How I Made a Sustainable Income from Writing Music

I actually was going to write an article about another topic today but then stumbled across a discussion on the internet where someone who according to himself works for more than 30 years in the industry gave what you would call an anti-pep-talk to up and coming composers.

In a nutshell according to him, success in the industry is exclusively based on luck and all available jobs and positions are taken already so don't waste your time trying to start a career in the business. He also said that it was more likely for a well known rock/electronic producer to break into the scoring industry than for a trained film composer.

Interestingly, every once in a while you get these kind of people who are supposedly working in the industry for a long time and who formulate their viewpoint in a way that would scare off even the most motivated people. In fact, I even know a few people working in the business who approach this job with the mental attitude of a frustrated office worker and who exude a general negativity about it.

While I don't want to speculate about the individual background situation of the person mentioned above or the "frustrated composers" who I know, I'll try to give a balanced picture of what my experiences are and how I found my spot in the industry.

Having said that, in spite of me having worked professionally in this field for more than 15 years, I don't see myself anywhere near the point of what I eventually want to achieve yet but I am happy that I'm currently at a state where I can comfortably sustain my living without needing to worry financially.

Another thing to be mentioned here is that a career path is incredibly individual and just because one strategy has worked for one person doesn't mean that it will universally work. So  please see everything that I say here with a grain of salt.

I was lucky enough to have a quite clear image of what I wanted to do in my life pretty early on, so I already had this advantage over many composers who enter this game later on in their life. I had a family who supported my desire to make a living in the music industry with a healthy dose of "Don't you want to do something more sustainable?" so in a way I was already priviledged over people who need to invest way more energy and persistance in following that path because they lack the family support.

I entered music university at the age of 19. Looking back, I see that it would have had certain benefits to enter university at a later age as I don't feel like I had formed a "artistic personality" at that young age yet that had anything meaningful to say. But then again there was the advantage of getting into the game early.

I started to build up a network over the internet quite early on as well. Many amateur and student filmmakers were organised in forums during these times which is where got my first unpaid gigs. With some of these people I still have a creative relationship to this day having made the transition to paid work.

A few years later, I had what I would say was my "lucky moment" when a producer hired me for a rather high profile job that allowed a real orchestra recording. In spite of the movie not becoming very successful and being conceptually altered several times which in consequence eliminated big parts of my score from the movie it gave me my first professional orchestra recording experience and made it clear for me that working with real orchestras was what I enjoyed most about this job and what I wanted to exclusively do.

Having worked with a real orchestra plus the university degree gave me an experience advantage that lead to some new jobs. I was approached by a composer who wrote the new non-orchestral parts of the score for the movie mentioned above and he asked me whether I could help him orchestrating and doing some additional writing on a score that he was hired for. This eventually lead to a partnership that lasted for about 7 years . I first started out orchestrating for him but eventually I became more of a writing partner. or me however, this relationshp had the downside that he always was the person who would communicate with the clients and he was always hired. I always was more of a sub-contractor which made me quite dependable from his work.

There was a general problem that his work was mainly coming from one director who had a big accidental success in his career and consequentially got offered a few high profile movies that all failed commercially and eventually lead to this director not getting any more jobs. Consequentially this meant that we didn't get that many jobs anymore and the composer whom I was working for started to branch out into a musical field that I didn't find too attractive.

This fell together with my personal decision to focus my career on becoming "the person that gets called when a real orchestra is involved" as I at that time really hated doing work "in the can". So there was this one problem of us two as a team getting fewer and fewer jobs and me personally limiting my work field even more. This was of course not a spontaneous development but it happened gradually. Seeing the partnership growing apart, I tried to aquire jobs on my own which often of course required my own skill set of writing score sheets and orchestrating and not the skill set of my working partner which was producing and conceptualising which lead to me doing jobs on my own.

This development eventually lead to the break-up of this partnership where we both had grown creatively so far apart that it didn't make much sense to continue.

