You will also need a demo if you ever want to apply to full-time in-house soundtrack positions.

If you have already recorded a lot of your music, skip this step If you’re an electronic artist, stick with stock or cleared sounds. Do not use any samples. So long as your lyrics don’t include swearing or sexual innuendos, it can be used in a commercial. All types of lyrics get used in commercials today, so don’t overthink the lyrics. It’s fine if you don’t sing.

This will typically cost $500-1,000 depending on the studio and engineer that you choose to work with. Save a copy of all of the individual tracks in case a studio wants you to remove the vocals, cut a guitar track, or mix some of the layers differently.

If you don’t want to pay for a professional DAW, download Audacity or Adobe Audition 3. They’re free DAWs and they’re pretty easy to use. Apple computers come pre-loaded with Garage Band, another DAW.

You can ask the engineer to do this for you, but as a musician you should learn the basics of a DAW anyway. In the program, drag the slider at the top right or left of every track and pull it away from the place you made the cut to fade each track in or out. This will give your demo an added layer of professionalism. You can pay the engineer at the studio to do this for you if you prefer.

It may be time consuming, but the more agencies you can send your music to, the better.

Again, you must include a note that your music is royalty-free. Bumpers are the small graphics and music that gets played on the way in or out of a commercial break.

Contract work has a fixed start and finish date. Begin looking for new contract positions towards the end of each contract that you’re hired for. These positions often involve making custom songs for unique commercials or productions.

Unless your music is truly unique or you’re incredibly lucky, it is highly unlikely that you will make a full-time living from selling music through a licensing platform. Most of these songs sell for $10-100, but you won’t sell a lot of them at once unless an buyer really likes your music. These platforms are typically free to join.

Premium Beat is an exclusive site that will not allow cross-listing. Many of the other popular platforms allow cross-listing under the condition that you remove a song if it is sold somewhere else.

You can earn $10-200 a song depending on how unique it is and where it is going to get used.