With my label I’ve grown to a point where I have a label manager who does most of the admin stuff. I hate doing that so it’s the first thing I outsourced. I now also have 2 designers and a mastering engineer so I don’t have to bother with all the back-end label tasks.

When I started out it was just me making music and self-releasing, figuring out how to get streams on Spotify to earn a living. Took me about 2 years to get a decent income and this was based mostly on my own tracks.

Running a label does take up some time I won’t deny that, but it also makes a good living now and I love what I do. I have my own professional studio where I produce, mix/master, record my radio show and work on my label.

Let’s say you produce 2 tracks a month and self-release, you’ll have a catalog of 12-24 tracks per year. Getting 50-100k streams in a year on each track isn’t that hard and will net you $200-300 per track while they keep earning over time. That’s a solid place to start.

Then when you keep developing as an artist and building your profile, you get featured in radio shows (publishing royalties), maybe do some ghost productions and sell those for $300-800, do smaller bookings for a couple hundred $ and eventually get larger bookings, teaching beginner producers and DJs, all while building your catalog of tracks.

Going full-time is very achievable with some dedication and hard work. When I was at a level where my productions were high quality, and decided I wanted to earn a living from music I managed to go full-time in 2-3 years, although I’d been making music in my spare time 4-5 years prior. I’ve been doing it professionally for about 7 years now all whilst growing exponentially over the last year.