How To Make Money From Features As An Indie Artist

These days, there’s a lot of talk about how difficult it is to make money as a music artist. While there’s no disputing that it can be a challenge (which is why you need other reasons to do music than just making money), the fact remains that if you are dedicated and resourceful, it is possible to earn income from your talent.

One major way of making money as an artist is through features. These collaborations can serve as either a one-off bonus payment or can be a deep well of residual income for years to come. There are two main ways an independent artist can make money off features:

• By charging an upfront fee for being on the track.
• By agreeing to a percentage of income from the track (sales/royalties).

Upfront Fee (Commission) :

As an indie artist, the popular questions pop up when it comes to features — “At what point in my career do I start charging for features? And how much should I charge?” There is no particular metric scale or guide that determines what you should charge, and at what point you should. Most artists begin charging at the point when they’ve developed a fanbase. Once your name is on blogs, sites, and you have started generating interest, at that point, it’s important to require a fee for features.

An upfront fee means you and your collaborator agree on a fixed sum for your input and afterwards, you are not entitled to any bit of income from the single. This has its pros and cons as you would imagine. If the song gains mainstream popularity, all you’re entitled to is credit as a collaborator and the fee you’ve already received. On the other hand, simply taking the commission fee is quick income for your effort especially when starting as an independent artist.

Sales/Royalties:

To begin with: “Royalties” are the sums paid to rights-holders when their creations are sold, distributed, embedded in other media or monetized in any other way.

For music listeners, a song is just a song. But for the music business, every individual song is split into two separate copyrights: composition (lyrics, melody) and sound recording (literally, the audio recording of the song). In some cases, both copyrights belong to the same person/group, in which case that lucky party gets double the cash flow.

Artists may be entitled to royalties from SoundExchange (www.soundexchange.com), which pays artists for performances. If you wrote lines of the song, you are a “co-writer” and are entitled to writer and publisher royalties. For writer/publisher royalties, you should get everyone who helped to create the track to sign a split sheet. A split sheet outlines the percentage of the copyright/royalties that each collaborator is entitled to. Without a split sheet, any of your collaborators could claim they have an ownership percentage that is equal to everyone else — even if they wrote just one line!

To avoid that, you could use Cosynd (www.cosynd.com) to create your split sheets — it’s free, fast, legal and all online so you don’t have to track everyone down for signatures and keep different versions.

Alternatively, you could arrange for your percentage split on Distrokid. Distrokid splits earnings from any song or album and automatically sends those earnings to your collaborators. This ensures you get paid for every stream and download.

A few other cool things:

• You can add unlimited collaborators to any track.
• You can change the splits at any time.
• You can add or remove collaborators any time.
• You can go back in time and see any previous splits.
• For privacy, collaborators can only see what percentage they get. They can’t see who your other collaborators are, or what percentage other folks are getting.
• DistroKid never takes a cut. You & your collaborators get 100% of earnings in total.

In conclusion, you can take advantage of either format to get paid depending on your desires. However, it’s important to note streaming revenue trickles in but as the popular saying goes, little drops of water make a mighty ocean.