so hello everyone this is my first long form video so if it's a pile of dog [ __ ] please don't abuse me in the comments I am trying so as you can tell from most of my videos on my channel here I am holding a [Music] guitar uh I a professional guitarist I often sing in my videos as well but unfortunately nobody hires me to sing even my friend who saved my life as a child child is thankful when I only post instrumentals anyway I digress so I'm a professional guitarist and have been for the last a
bout 12 years ever since I graduated University I have a bachelor's degree in jazz and a master's in composition so today I'm going to address a question I get asked a lot how much do you earn especially now I've been monetized on YouTube oh yeah the big bucks are now coming in as you will see how much is a typical year of earnings for you we're going to talk about my transition to YouTube and how that came about it was a lot harder than I thought so here we go January to June 20123 I worked on
a cruise ship um for about five months now the salary on a cruise ship varies quite a lot depending where you're from and which company it is it can vary from around 2,000 to 4,500 I was on $4,000 a month and um it was a five-month contract so I earned around 20,000 so the pros and cons of this gig if you've ever worked on a cruise ship you know that the gig can be very good or very very bad I'll go into more detail about that another time but the pros and cons of my gig you know I was a solo gu
itar vocalist so I was able to choose whatever kind of repertoire I liked I was able to play a wide variety of music lots of classical guitar and the other benefits of this gig I have solo accomodation which is free I have free food and drink and depending which itinery you have fingers crossed it's not the Bahamas because that is the worst um you'll have a good time and I was doing a half World cruise from Australia to the UK and it was great yeah uh except in Egypt where I was nearly put in ja
il for 10 years for flying a drone well that's a video for another time so the cons you can have a really bad time depending on the strictness of the management on board I worked for Viking where the management was mostly good and they let you get on with your work unfortunately halfway through my contract they tried to change things which would mean me losing my single cabin and some other privileges which is a big no no you know I'm a solo musician I should have a solo cabin and I said well I
don't want to do the job anymore so you'll have to find someone else and um they allowed me to stay stay on the ship for a couple of months until we got back to the UK and then I left um which you know [ __ ] happens it's not the management on board's fault it's a decision made from higher up so I don't blame anyone things change whatever you live and learn so another con of this gig is you lose a lot of your contacts on land when you go on ship which means finding it harder to get work when you
come home so that was January to June when I came home I chilled for a little while but then I started doing some you know bar work I mean like playing guitar on a bar not like being a waiter or something and this little list contains you know function band work bar gigs um and I had a little residency in Temple Bar in Cardiff which was that was okay and I earned about a th from this and to be honest it could have been a lot more but I just couldn't be asked to do the work um I was too busy tra
veling and I wanted to wind down after doing that cruise gig so if it wasn't an easy gig I just didn't bother doing it so the pros of this gig you know you have a different audience each night you have an excited crowd live faces and you always get something different cons it's hard to get gigs after ships sometimes you have to travel pretty far for the gig which is a pain in the ass and sometimes the sound is bad and dealing with bad sound especially after you've worked on a ship where the soun
d is pretty consistent ah it's a pain in your ass honestly a real pain in the ass so that was about a th000 over the you know June till August months and uh yeah so here I am now sitting at about 21,000 so I also had some work writing charts I wrote a bunch of arrangements for some singers on board and some other random charts throughout the year that give me about $500 now the pros of this gig is you can do it from anywhere the cons are it's not a real stable gig work is very random so from Sep
tember to December I was teaching um I taught AP music theory for a Chinese company and this earned me around $33,000 um this was great it was a really interesting curriculum I was teaching AP music theory which is um quite an advanced music theory course so it was really interested to teach um I had great students and again you can do it from your bedroom which is fantastic so the cons are sometimes I just didn't get any students no students no money yeah tough [ __ ] so all in all with all the
tips uh from work and a bit of busin here and there only when I was bored sometimes if I was working on some stuff like playing some cool gypsy jazz music I would make some back in tracks and take them out on the street you'd be surprised how much money you can earn actually like an average day was around £60 and I would stay there for about 2 hours but you have to get over the fact that you're playing guitar on the street after just working on a six-star cruise ship but sometimes it's fun you
know so yeah all in all I earned around £25,000 now I already know what you're thinking and I know it's not a lot of money especially in the UK but what you have to take into consideration is that I was on the ship for approximately 5 months so that's 5 months I'm not paying for accommodation or food so that's 5 months out of the year already yeah and a month after I got off the ship I was wild camping I was hiking through the mountains and stuff and just enjoying myself so that was a pretty che
ap month as well yeah so for the rest of the year I just rented random ABN BS I stayed with some family I traveled around and I went to visit my mother in Spain for a while so all in all the 25,000 actually goes quite a long way so I know what you're all waiting for what were my YouTube earnings hhm well well let me tell you let me give you a bit of backstory so during 2023 I finally started to put a bit of effort into making YouTube videos I love photography and the idea of making videos but re
alistically I'm not too creative when it comes to this kind of stuff so I started making videos and what happened nobody bloody watched them shame on you um then I gained around 100 subscribers friends from Facebook people I pressured into following my channel Etc and to be honest you know when I play live people like my music you know I tell interes in stories while I'm playing the songs and I play good music so I just expected it to be the same on YouTube post a little video you singing a song
and people will like it well realistically there's 500 million people doing the same thing some a lot better than you so I had to find something worth posting you know yeah I just expected people to like it and realistically my videos weren't that good but a major turning point happened was when I recorded and promoted a song by Toby Keith uh a singer actually and it seemed that everyone who clicked on this video subscribed and pretty soon I had over like a th000 subscribers and the next turnin
g point was when I recorded an instrumental called back home again in Indiana which I kind of use the shed Atkins version to base my version upon which got me like another thousand subscribers when I done a little promotion on YouTube yeah this was quite surprising for me cuz I never thought about promoting anything before but it worked but the thing was I still struggled to get over the threshold of 4,000 watch hours on my videos to become monetized partly because my content was to [ __ ] minut
es long and people get bored after 16 seconds of the music apparently how dare you anyway a couple of videos later and some cheap promotion I usually promote my video for like3 over the space of a week and the threshold was finally met and I was finally monetized for Youtube yay so what I wasn't quite ready for was I just expected the viewers and subscribers to just keep coming you know but it just didn't happen like I wanted to expose viewers to old folk songs from different countries but in re
ality who is searching for that [ __ ] you know I love learning about folk music from other countries but you know it just doesn't resonate with some people and that's fair enough you know but I enjoyed making those videos anyway so at the end of 2023 my total YouTube earnings were a massive 23 cents oh yeah and so far in 2024 it's only up to about $3 as far as 2024 goes I just got off a cruise ship gig now which was like one month and I have another one coming up in end of June till October so
that will that'll pay my way for this year very very easily I think and I have a lot of sessions with function bands and stuff like this coming up too but thank you for listening if you've stuck around to the end of this video if you didn't [ __ ] you hopefully I um I dispelled a bit of the Mystique about being a professional musician and if you have any question questions about being a professional musician or any questions in general let me know in the comments I know a lot of people say like
oh let me know in the comments but actually it's really fun to uh engage with your audience you know and it's very interesting to see the some of the questions people have and anyway and I will try my best to answer any questions so have a great day and I will uh see you soon bye-bye
Comments
i love your authenticity and honesty