53 Profitable Business Opportunities for Musicians (Full List)

In 2018 I already did blogging for about 10 years. I have sold a couple of copies of my “How-To-Guides” but nothing memorable. This was kind of frustrating as this was the kind of stuff other DJs told me they want to learn. Unfortunately, it seemed no one actually wanted to pay for it.

This seemed kind of strange because all the business books and info product gurus out there all were telling to ASK your customers what they want. In my case, everybody told me they wanted to become better at djing and play more gigs. But nobody actually wanted to pay for products like this.

So one day I noticed that I always get a lot of questions about my DJ sets at special occasions like weddings or birthdays: what kind of music I was playing, what my starting song as if I have any secret weapons when there’s nobody dancing and so on. So I just made a small collection of my playlists from that year and also looked out for other public DJ sets that I liked on blogs or websites. I then put my favorite sets into a pdf made it look nice and sent it to my mailing list.

My paternal grandfather was my mentor in Indian music. He taught me Carnatic vocals when I was 4 years old. He was my inspiration. My maternal grandfather was a businessman who ran hotels, lodges, oil and rice mills, spares shops, etc. He too was my inspiration. My mom will always be an inspiration to me as she taught me righteousness and virtues.

Also, my school provided great exposure to dance and vocal, both being my passion. I had participated in various cultural competitions and events during school and got recognized and awarded by our Chief Minister and Governor at that time. I even performed in the International sports festival inauguration dance that happened in India during my grade 12. The thrill was the music was composed by our Oscar awardee AR Rahman, India's pride. I used to be actively participating in Lions club events, competitions, and Bookfair every year.

To start any business we need to have the investment and I definitely wanted to save for that big day. It took me years and I decided after my younger kid was born. I wanted to balance my work and family life better, without compromising both and also keep them growing.

I grew up in Johnson City, TN - a small town in the northeast corner of the state. For as long as I can remember, I dreamed of moving to Los Angeles and starting my own business. When I was 18, I moved to LA to attend college and haven’t left yet.

I started my first business in 2008 when the startup culture was very limited in Los Angeles. Resources were scarce and it was difficult to learn how to start and run a company with no experience. Nonetheless, I trudged through the journey for a few years trying to figure it out. It was filled with some success and a lot of learning lessons, but ultimately, it didn’t end the way I had hoped. I spent a few more years working with startup companies and learning more about the landscape and how to hone my skills as a leader and entrepreneur.

In April of 2014, I started my second company, Lemonlight, out of a second bedroom with my two co-founders, Daniel Marlow, and Chad Rogers. Lemonlight’s mission was to offer small and medium-sized businesses access to high-quality, affordable video content that they could use to advertise their brand online.

KLOS Guitars is the first company that I started. And how I got here is quite the unconventional path.

I’m from the suburbs of Chicago originally. After graduating high school I went to Princeton University to study electrical engineering with an emphasis on semiconductor physics, which was fueled by my passion for science and a curiosity of how things work.

I first dipped my toes into entrepreneurship my junior year when I entered into a Hackathon with two of my peers. The three of us felt that our curriculum was too theoretical and we wanted to test our hands on skills by building something practical. We came up with Dorm Control, which was a bluetooth controlled power strip that you could control via your phone.

Before telbee, I had founded a couple of other businesses - I’ve always been an entrepreneur by nature.

At the time that I came up with the idea of telbee, I was working in the insurance space, but taking some time out to reflect deeply on what my goals for the next five years were.

When I first came up with the idea of launching a business around voice tech, it was based on a simple realization: While modern automation does help make things quicker and easier for businesses, we seem to have lost a lot of the personal side of business-to-customer relationships.

Honestly, the idea started as a hobby.

When I started the blog in 2007, it was meant to be an alternative to the major men’s magazines on shelves because the magazine industry still hadn’t fully accepted the fact that everything was going digital and that print would be dying a slow and painful death. I wanted men to have access to cool guy things online, as well as dating advice, with a focus on realistic male acquisitions instead of focusing on things your average guy could not afford. Promoting the "fake it till you make it mentality".

I had worked for a magazine called Performance Auto and Sound Magazine pasmag.com, so I had in-depth knowledge about the business from a print perspective.

My days with a camera can be traced back to my parents’ Sony Handycam when I was 6 directing my friends to make mini movies (still somewhere around here on VHS) but high school was a defining time for that passion as I joined the video club.

There’s certainly no substitute for hard work and dedicating thoughtful time to what you’re working on. I’ve published over 500 videos in the last three years and it takes a lot of time and effort to get there but if you show up everyday you will be ahead.

