8 interesting ways to make money with a recording studio

What if I told you there are other ways to bring money into the business? Wouldn't you like that? I bet you would.

In that case, say no more. This post is dedicated to showing you many off-the-book strategies for monetizing a recording studio.

Keep reading to find out about them.

If you haven’t got room for demo tracking, pre-production, and stuff like that on your price list, you’re seriously missing out on a great income potential.

Believe it or not, there are times when artists are not in a good mood to record tracks. During these phases, they just want to test out sounds, make demo recordings, try beats, test-run productions, or work with various producers to see which ones resonate best with them.

Only a studio that has provisions for this will benefit from this opportunity. Therefore, we encourage you to incorporate similar services into your business today.

There’s no fixed studio equipment list. Although there are basic tools you expect to find in a standard recording studio, there are lots of extras & high-end equipment you don’t find everywhere.

If you’re lucky enough to have this sort of pieces in your studio, it may be a good idea to rent them out. For example, you could rent out your audio interface, microphone, headphones, pop filter, electrical cables, MIDI controller, Mixing console, etc. Of course, you want to ensure your items before putting them up for rentals.

However, if you’re not comfortable renting out your main gears, you can consider stocking up on extra gears for the sole purpose of rental. That is, buy extra cables, mics, consoles, etc. They don’t have to be the same quality as the ones you use in your studio.

No artist is comfortable recording in one studio and then taking the stems away to mix in another studio.

Unfortunately, many studios these days only focus on music recording. And that’s because the studio owner and engineers don’t have the right mixing skills.

Go back to the drawing board and hone your mixing skills. You can turn a great profit by adding mixing to your price list.

It’s true some artists prefer to have separate people mix and master their work. However, some don't like the stress of shipping track files from one studio to another.

You never can tell which one a client artist is unless you tell them you master, too. If they’re cool with having the same person record, mix, and master their song, then that’s good for you. However, if you have many client artists who are not cool with that, you may want to consider hiring a separate engineer/producer for mastering sessions. Since you’ll be creating an extra income source with it, I believe it’s worth it.

Did you know online radios, advert marketers, podcast showrunners, and other audio content creators always edit their works before pushing them out?

Yes, they do. In that case, why not consider helping these people to edit their works?

If you can market your business effectively, you might be lucky to find a couple of clients to work with.

All you’ll be doing is simple voice/sound editing to make sure their content gets out appropriately. Which is quite similar to your everyday music mixing work.

You can turn good profits by inviting artists, bands, and other music groups to come and rehearse in your workspace.

This is a great way to put your studio to good use when you’re not tracking. Of course, you’ll charge for potential damage costs in case someone breaks something.

If you have beat and sound production skills or have an in-house producer, you can start beat creation sales.

As you know, lots of rappers and singers need dope beats to jump on. If you can sell to them at friendly prices, I'm sure many would buy.

Some artists want to remix songs. Some people want to jump on trending sounds/music, and some simply want to make the cover to popular songs.

All these are not from-the-scratch production works. As such, they shouldn’t cost regular amounts. Unfortunately, many studios don’t care. They still charge their flat hourly rate even though someone simply wants to cover Beyonce’s latest single.

Be better than these guys by offering custom services at cost-friendly rates.