you have the better are your chances of being found in the search engines. Keep busy writing new articles, composing new tracks, updating and being active at the social media sites and visitors will start coming to your website.

3) Every time you make a post about a new track make sure it has buttons and text that links to your profile at for example pond5.com. This way you can see if the traffic you generate actually leads to sales.

At pond5 tracks views, your own sales and affiliate sales are being tracked. The stats a pond5 can therefore give you some idea of the quality of the traffic you send through your links.

4) After you start seeing some decent targeted traffic for your website (1000+ unique visitors a month) sign up with licensequote.com or youlicense.com. Now remove the pond5 links and start selling your music directly through your own site.

Before taking this leap I would suggest having over 100 tracks in your portfolio. This way the time and money spent on setting up your own shop though licensequote.com makes it worth while.

5) Now that you have some traffic through your website and hopefully some sales you can start looking more extensively at your website stats. By doing this you can figure out how much money you can spend on getting a new customer and still make a profit. Good places to start with paid advertising are AdWords or Facebook. At these two services you can make your ads very targeted which is a must if you want to make a profit from paid advertising.

So why don’t every composer sell music himself?

As you can see it takes a lot of effort to promote your own website. The libraries are aware of this and at music libraries where you get more than 50% from each sale seldom sells much music. They simply haven’t spend the money needed to get targeted traffic and thereby make sales happen.

Is it worth spending time on setting up a WordPress website and paying for a Pro account at licensequote.com?

I would definitely say yes. Even if you only use your website to link to your profile at a music library. The more people you get to listen to your music the better the chances of getting sales.

The possibility of getting 100% of the money from your sales sure does make it much more interesting working on your own website.

So get on with it – if you don’t have a website yet create one today. Start doing something active instead of counting on the music libraries doing all the heavy lifting for you. 🙂