How to Make Music: 10 Steps to Becoming a Recording Artist

I want to share what it takes to make a professional sounding song for anywhere between $100 - $1,000 so that you can confidently share, distribute and ultimately sell your song. Your song will never sound as professional as the ones on the radio ... but it can be pretty close. 50% of people discover new music from listening to the radio. Chances are, our songs won’t get on the radio, but you can still target the other 50% of people that discover new music from friends, family, youtube - so putting out high quality music is powerful.

If you are making music to express yourself, not to make a living, I respect and honor that. Self-expression is definitely what drives me as well, which is why, until recently, I didn’t necessarily follow this advice I’m about to share. That’s also why I am sharing this with you, because when I look back I wish I had made more music and done these things earlier, so I could have been making music full time sooner. It is an amazing job!!!

Before I start, you might wonder, “How can a song you hear on the radio honestly cost so much money?” What exactly costs so much?

Here’s an awesome article that talks about how much it costs to make a hit Rihanna song.

Songwriting -15,000
Production -20,000
Vocalist - That was Rihanna, so in this case, it was free (kinda)
Mixing & Mastering -15,000
So that’s $50,000 for one song.

But let’s now focus on doing this for around $100 - $1,000.

... and remember the most important thing: in most cases, YOU will be the Executive Producer.

What’s a producer? A producer of music can have many roles, from gathering ideas for a song, to coaching the artist, to supervising the entire recording, mixing and mastering process.

** For the sake of this article and keeping things simple, we are going to assume you are a vocalist (singer, rapper, etc) that wants to make a song over a produced beat/instrumental (as opposed to a band that has real instruments and lots of members, although bands may find a lot of this applicable and helpful! I just don’t have the expertise or space to get into that as in depth - being in a band again is on my list of to do’s!).

Here are the 10 steps to making professional music at a fraction of the price!

Listen to Music Daily
Find Beats
Write Your Music
Create the Scratch Track
Get Feedback!
Find a Mixing Engineer
Recording
Mixing
Mastering
Storing