How I Made $15,000 As A Rapper in 1 Month (Music Marketing)
In this video I want to show you Smart Rappers how YOU can still make money from CDs and how and why there are still over 5 BILLION DOLLARS in CD sales a year even with streaming.
This video is going to especially matter to independent artists like you who are going to be able to make money from this video and what I’m going to show you in it.
I’m going to show you how I made $15,000 off of a MIXTAPE that I burned onto CDs and sold to fans.
You can STILL make money from CDs. And I’m going to show you how. Right after the intro.
I’m Rob Level, and you’re part of Smart Rapper right now, the number 1 source for upcoming rappers. I release a new video every single day on here so you can get smarter and become better at your craft and business DAILY and you’re only going to see those videos if you subscribe. So do it right now below! It’s FREE.
That’s my song playing in the intro, if you wanna check out my music there is a link that leads to any streaming platform of your choice below. If you can please do me a favor for helping you with all this crazy helpful stuff, after this video go add it to a playlist of yours that you listen to to help me in the algorithm.
In a minute I’m going to show you how I made $15,000 selling CDs and how even now when I offer Autographed CDs, they sell out and I make a couple grand from my hardcore fans.
As Independent artist or really as anyone who has someone who supports their craft, you have to know that PEOPLE WILL BUY CDs TO SUPPORT YOU….
But they will not and CAN NOT buy CDs if you DO NOT OFFER CDs for them to buy from you.
If you just tell them to stream your music it is never going to add up to $15 from that individual person. A fan would have to stream your songs in total 178,571 to equal them giving you $15….
So instead, tell someone who is a supporter to support you and sell them a CD.
But here’s the thing, you don’t JUST sell them a CD, they aren’t buying it for the CD… they are buying it to support you and if you Autograph every CD, they are buying it to support you AND have an autographed CD from you.
They are never going to open that CD and listen to it, NO… this is memorabilia for them!
Make 100 CDs, Autograph all of them and tell your fans you are selling AUTOGRAPHED CDs, maybe even customized autographed CDs for 15 or $20.
Those 100 CDs Might not sell in the first month, but they will sell over time as you gain fans that really support you which will start flooding in more and more as you work more to reach this dream.
If anybody ever needed any proof that I was a struggling artist and really did this shit from the ground up just like you are doing.
I actually have some footage of me living in some ones basement in a very small box room where I slept on the floor every night and woke up to my studio. Everything I owned was in that tiny room.
This is in 2013 and I show you me actually hand packaging CDs and autographing them to get ready to sell to fans when the mixtape released.
I’m actually sitting there finishing mastering my own album that I had just mixed and then right when I was finished to start making money to survive and market the project, I had to immediately get started on burning the CDs and light scribing them.
Light scribe discs actually allow you to burn an image onto the top of the CD so it’s not just a blank CD top. I made sure to do this because it added that extra flavor that made it worth the purchase.
I burned 1,000 lightscribe CDs, autographed 1,000 artwork covers, and inserted them and packed them up.
Then announced I was selling handmade straight from my studio computer autographed CDs and sold around 975 CDs. Only because 25 of them failed during burning and I had to throw them away.
It cost me less than 30 cents per finished unit including the cover, the plastic, the CD and the markers for the autographs.
30 Cents…. And I sold them for $15 PLUS shipping.
$15 times 1,000 units plus the little extra I got to keep from extra shipping cost was around $15,000 in profit.
You gotta realize, this was literally the ONLY money I made all year from my music back in 2013. I was making like $20,000 a year TOPS from my music and that’s the only way I survived. It was those CDs plus some T shirts I’d flip maybe twice a year.
I’ve been right where you are right now. I’ve felt the come up pain.
Don’t forget if you make these CDs you can add them into bundles of your merch and sell a T shirt, hat and autographed CD for a total of $50 and you are going to profit like $34 off of each of those bundles.
People are more prone to buying bundles because as a package set it seems like more value for less money but you still make money which is what matters.
A Hat will be around $6 bucks, a T shirt closer to $10 unless you get a good price break and the CD will generally cost $1 to $2.
And I say $1 to $2 because you also have the option of buying pro level packaging 4 page insert CDs that’ll run you like $1 to $2 each that you can autograph if you don’t want to hand make the CDs.
I’ll put a link below to a company I recommend that will make you super high quality amazing looking finished CDs you can just autograph and sell to fans.
The higher quality it looks the better the chances are that it will sell. And they can even help you get the artwork done for your CDs for a little extra… I’m pretty sure.
Or you can have my team make your graphics which we started doing recently btw. I”ll put all the links below.
Now if you’re going to ask why I hand made the CDs instead of buying the packaged ones… well there is a large difference in a 30 cent finished product and a $1.50 one… literally 5 times the difference.
If I lost $1.20 on 1000 CD sales we are talking about $1,200. That’s definitely worth the 7 days of work it took me to make the CDs manually especially when I didn’t even have a day job.
Check out all those links below. I release a new video EVERY SINGLE DAY so make sure you subscribe and hit that little bell so you get notified when these videos come out.
And remember I have music marketing strategies and promo ideas you can get your hands on in my products section in the links below.
Check out my new single on Spotify and add it to a playlist the links are below for those as well.
Keep hustlin gang… Look how far we have already came… I’ll see you at the top.
– Rob Level