Selling Sheet Music - Progress Thread

[Aristoss]

It's been a while.

After living in Idea Land for too long, I've finally embraced what I'm great at and that follows the CENTS framework:

Making skillful musical arrangements and selling their sheet music online (Digital Product)

It's a sector that is pretty saturated,
But I'm planning to stand out by:

-Serving underrepresented instruments,
-Offering high quality recordings as a way to market and potentially to sell as a bundle (audio + video + sheet music)

So far I have made a few sales, mostly of my own compositions.

I'm offer the products on my own website and today I opened a publisher account on a few major publishing websites, who sadly take a big percentage of the sale,
but have their own audience. By diversifying and by also selling on my website I should keep a certain amount of control.

I'll use this thread to document my success!

 

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[piano]

It's nice to see another fellow musician on this forum!

I had actually the same idea a year but didn't follow through properly.

Anyways, you say that your idea follows the Cents framework yet you didn't list every commandment. Maybe do so as a follow up.

It's a sector that is pretty saturated,
But I'm planning to stand out by:

-Serving underrepresented instruments,
-Offering high quality recordings as a way to market and potentially to sell as a bundle (audio + video + sheet music)

Let's say you do make great arrangements; how do you plan on giving them exposure so that people will be able to buy them?
That might be hardest and/or most time consuming part of this.
You could maybe blow up in a certain kind of community (let's say trumpets) by transcribing or writing a great arrangement that makes people go nuts and thus buying your stuff, but that as well would prolly be very time consuming and definitely must not work either.
...or try to create a youtube channel...

I just personally think that more sophisticated music is regressing and so your target audience as well.
I would personally go do something else (unless you really do see the reason to pursue it).

Also just as a heads up: MJ often talked about not making passion your job. Maybe read up on that again if you can't remember or know that yet.

ps: how old are you?

 

[StrikingViper69]

Another musician here, who also had a similar idea it’s on my list of things to execute next year.

How many sales have you seen so far? How are you going to be advertising your music?

I don’t have anything to add that @piano didn’t already say.