How To Make Your Passion Pay the Bills When The Rockstar Thing Didn’t Work Out
How to make your passion pay the bills is a quandary facing many. So it didn’t quite work out. Rock and roll superstardom denied. Instead you find yourself knocking out the cheesy covers on a Saturday night in the local pub – a couple of hours of glory before its back to the 9-5 on Monday. For 20 years or more you’ve kept the dream alive but maybe now its time to accept that this as far as your going. What now?
Chances are if the scenario above is one you can relate to then no back-up plan was in place. You’ve been concentrating on working out how to make your passion pay the bills. You’ve done a succession of jobs that your heart wasn’t really in but which have paid the bills and financed that room full of equipment you’ve accumulated. But most of those tedious 8-hour weekdays were really just filling in time till the midweek rehearsals and the weekend gigs. They were just the day job.
Every now and then across the years something happened that kept the dream alive: A call from a record company, a great review from a magazine or a promoter. Maybe you even got on a support tour with a revitalised big name from the past. Just enough to keep you focussed on the big dream, the breakthrough that was going to change everything. Maybe you’d finally discovered how to make your passion pay the bills. Alas no – they all failed to deliver.
So now reality has bitten. You still love doing the gigs (kind of), you still love playing but you’ve realised that you’ve probably reached the end of that particular road. Is it time to chuck it? Is it time to see what the old Strat, the dusty Marshall head and 4 by 12, the recording and PA gear are worth? Nah !! Sod that !
How to Make Your Passion Pay the Bills in Ways You Never Thought of
All that’s required is a rethink and you’re actually in a great time and place to do it. Lets face it all you were really interested was playing the music. It’s still what gets you animated when you talk about it. It’s still the thing that connects deep in your soul. It’s just not going to be what earns your living – or is it?
Maybe not in terms of playing to full houses every night or selling tons of “product” with royalties flooding in night and day but there are other options. We’re in the digital age now after all. We don’t need to spend the majority of our time doing things we hate to finance the things we love. Good news! You can learn how to make your passion pay the bills in other ways
The notion of exchanging time for money is past it’s sell by date. Has been for a while now. And lets face it that’s actually what successful musicians end up doing anyway. How many hours does it actually take you to be on stage for that hour or two?
There are the rehearsals, the transport, the waiting for the sound guy to show up, the setting up of the kit and the sound checking. Then after the gig there’s all that in reverse. For the few who make it to the big time add countless hours of travelling, waiting around and fulfilling contractual obligations, media junkets and interviews.There’s no age limit to this lifestyle but it gets tiring as the years roll by. It’s no longer your ideal idea of how to make your passion pay the bills
It doesn’t have to be the end of the road at all. You can learn some new skills that will give you back a lot of that time and can provide you with a good, even incredible income. You can even apply those skills to your musical passion. I’m talking about digital marketing skills. By learning these you can become an affiliate marketer and earn your keep by selling goods, services and information online.
Here are just a few examples of how you can turn that passion into income as a digital marketer. You could sell musical products online. You could sell music lessons online – create your own or sell other peoples. You could repackage your old back catalogue of recordings, create videos for them and sell them online. You could offer to do the same for other musicians. There is a market for everything online and it doesn’t take 8 hours a day to do it. Leaving you more time to keep on rocking.
You’ll need new skills, some money and a laptop. It’s way less work and money than you’ve spent on your art over the years and you can do it anywhere you can connect to the Internet. Find out more about how to make your passion pay the bills by checking out a series of free videos on the link below.
How To Make Your Passion Pay the Bills
