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Season 3 ·

S3E02 – Never Sell Yourself Short

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When you’re new to the music industry, the world of contracts awaits..

Are you ready for them?

I was an electrician for 10 years collecting a “regular pay check”, just like many of you who want to start making money in the music industry.

This FL Studio Podcast Episode covers Never Selling Yourself Short to learn how to negotiate music contracts that are FAIR for both parties involved.

The main takeaways are:

  • Digital products (your beats/music) are YOUR COPYRIGHT..
  • Selling music is all about LICENSING
  • Every deal should be FAIR FOR BOTH PARTIES..

View GratuiTous Music Videos Here!

I hope you enjoyed this FL Studio Podcast.

View the M-Audio Oxygen Pro MIDI Keyboard.. you won’t be disappointed!

Want to make professional beats? Try my FL Studio Courses.

Adjustable Keyboard Tray Arpeggio Contracts Music Career Templates Typing Keyboard

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Transcript

S3E02 – Never Sell Yourself Short

  1. Season three, episode two, never sell yourself short.
  2. When you enter the music production industry, for most people, you don't really
  3. understand that it's really a game of contracts.
  4. All right. Most people work a normal job, and for those who are new here, I
  5. used to be an electrician for about 10 years here in Canada, and I was always just
  6. working a normal job, collecting a normal paycheck, right?
  7. You work your 40 hours a week, and or if if the job isn't behind, if the job's
  8. behind, you'd be doing some overtime, and overtime was actually kind of rare.
  9. A lot of companies didn't want to pay you overtime.
  10. but anyways, so contracts, we're gonna be talking about never selling yourself
  11. short, and I'm gonna be giving you some tips that I wish I knew because entering
  12. this industry, everything is regarding contracts, whether you have your beats that
  13. you're trying to sell, whether you are creating products like sound kits, courses,
  14. books. Essentially, you are an online entrepreneur, and it doesn't
  15. matter what product you're really selling, it could be fitness course or it could be
  16. a beat. The fact is you're dealing with what's called copyright and you're dealing
  17. with licensing. So, the main reason I want to talk about this is because when I
  18. was about five years into creating these online FL Studio courses, a vendor reached
  19. out to me and they were like, Hey, will you create a course for us for $500?
  20. When we get further into this episode, I want you to understand that when you enter
  21. this online industry, it is all about passive income, okay?
  22. And when I say passive income, when you create a beat, and let's say you put it on
  23. Spotify, artists are collecting royalties.
  24. That means passive income. So, in other words, you want to try to create as many
  25. passive streams of income coming in as possible because if one starts doing bad,
  26. then all the other ones are still kind of keeping you afloat.
  27. Now, before we get into further into this episode, I just want to give you a quick
  28. update on the website. I just created this custom MIDI keyboard tray.
  29. I will leave the link in the description.
  30. I highly recommend you check it out because when I make my music, I talk to you
  31. often about an adjustable keyboard tray.
  32. An adjustable keyboard tray allows you to pull your typing keyboard and your mouse
  33. closer to you, allowing you to sit in comfort.
  34. But what was happening is, you know, nowadays I've been talking to you a lot about
  35. the hands on mixing. I've recently picked up the M Audio Oxygen Pro.
  36. I've been using that for about two years now, and I have not had a better experience
  37. with a MIDI keyboard in all my years of making beats.
  38. And nowadays I've been really trying to get hands-on with my plugins with fab filter
  39. plugins, and again, you can check that out in the platform.
  40. The course is called hands-on mixing in FL Studio.
  41. Anyways, I was reaching over and it was starting to hurt like my back.
  42. And I created this custom MIDI keyboard tray.
  43. I created an article on the website there.
  44. There's videos, there's pictures for how I installed it.
  45. Okay. Also, I created tons of other free tutorials this week as well, such as you
  46. know, how to create an FL Studio template, what are our pigeos?
  47. Again, just visit it'sgratuitous.com forward slash blog.
  48. And if you want to take it to the next level, there's tons of courses as well as
  49. books there for you too. All right, so let's give a little example of not selling
  50. yourself short. Let's say you're going to an interview.
  51. So when you were an electrician, and this is something that people really don't tell
  52. you much, is you're a dime a dozen in the construction world..
  53. So in other words, the company will hire you, they'll bring you on site
  54. And then what happens is near the end of the job, they'll start either sending
  55. people to a new job or they start laying people off.
