You can make real money with your guitar, even if you aren’t a great musician.
1. Teach beginners to play. Most lessons are given to beginners. Few students are intermediate or advanced players. As long as you know the fundamentals and are one step ahead of your students, you can teach. This is especially true if you have an empathetic personality. Any teacher can make $60/hour or more. Typically lessons are 1/2-hour for $30. You can make even more by teaching multiple students concurrently, even online through Zoom lessons.
2. Street performing can be surprisingly lucrative. It is important to find a location where street performing is legal and appreciated. It also has to be quiet enough that people can hear you. This can pay in excess of $40/hour. One of the coolest things about street performing is that you get to practice or work out new material while you’re getting paid. The next time you see an experienced street performer, hang around for a while, and watch how much money is going in their hat or tip jar.
When you first start street performing, you’ll make mistakes. You may even find the whole thing embarrassing, but in time, you’ll be like a rock star to the people who stop and listen.
You get to set your own hours, play the music you like, and do everything your way. What could be better?
You might want to perform on an acoustic guitar. This is fine if the environment is quiet enough. More commonly, performers will use a little battery-powered amp.
3. If you’re a typical musician, you appreciate good instruments. Leverage your knowledge of guitars by buying one which you know is a particularly good deal. Sell it at a profit through local networking, Craigslist, or Ebay. Take the profit and buy two more guitars. Sell those, and so on, until you’ve built up a profitable guitar sales business. In order to success, make sure there is a good markup on each purchase. You don’t want to spend $100 on an average guitar and sell it for $125. Instead, you might prefer to buy an especially nice guitar for $150, and sell it for $600.
4. Run a music camp. This can be as basic as having paying musicians come to your living room on a regular basis to a full-on camp where you rent live-in facilities and provide all sorts of activities for a week or two. Camps don’t have to be just for children. Many adults would love mixing with other adults in a music camp.
There’s money in specialization. If you’re a flamenco player, love finger picking, are remarkable with slap guitar, have a knack for composing, or can do anything most other guitarists can’t, you win!
You’ll find much more information about this at 26 Ways for Musicians to Make Real Money.
