Professional girl pianist on YouTube needs help xx

[helen larke]

Hi everyone, I am a professional pianist playing at a hotel residency, for weddings and I’ve done cruise ships.  I’m now 42 and I’ve been professional since I was 17.  Over the last year, I’ve been filming a lot of songs for YouTube to try and see if I can make pennies a different way,  this is a link to my latest one

. 

Any comments and if as many people as possible would be so kind to subscribe to my channel if you are liking and feeling kind would be amazing.  It seems it is so hard to get anywhere, and I’m trying so so hard.  Sending lots of love, Helen

[perfect_pitch]

Here's a bit of advice...

I also did this for a while, and I actually chose not to monetise my YouTube videos... why? Pissing 10,000 people with adverts just to make a buck (literally) didn't seem worth it. Tried the Patreon route as well while I had 2.5K subscribers - got maybe 3 of them willing to pay.
USED to make money through Apples iTunes back when people actually downloaded the tracks they wanted. You could get as much as 45% of each track (about 58 cents from a $1.29 track). Now that Apple Music is streaming... for the exact same amount of money - you now need to have 165 people stream that track just to make that 58 cents.

Apple Music is killing independent artists who depend on that money.
YouTube Premium is hoping to destroy the money streamers make by getting people to shift to YouTube Premium - that way, YouTube make MORE money from NOT shovelling ads in front of everybody (who would have thought).

I'd say you and I got into this line of work years after it was profitable. While I'm lucky I have a full time teaching position and love the art of actually puzzle-solving students mistakes, the problem is a lot of the time you don't get the appreciation in the internet as you'd like. I did it as a hobby just for the fun of it, but there's no challenge in it for me in terms of the arranging side of things. I can do it with ease, and I've proven I can do it to the rest of the world.

Sorry to be so glum.   

[ahinton]

Here's a bit of advice...

I also did this for a while, and I actually chose not to monetise my YouTube videos... why? Pissing 10,000 people with adverts just to make a buck (literally) didn't seem worth it. Tried the Patreon route as well while I had 2.5K subscribers - got maybe 3 of them willing to pay.
USED to make money through Apples iTunes back when people actually downloaded the tracks they wanted. You could get as much as 45% of each track (about 58 cents from a $1.29 track). Now that Apple Music is streaming... for the exact same amount of money - you now need to have 165 people stream that track just to make that 58 cents.

Apple Music is killing independent artists who depend on that money.
YouTube Premium is hoping to destroy the money streamers make by getting people to shift to YouTube Premium - that way, YouTube make MORE money from NOT shovelling ads in front of everybody (who would have thought).

I'd say you and I got into this line of work years after it was profitable. While I'm lucky I have a full time teaching position and love the art of actually puzzle-solving students mistakes, the problem is a lot of the time you don't get the appreciation in the internet as you'd like. I did it as a hobby just for the fun of it, but there's no challenge in it for me in terms of the arranging side of things. I can do it with ease, and I've proven I can do it to the rest of the world.

Sorry to be so glum.   

Wise advice!

[robertus]

My advice- it's very easy to make money giving piano lessons, and performing live. Recordings of all kinds (whether youtube, or a regular record deal) doesn't make any worthwhile money- there only good for promotion (and kind of fun to do, and can be artistically satisfying).

[ronde_des_sylphes]

My advice: unless something remarkable, probably external and outwith your control like someone with vast social media reach sharing one of your videos, the rates you get paid via the likes of YT, Google Music, Spotify etc are so tiny that you are never going to earn more than the odd little bit of pocket money this way. I think you should view YT as free promo material to showcase yourself, as a convenient mechanism for sharing your work with promoters etc (I'm sure you're already doing the latter). The fundamental problems are the low view/ stream payrates and that most people browse YT casually and in the expectation of free material. Do you have CDs of your work? You'll almost certainly make more money selling them after events than you would through YT. Getting professional quality ones made which look good really isn't prohibitively expensive nowadays.