How do you make money listening to online music?
When you join the platforms that I’m going to list below, you create an account, and this account allows you to do two things. First, you are given audio files. You click on the link, and you listen to the music. Second, you are given an input form where you can type in your impressions. The whole point behind these platforms are designed to get people to listen to music and review what they heard. You have to follow a format. You can’t just use a free-form type of writing putting down the first that comes to mind.
How do music review platforms make money?
It all boils down to content. When a new act, band, or singer comes along, a lot of people would search for that performers’ name. If they’re very new, chances are there’s not much content online about them. That is a lost opportunity for publishers. They would like to capitalize on fast-rising talent because they know that sooner or later, these performers will develop a following.
These fans will go to Google and type in the performers’ name and the word “review.” If they come up with a blank page or no results, that’s lost opportunity to make money. This is where music review platforms come in. They’re always on the look out for the latest and greatest upcoming talents in the music industry.
99.9% of the time, a lot of the acts that you are supposed to listen to are completely obscure. For the most part, nobody has heard of them. Maybe they’re coming up in one small town in the United States, or they’re just somehow familiar in one far-off region in America. Whatever is going on, they don’t have national, much less international appeal and exposure.
When reviewers such as yourself listen to their music and write truthful reviews, you create content. These platforms then get valuable content that some people somewhere, somehow, are searching for. This translates to eyeballs.
Music content means ad revenue
Make no mistake. It may seem like it’s too good to be true that a company would pay you good money to listen to music. This is not charity. There’s nothing magical about it at all. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised. Why? There’s money in it. You’re creating content. In fact, this is the best kind of content because these companies scour the Internet and social media for even faint signs of rising popularity.
Once they identify a slow or fast-rising musical act, they get the audio, and they get their reviewers to start writing. They lock in precisely at that point in the career of these musical acts where nobody has heard of them. This means, there is no competition. Think of it this way, if you are going to write a review on one of The Beatles early albums, good luck. There is sure to be hundreds, if not thousands, of articles on that album. It doesn’t matter how obscure it is. The more popular a performer or celebrity is, the more content he or she will inspire. That goes with the territory.
The genius behind music review platforms is that they’ve developed an all-important skill for detecting fast-rising, yet relatively unknown talent.
What skills do you need to get paid to listen to music and write about it?
The skill set for this way of making money online is pretty straightforward. First, it the obvious: You have to have decent English writing skills. You don’t have to be the very best writer. You definitely don’t have to have the writing chops of a veteran journalist. That’s overkill. That’s overdoing it. As long as you can write in a clear way that effectively communicates your ideas and gets the value that the performer brings to the table across, you’re good to go.
As you can probably imagine, this is a fairly moderate threshold. Most people in the United States and elsewhere who have graduated with a high school degree can clear this hurdle. It’s not much of a standing. If you can understand and write English fairly well, you can qualify for these platforms. This means that your work, while it may suffer from a few rough spots here and there, is generally passable.
You have to have an ear for music
The next qualification involves your experience with music. It’s easy to think that since music is the universal language among human beings, that almost anybody can write a decent music review. If that were only true. You can tell when you read a music review which reviewer actually loves to listen to music.
They’re not just describing the sound or what the performer or band seems to sound like. Instead, they bring out all sorts of insights regarding the emotional state, and the psychological situations created by the music. Put simply, they allow the reader to actually get into the music and interact with it on many different levels. This takes quite a bit of skill.
Again, you don’t necessarily have to be an excellent writer, but you have to have an ear for music. You have to have a passion for why certain types of music make you feel good, and why other disturb you or seem boring, annoying and not worth your time. It’s one thing to feel these emotions. It’s another to write about them in such a way it resonates with whoever is reading your article or review.
You need to have the right equipment
Believe it or not, if you use beat-up headphones, it’s going to show in your review. A lot of cheap headphones out there doesn’t do a good job processing the bass portion of recorded music. To really capture the emotional range music brings to the table you have to have the right equipment. You can’t be counted on to write an honest review when it seems like the music you listened to feels like somebody is stabbing you with a rusty fork in the ear. That doesn’t work.
Where can you sign up to make money listening to music?
Playlist Push
If you already have an account with Apple Music, Deezer or Spotify and you have a playlist, you can sign up for Playlist Push. This is a special service where musical artists are paired up with people like yourself who create playlists. Artists will pay you to check out their music and review what you hear. They’re not twisting your arm. If you like what you hear, you can add the performer to your Apple Music, Deezer or Spotify playlist. Seems pretty straightforward, right?
The big downside to Playlist Push is the fact that not just anybody can sign up. You must have more than 400 people following your playlist. The higher your reputation on Apple Music, Deezer and Spotify are, the more money you make. Generally, Playlist Push will pay listener reviewers somewhere between $1 to $12 per review you write. All pay outs are made through PayPal.
Earnably
Earnably, technically speaking, is not a “pay to listen to music” platform. Instead, it is more like a micro task website, like Microworkers. The difference is, unlike Microworkers that pays you a few cents for small tasks you do, doing tasks on Earnably earns you points. Depending on the task, you get a lot of points or fewer points. These tasks can involve listening to online radio, listening to music, watching videos and other entertainment related tasks. It can also involve taking online surveys.
