Finding a Music Career Through Online Opportunities
For many outside of the industry, performing live music is the epitome of being a professional musician. Anyone with experience, however, knows that the potential of different musical careers is varied and deep. This is especially the case with the internet, with online opportunities affording options that open a huge number of careers to those with home equipment. For those looking to take a forward-thinking and slightly non-traditional approach to music, there’s a lot out there to experience. Investigating some real life examples of both full and part-time potential, we want to explore how newcomers could get started.
What Opportunities Can You Expect
When taking the online approach, a musician can find many of the same opportunities that are available offline, as well as some that aren’t. To start with, a degree of experience with composition for songs and smaller tunes is always in high demand. Whether producing for a major project or a small channel, if you possess the right recording equipment and a laptop like a Macbook, you have a way to get a foot in the door and start working.
Composition work tends to require a lot of oversight to ensure the people you’re working for are happy, so these opportunities can be more full-time than others. A typical day for this work could involve a lot of Skype meetings, Gmail contact, and even some expertise with film editing in programs like Adobe Premier, so the skills required can drift outside of the strictly musical sphere.
“Home Studio” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Яick Harris
Teaching is also a real possibility over the internet, where you can relay theoretical and practical skills to people a world away. Without requirements of travel costs for being in person, getting invested in this line of work can be much cheaper than with its physical alternative, and just as rewarding. Work along this line could involve teaching a group of people, starting a band that wants to compose, or one-on-one lessons to musicians of all skill levels.
The best part of teaching work is that it is highly flexible, and can even work well if you’re traveling with minimal equipment. This can be great if you’re studying or working another job. You could work a normal desk job at Amazon in the morning for example and then rely on timezone differences to teach students at your night and their mid-day.
Musicians who want to focus more on direct performance could also try their hand at streaming. Services like Twitch have huge communities for music streamers, and you could throw variety into this equation to extend possibilities further. This can take time to build a career in, however, and might be best served as a slower side-project at first.
A way some musical and variety streamers have found success here is by spreading their time between their music and playing hit video games like CS: GO or Valorant. Here you start by reading some Valorant news and using this as a launching pad to boost your content. On the release of a new character, or the patching of an old one, for example, you could use that as an excuse to celebrate/mourn changes by playing their theme while discussing their part in the game and canon. As a side bonus, this level of interest in ongoing titles could be leveraged to contribute to video game projects in the future, if that’s interesting to you.
Where to Start
Though starting on Twitch is self-explanatory, other job and career options online can be more difficult to begin. To start, you need to create an ongoing and accurate portfolio of your musical experience, online and off, on a personal and professional level. Even if this is your first time stepping into the professional domain, a record of passion projects means a lot, especially to those who don’t have a lot of money to spend.
Finding work can be achieved directly through freelance work websites like Freelancer and Upwork. These offer thousands of jobs, some focusing more on newcomers while others are centered more on experienced professionals. If you’re starting out, these can be great places to build experience.
Once you’re more established, LinkedIn is still the leading system where professionals congregate. With enough connections and a well-regarded history, a good profile on this website can get you headhunted, leaving the job-hunting process up to others.
“Home recording controller closeup.” (CC BY 2.0) by shixart1985
Whatever type of opportunity you seek, understand that it can take time to break into the online sphere. Online systems can take a little figuring out, and there can be complexities in synchronizing time zones that take some getting used to. Stick with it, however, and you could find a path that opens up options not available in the physical world.
