Making a living playing guitar is every guitarist dream. Even making any kind of money doing what you love can be fulfilling and exciting. So, how do guitarists make money?
Guitarists make money by YouTube ad money, becoming a session guitarist, giving guitar lessons, creating and selling an online course, touring, and social media affiliate marketing. Doing these methods allow guitarists to make over $100,000 a year on average.
Continue reading to learn more about each way guitarists make money, and which one is best for you.
How Much Money Can a Guitarist Make?
A professional guitarist can expect to make an average of $140,000 a year. This is consistent for the modern ways a guitarist makes money including YouTube, session work, creating an online course and promoting affiliate products.
Guitar is continuing to grow in popularity and professional guitarists are profiting over the growing thirst for knowledge.
How Do Guitarists Make Money: 5 Ways
The five ways guitarists make money are:
- YouTube Ads
- Session Guitarist
- Guitar Lessons and Online Courses
- Touring Guitarist
- Social Media Affiliate Marketing
Let’s dive into each of these methods below.
1. Making Money on YouTube as a Guitarist
In the past 10 years, YouTube has become one of the main ways a non-travelling guitarist makes money. We are not talking a small amount of money either, we are talking thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So how much money can a guitarist make on YouTube? Per 1,000 views a video gets, the guitarist will make an average of $9.90. This means that if a video gets all the way up to 100,000 views, then $1,000 will roughly be made. To get to this kind of viewership, YouTubers will need to aim for 10,000 subscribers. At 10,000 subscribers, a guitarist can expect to make $1,000 a month depending on their upload frequency. This number may seem exponentially high and unachievable. Although, with the growing number of YouTube viewers and guitarists alike, it is achievable if unique content is being uploaded. Let’s go through some examples.
Marty Schwartz has built a handsome living by giving simple lessons on famous guitar riffs and songs. Paul Davids has done the same but a notch ahead. Paul creates Oscar worthy videos that encompass everything from lessons to general guitar insight. But these are two are relative outliers to the guitar space on YouTube as both these guitarists have millions of subscribers.
Jamie Harrison is an interesting YouTube guitarist because he does talk any or at all in his videos. He lets his guitar playing do the talking for him as he covers various popular songs with extreme precision. Sean Mann is similar to Jamie where the majority of his videos are covers or improvisational sessions. Through posting videos of their playing on YouTube, they can live full-time as a guitarist as both have over 20,000 subscribers.
More and more guitarists are resorting to YouTube every day to show off their skill, give insight into their or others playing, and offer words of advice to prospective guitarists. With YouTube, the possibilities for content are endless. Likewise, the possibilities to make money on the platform as a guitarist are endless.
2. Session Guitarist
The second way that guitarists make money is by becoming a studio session guitarist. This area of work can be lucrative and allow a guitarist to make a lot of money. Although, it is harder to get into, both job wise and skill wise. Session guitarists are usually highly skilled guitarists that are experts at music theory and creating guitar riffs from scratch.
Find Out if Playing Guitar is a Good Hobby Today!
On average, session guitarists make $54,600. Keep in mind that this is the average. There are session guitarists that make well over six figures and some that make less than average. Although, those that make less than the above figure likely do it part-time. Those that are full-time session guitarists usually make at least the average and then up from there. Often times, it is the record label of the recording artists that pay the guitarists, or it will be the studio although this is rare.
3. Guitar Lessons and Online Courses
The third way a guitarist can make money is by giving guitar lessons and creating a course that they would market and sell online to the masses. Giving in-person guitar lessons can be a decent way to make money on the side. Charging around $20 an hour is average and can help a guitarist pay the bills. Although, it is usually not enough to live on and most guitarists that give in-person lessons have a full-time job as well.
The second option can be much more lucrative. Online courses are a great way to reach many people and generate passive income. The main work behind it is actually creating the course and from there it can be all passive.
The catch is that the guitarist will need a following beforehand. People will rarely buy a guitarists course if they have no idea who they are buying it from. Instead, focus on building an audience on social media and YouTube through your videos and eventually create and sell a course.
Paul Davids is a great example of this strategy. He generated a large following on YouTube and then created a course. Paul created the course “Next Level Playing”. This course sold for $200. Currently the Facebook group for this course has 10,700 paying members. This means that he made at least $2.14 Million, before taxes, on this one course alone!
4. Touring Guitarist
The fourth way a guitarist makes money is by touring with a band or as a solo act. This method of making money is much more difficult than the rest of other methods listed here.
This is how many of our older favorite guitarists started to make money early in their careers. Guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix spent years playing for pennies in dimly lit side street bars. Eventually they built up a fan base and started touring bigger venues, becoming two of the highest paid guitarists of their respective times through touring.
If you keep your expenses low and can book a decent amount of shows a week, then this is tangible way of making money as a guitarist.
5. Social Media Affiliate Marketing
The often-forgotten method of making money as a guitar is social media affiliates. This method incorporates social media platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram, and ultimately YouTube even though it is not technically considered a social media platform.
This way of making money occurs when a guitarist promotes a brands product or services on their platform in exchange for money. If a guitarist has a large following on social media or YouTube, then a brand is extremely interested in directly reaching that audience through this guitarist. The brand will then ask the guitarist to talk about their product or service on their platform, thus reaching that audience directly.
An example of this is a guitarist using Dunlop picks in all their videos or releasing a video praising the picks.
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