I was a distracted student in high school but my one reprieve was making videos at the direction of my teacher Brad Schulte. One of my earliest projects is still on YouTube which received 700k views at a time when that was a big deal. Most of those views came from people searching for keywords which planted a seed.

The two of us met while working at Deloitte. I (Kelli) was an operations manager with an extensive background in event and entertainment production including creating live experiences at Universal Studios Hollywood. Vanessa was a year one CPA fresh out of the University of Washington who realized within just a few months in at the fall tax deadline that this was not her jam. She decided to jump ship and start a DJ & Karaoke Service. Barely a year later, I left the firm, as well as my then part-time event production company, began to take off & I was finally able to commit to it 100% when I got a contract with Boeing.

In just months after both launching our businesses respectively, our client rosters began to grow. Vanessa’s company and namesake moniker, Baby Van Beezly, dove into the private and corporate event vendor realm, spinning party tunes and wedding marches. My clients with my company, Shindig Events, began to move away from private individuals to corporate entities such as PopCap Games, Adobe, Boston Consulting Group, Oculus, and Facebook. I was able to hire Vanessa for all sorts of gigs over the course of the next 6 years.

While Vanessa’s Baby Van Beezly biz began to really take off, my Shindig Events were coming to a close. After 7 years I was ready for a change, a stress break and launched back into day-job land, where I currently reside. But there’s always that itch to do something creative and event-related so a side hustle was inevitable.

Back in 2013, I had already discovered my passion - personal development - and had realized writing is the best way to express myself. So I combined these and started a self-improvement blog.

Starting the blog was the best decision and not giving up on it over the years (even when no traffic or money was coming in) was what helped me move forward.

It was first just a hobby and I knew nothing about blogging. Over the years, after publishing a ton of content, gaining traffic, learning about SEO, email marketing, social media, and all the ways to monetize a blog, it became a real business.

I grew up with my business partner, Mark Meikle, in Plymouth, Minnesota (Mark is the President of ESL). We attended the Robbinsdale Spanish Language Immersion Elementary School in Golden Valley, MN, starting in the fall of 1987. This was the first public school in Minnesota to incorporate the Spanish language within the curriculum at the same time as English (learning to read/write/speak/math/science in a bilingual fashion K-5).

The old entrepreneurial saying comes to mind; ‘you need to reinvent yourself every 4-5 years to maintain success’, which we can personally attest to. Staying rigid and stubborn regarding your original business plan and execution can only lead to dead-ends if you do not experience any hint of the growth you were anticipating.

There, we were fortunate to meet 10 of our life-long best friends, whom we are still close with today. With the exception of college, Mark and I were classmates from kindergarten all the way through our graduation from Armstrong High School. Mark is one of my childhood best friends, who was always one of the smartest in our grade, as well as the fastest-running kid. Me, being a little overweight growing up, would use my early sales skills and motivation tactics to coach Mark around the running track and various sports in elementary school, so we’ve always been a team since the beginning of our friendship.

I’ve always loved talking about my personal journey, especially about how my first startup failed because It scaled too fast when I was 18, after leaving school to pursue growing it. Even after my first failure, I knew I just couldn’t be told what to do without it sparking my creativity. I love working in teams and working on tasks, but just not the aspect of someone telling me what to do and when. Thankfully, I’ve since grown in terms of my business acumen, and enjoy learning from so many talented and hardworking entrepreneurs online who give me so much hope and inspiration for my personal and business life.

It took about 2-3 failed project ideas before launching Avora Now & Musicspace. Avora Now is an invite-only music distribution platform I launched back in 2018 for artists and producers. If you’re familiar with music distribution income, you’d know that it takes a musician about 3-4 months before they receive their first payment for a song they’ve released, which led me to a new dilemma --- How on earth would I be able to survive long term if it took 3-4 months before an artist makes money from our platform? Bear in mind, Avora only makes money when our artists do, using a revenue share model. Fast-forward a year, I had grown Avora’s Instagram page to thousands of followers reaching tens of thousands of engaged musicians each week. But the same issue remained once again - We just weren’t making anything yet. In fact, I was hustling to make money selling album cover art designs on Fiverr.com, doing one-to-one Instagram consultations, selling promotional slots on my Spotify playlist, Instagram shoutouts, money from my partner and money from my parents. I owe it all to my loved ones who stood by me throughout it all.

So then it hit me hard…. Why don’t I create a new platform that could benefit users instantly, instead of having to wait 3-4 months for them to enjoy the real value? -- In came Musicspace.