My beginnings in the “music industry” were when a friend recommended a site to me called Audiojungle. I had just finished college, and wasn’t any good at music technology (ie. recording music), but could compose quite well. So I decided to try and make some tracks and upload them to the site – if they were any way good, someone might buy them and it would give me some reassurance that I was on the right track.

Of course I only expected to maybe sell one or two tracks. In my first month on Audiojungle, I think I uploaded about 3 tracks – all short piano loops. For reasons which I couldn’t understand at the time, my tracks started to sell.
In July I had 9 sales – amounting to a whopping $8.75. I couldn’t believe it – people actually liked my music enough to buy it. When I started to see the sales very very slowly trickle in, I started to think…hmmm this could work out to be quite a nice money maker in my spare time.
So next I joined Revostock. A better payout rather (50/50), and they sell your tracks for more, I thought it looked good. I joined up, and started uploading my tracks. Then my tracks started to sell on there too, and I had another revenue stream coming in. So next I spoke with Mark Lewis (owner of PartnersinRhyme.com) and he liked my music, so let me join up to Musicloops.com and if I did well on there, I could join PartnersinRhyme.com and make a CD collection for the site.

Naturally enough, my music sold well on musicloops.com and after a few weeks, Mark asked me to create a CD of emotional piano tracks to be sold on PartnersinRhyme.com for $100 a pop! I got cracking, and used what limited knowledge I had to make a few piano tracks using Reason. I kept the idea of KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid! I just used piano and strings – I didn’t master the tracks, didn’t use any EQ – nothing – just piano and strings in Reason. I didn’t do any mastering simply because I didn’t know much about it at the time. So far since it went on sale I’ve sold it 5 times and made $250 last month from it. You can view it here
It just goes to show – theres money to be made in the stock audio market if you have some spare time, and have a bit of talent.

Head over to www.filmandgamecomposers.com to read the full article.