The great thing about Earnably is that it actually has a wide range of ways to pay you. You can get paid in Amazon gift cards, Bitcoin, or PayPal. To get paid out, you have to redeem the points that you have earned. As of this writing, 225 points translate to two dollars. Keep in mind that you have to meet the minimum points required to withdraw money from the system. Currently, that minimum amount is 225 points.
Cash4Minutes
This platform enables you to listen to the radio and to call. You just sign up and then you wait to get an email. When you get an email, you will be asked to do listening tasks. It will spell out the steps that you can follow. Cash4Minutes is different from the other platforms I listed here because they pay you primarily for patronizing radio stations. You get paid per listening minute. It’s tracked by their software.
Cash4Minutes currently pays around $0.08 per audio minute. The great thing about this platform is you get to choose among a wide range of payout channels. You can get paid in the form of Amazon gift cards, Litecoin, Bitcoin, and of course, PayPal.
HitPredictor
HitPredictor is a music research platform. What I like about this company is the fact that they’re not just cracking out content, They’re not just trying to get you to write a review, so they could make money off the review. Instead, they actually work with record companies to test out the market for certain songs.
You have to understand that when a record company has a new song to promote, it actually has to spend a lot of money getting influential streamers, as well as online radio stations and offline radio companies to play the song. It takes a lot of effort, and most of the songs that they promote don’t do all that well. This is why record companies hire platforms like HitPredictor to test out songs that they are thinking of airing. You get paid to not only listen to the music, but to give your feedback about it.
What I like about this platform is that you get to choose the music genre. I don’t know about you, but there are certain genres of music I simply would not want to listen to. They just rub me the wrong way. Also, if I was asked to review music in a genre I don’t really care for, I probably wouldn’t write an objective review. Your job is simple. You sign up before certain types of music, you listen to the sample, and then you give it a rating.
Just like with the other platforms that I listed above, HitPredictor pays in terms of points. But the good news is, you can cash out these points in the form of prizes or Amazon gift cards. Ultimately, if you can buy stuff with Amazon gift cards online, you can sell that stuff and turn it into cold hard cash. The best part about HitPredictor is you actually play a role in what kind of songs record companies would push.
Musicxray
The great thing about Musicxray is that it is really a genuine community. That’s the best compliment you can give than any of these platforms. Musicxray makes money, but it’s not just in it for the money. It really is a platform that enables people who are just starting out in the music industry to share their music and try to gain a wider audience. By doing so, Musicxray enables talent hunters from record companies to look at how these artists are doing on this platform.
Musicxray earns revenue by asking artists to promote their work on the platform. If you’re an artist, you can upload your music, but if you want it promoted so that you can develop a fan base, you’re going to have to spend a little bit of cash. It is really a paid-to-play platform. If you’re not a music performer, but would like to earn by listening to music, you could sing up to the platform and specify the genre you’re interested in.
Once you have specified the type of music you’d like to listen to, you are then notified of work by amateur acts that fall within the genre. The best part? You don’t have to listen to six-minute masterpieces. A lot of the clips are only half a minute long. Sounds awesome, right? Now here comes the bad part.
Sure, you only listen to short clips of music, but you only get paid $0.10 per file. At this rate, you need to listen to at least 200 songs so you can cash out through PayPal. This platforms’ minimum payout is $30 that translates roughly 200 songs.
RadioLoyalty
Another “get paid to listen to music” type of platform is RadioLoyalty. Unlike other platforms here involving individual performers or musical acts, this system is really an online radio station promotion setup. You can listen to a variety of online radio stations that cater to the genre that you’d like to listen to.
How does this platform make money? People have to access the web to listen to the streamed music. This means that they have to look at webpages. Whenever any kind of website gets a lot of web page views, you can bet that they could make money from advertising. That’s precisely what’s going on here.
RadioLoyalty basically is a glorified directory of online radio stations that show you different pages that can have ads. The more people use the platform in exchange for points or rewards, the more page views they have, the more ads they can show, and this can lead to more money.
Don’t even think of trying to cheat RadioLoyalty. They have a system where you have to type in captcha to make sure that you are actually listening and watching the screen. They put this in because a lot of people use software to try to cheat the system. By using a captcha system, RadioLoyalty ensures that only active human members are plugged into the system and are actually listening to music.
The final word on listening to music for money
When it comes to big paydays, listening to online music for cash is probably not going to make you rich. I classify this as another type of micro worker income possibility. With that said, if you’re like most people, you probably listen to music while you’re doing other things online. Wouldn’t it be awesome to listen to music while you work or while you surf the web, knowing full well that you are getting paid as you do other stuff that pays you? Maybe you can do micro task stuff on one tab of your browser while listening to music in another tab. Maybe you can write content or transcribe audio files while listening to music on a low volume in a tab on your browser. The possibilities are endless.
If you would like to learn about 25 ways you can make money through the Internet without having to spend money, check out my blog post on quick and easy ways to turn your spare time into cash.