How do you turn music into money?

How do you turn your music into money? Of course everyone does it for the sake of the music but that doesn't pay the gas bill. This interesting article shows how an independent artist (Zoe Keating a cellist) makes her money. Basically she makes most of it from iTunes with Bandcamp and Amazon also providing the bulk of her revenue. Streaming sites like Spotify only provide a small amount of income though as with anything the exact mix will depend on the artist and their genre.

The message surely has to be though that by cutting out the middle man (i.e. the major record labels) then artists can be best rewarded for their art. Thats what we indie kids have been saying all along...

Budgeting by post-it notes

I have decided that i need to be a lot tighter with my spending and budgeting. Not that i am hard-up or anything but in October i am going to need to be able to afford my MA course fees so i thought it time to restore a bit of fiscal discipline to my affairs. Most moneys that go out of my account are fairly predictable being existing direct debits which i have listed on a spreadsheet however food and stuff bought for myself is different and sometimes it is hard to track how much i have spent on food and CDs et cetera every month.

Therefore i have begun an experiment where all spending in the food and (what i term) media areas will be noted on the wall over my computer using post-it notes. I decided to use post-its instead of yet another spreadsheet so i don't have to turn the computer on to know where i am.

So yellow post-its for media and orange for food. Each post-it is marked with the amount spent, the date and a few details on what was bought. This means i can at a glance see how much i have spent in either area and see how much of both is still remaining from my allocated budget. This hopefully will stop me going over budget and restore a bit of discipline to these areas. Maybe the government should try budgeting by post-it notes too, if it works of course.