by Vince Smith

Created on: February 19, 2007

The music industry has many fields you can work in besides being a successful artist. The reality is that most musicians never make the big time or even make a living trying to make it. If you're not one of the chosen few who tour arenas and record CD's for a living, you'll have to find another job in the field that pays the bills.

Many musicians end up playing cover songs in local bars to scrape out a living. There's nothing wrong with this, but there are many other ways to succeed financially in this industry. For instance, many become songwriters for other artists or for publishers. Generally, this pays good if you can get a big name artist to record one of your songs, and it will make you rich if one of them becomes a huge radio hit. It can be a lot of work submitting to publishers, producers and bigwigs but the payoff is huge if you're a good writer.

Still more musicians turn to creating music for commercials, movie soundtracks and other non-lyrical avenues such as voiceovers and sound and video editing. There are also "session musicians" that get paid to play in a studio on someone else's recordings or live with touring acts that come through town. In order to do session work, you must be able to "sight read" which means that you have to be able to look at sheet music or tablature and be able to play it as you read it. This is an acquired skill that takes lots of practice and hard work to get good at.

There are many more, I will write a second part to this article or I will add on to this one at a later date.

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