  56. Okay. So you want to try to stay on that job as long as possible.
  57. And if you're new at the company, people also have sonority as well.
  58. So sometimes you are jumping around to different electrical companies and you're
  59. sitting in interviews, not all the time, but sometimes, and they really know how to
  60. sweet talk you. Oh yeah, we're gonna start you off at let's say $20 an hour or $25
  61. an hour. I'm just throwing just a random number out there.
  62. And then they'll say, and then after a couple months, you know, maybe you can get a
  63. little bit of a raise, you know, depending on your performance.
  64. And it's gonna be so hard to get that raise.
  65. So what I'm trying to say is you want to learn to negotiate right away.
  66. All right. You know, if you have the credentials, if you have the skill, if they
  67. need you, if they need workers, you say, Do you know what?
  68. 25, how about 27? And then you can kind of work something out.
  69. Even an extra dollar when you are working a job goes a long way.
  70. But now let's hop over to now, let's say a music producer where you know maybe you
  71. want to sell your beats or whatever.
  72. What you need to understand is that selling a beat is no different than selling a
  73. course or selling a book or something like that, okay?
  74. Now selling a service is something totally different.
  75. A service is something like let's say you wanted to book an FL Studio lesson with
  76. me. That's not copyright. You just book a one-hour lesson, we have a video chat.
  77. Hey, how's it going? I answer some questions.
  78. That's not really anything to do with copyright or licensing.
  79. When you create our digital product, this is all to do with licensing.
  80. And so this company who made this offer, they said, Would you create a course for
  81. $500 for us and that's it? If you were listening close to everything I'm telling you
  82. so far, you would know that's a bad deal.
  83. Because they're able to use the course, they're able to use my brand name, and I
  84. only get $500. You always want to have strings attached to the products you're
  85. creating. Let's talk about a beat now.
  86. Let's say an artist comes to you and they say, Hey, I want to buy a beat from you
  87. for $10,000. And that might be a lot of money.
  88. And especially if you're new, you're just like, that's a great deal for $10,000.
  89. But you have to sell all rights of that beat to them.
  90. Your name won't be on the credits, etc.
  91. etc. You get the money now, but let's say that song blows up.
  92. Let's say for two or three years, it is like number one or in the top 10 and it's
  93. making money all the time. And you know, you're sitting there and you're like, wow,
  94. I made that beat, and no one even knows I made that beat.
  95. But you thought at the time the $10,000 was worth it.
  96. Did you sell yourself short? And when you're new to contracts and to
  97. licensing, because if you work a normal job like I'm talking, you know, what I was
  98. electrician, you just work your hourly rate, you go home, they give you a paycheck,
  99. they deduct even a lot of like your taxes and all that stuff.
  100. Would you be happy with the $10,000 you received?
  101. Or would you have been more happy to get some percentage of those sales if it was a
  102. huge song?, right You probably would have made a lot more money if you would have
  103. had strings attached to the product.
  104. If you're gonna sign it, are you happy with the decision?
  105. That's a really good example. That beat, right?
  106. beat. If you sell the for $10,000, you know, if you're really young, you're gonna be
  107. like, oh, that's a lot of money
  108. But it's not really that much money.
  109. If you really think about it, like the cost of a home, very expensive, right?
  110. And so it totally depends because let's say it's a smaller artist.
  111. Might be a better deal for you.
  112. If it's a big artist and they say, hey, ten thousand dollars for the beat, you know
  113. that they're gonna be making way more money than that.
  114. Know your skill level, know what you bring to the table, and that will
  115. help you to never sell yourself short.
  116. I've experienced a lot of good and bad contracts in my time doing this online FL
  117. Studio Education, and that's what I want to pass on to you.
  118. So I hope you are enjoying season three of Music Production Made Simple.
  119. I'm gratuitous. You can visit me over at it'sgratuitous.com if you're wanting to
  120. learn how to make beats with FL Studio.
  121. The last thing I just want to share with you is to check out my music.
  122. You can listen to that over at it's gratuitous.com forward slash music.
  123. All the beat tapes are available for free download, and there's the video there.
  124. You can see the track list. Very, very cool, very nicely laid out.
  125. Thanks for listening. And always feel free to reach out if you have questions, if
  126. you would like me to cover certain topic.
  127. have a lot of different ideas for this season.
  128. So I'll talk to you in the next episode.
  129. Eagle
  130. game.
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