How I Create Music for Licensing

In this video, I order songs off of Fiverr with the goal of earning passive income from them through licensing and streaming. It didn't really turn out as I expected...

For awhile, I’ve been thinking of ways people can start to generate passive income without having a specific skillset or a ton of cash. And I’ll admit, it’s no easy feat. But I thought I’d see if I could leverage the power of Fiverr to make it a little more attainable.

So if you’ve seen my other videos on passive income, you may know that I make music, and it currently generates income in two ways. From licensing… and from streaming. This currently accounts for over $2,000 a month in passive income for me, and the more tracks I have uploaded, the more it’ll generate.

But if you’re not much of a musician or producer, is there any way you may be able to still partake in some of this passive income? Well, I thought I’d head to Fiverr and find someone who would create tracks for me that I would have 100% of the rights of the music to do with it as I please. I can then upload it to a site like Artlist for music licensing, and I can upload to streaming services.

A lot of people that offer songwriting gigs may want to split royalties, which is totally fair, but for my purposes, I want to own everything 100% and not have to worry about splitting any money after the fact. Just one up-front payment and that’s it.

I ended up finding a seller who would create 10 lofi hip-hop tracks for about $30. I figured it’s a pretty low risk way to try this out. I also wanted to make sure it would be original compositions and not implementing samples by anyone else. Once he confirmed that it would be all original, I went ahead and placed the order. I’ll check back in when the order is complete.

____

So it’s two days later and the seller delivered all 10 songs. And I have to be honest… the tracks are… fine. Let’s listen to some clips of the tracks.

Being familiar with the music out there on sites like Artlist or on streaming like Spotify, these songs lack a little zuzsh. But, for $30, I can’t really expect higher-calibre tracks.

Still, mix is also a little off… the drums are a little loud, and in general, I just don’t think these tracks are where I need them to be to make sure they can generate some revenue.

I might head back to Fiverr and try out some more expensive gigs to see if I can get something a little more polished, but until then, I figured I would try and see if I can get one track out of this set of 10 that I can feel good about releasing with a set of other songs I already have completed.

So now, obviously, this next part is going to utilize some music production chops and creativity, so my initial premise for this video has definitely failed, but I will try and salvage what I can by creating one complete track in one day.

I’m going to grab my MIDI controller and get to work in Ableton Live to see what I can create.

OUTRO

Okay, so in just one day I now have a completely different track. It’s definitely a lighter, more electronic track as opposed to the lofi hip-hop style I originally ordered off of Fiverr, but I think this will work well with the other tracks I want to release alongside it. And to be honest, this definitely isn’t my favorite track… it feels like it’s still lacking a little something, but I think it can still be a decent background track for licensing.

I’ll give an update once I get some data on streams and downloads after I release this. If you enjoyed seeing more of my music production process, please let me know in the comments, because maybe I’ll start sprinkling in the occasional music production video alongside the other topics I cover with this channel.

Do me a favor and hit the thumbs up button on this video, consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and I will see you in the next one.