During these times, money was tight and projects were rare so I needed to come up with a plan B. For me, this plan was teaching and generally spreading out more on social media. Luckily, the interest in my lessons was quite cosiderable so I was able to create a steady source of income from this. This however occupied three days each week that I couldn't dedicate to writing music and I never wanted to become a teacher who composes on the side.

It was also at this time that I launched my "Daily Film Scoring Bits" on my web site where I posted a small snippet of knowledge almost every day and I also wrote some more extensive tutorials on my website. I figured that persistence was the most important thing in the age if internet and social media. And I really have to say that this had some considerable impact on my career. Just the fact that I was writing bits of knowledge showed people who stumbled across my web profiles that I knew what I was talking about and eventually contacting me and hiring me for a project. This again formed some long lasting working relationships that still exist to that day.

The comfort of having a steady income with teaching and relatively low expenses allowed me to decline underpaid projects. I figured that in order to reach the level I want to go to, I needed to establish a "quality costs" approach for my work. This is also partially the reason why I don't write library music and still try to keep projects that don't allow for real musicians to a minimum.

All these conscious decisions that I made took quite a few years to actually be fruitful. I got my main work from places all over the globe, often never meeting clients or even knowing how they look like. So I generally was quite independent regarding my work location. 

However, about 6 years ago I decided to "try out" the location factor and relocated to Berlin which at least in continental Europe is one of the main hubs for the creative industry. While I would still say that you can base a career completely online nowadays there was still a considerable amount of new projects coming in after moving here.

For some companies or clients simply seeing "Berlin" in your address is such a buzz-word that it automatically leads to them regarding your work higher. But also being close to potential clients and being able to physically meet each other over a dinner or a drink creates a different work relationship that exceeds the kind of personal bond that would be possible online.

Eventually, I was able to quit teaching all together as I got enough projects coming in from all sorts of clients. The experience that I explained before with relying on one director for projects taught me to diversify as much as possible regarding your clients. I'm happy to say that by now I have a solid base of returning clients from all over the world whom I work for as well as through word of mouth a constant growth in new clients.

In general, I have learned that the word of mouth is a much stronger factor than any acquisition attempts that you can undertake. 

As I enjoy teaching and find it very beneficial for my own musical development, I decided to go from providing content for free on my website to this Patreon which once again proves my point from before. Since I moved over here and gave a price to the content, I feel that it  is valued way more than when I shared it for free. The revenue I generate with this Patreon is a nice additional income but as you might know, I decide to reinvest some of it for "fun projects" like the Orchestra Discovery Session. Another side effect that this Patreon page has and that I already mentioned above is that people see that I know what I'm talking about and indeed some jobs have come to life through patrons hiring me to help them out.

At the beginning, I said that I'm not at the point where I want to be yet. I generally would love to compose more and arrange/orchestrate less. However, my expertise in knowing how to bring music into shape to be played by real musicians is more in demand than my generally more "old fashioned" writing. I have taken a few active steps to steer my career more towards writing but after all, your influence on your own career in this regard is rather limited.

My choice to only accept jobs that would allow me to work with real musicians has brought me close to bankrupcy and could have failed miserably but I have learned that the consequence from accepting jobs that you don't like is that you get more jobs that you don't like. So in this regard you have it partially in your own hands to shape your career path.

After all, as the guy that I mentioned at the beginning said, there is indeed a lot of luck and chance involved in how your career progresses. It is definitely not ONLY luck as you have some influence on it. However, one thing that is definitely not true is his claim that all jobs are taken. This would imply that the industry is a static entity which it is not. There's a constant coming and going, directors retire or don't get new jobs, esthetics and demands change. New up and coming directors break in the industry and bring their composer with them etc. It simply is not true that it is impossible to break in the industry. Still, it is tricky and requires some luck, but I feel that without some sort of idealism, you could as well just pick a completely different job.