I PAID FIVERR PRODUCERS to make my music (life after retiring ch.4)

Unknown Speaker 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast, Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives.

Unknown Speaker 0:13
Hey guys, it’s Sharon Tseung. And today we’re gonna go over life after retiring chapter four. And specifically, I’m going to go over how I paid music producers on Fiverr. And we’re going to see the results. So let me rewind and kind of talk about why I’m doing this. So if you’ve been following my life after retiring series, I kind of go over my personal life goals, what we’ve been up to ever since we retired from our nine to five jobs, so both my husband and I are not working full time anymore. So we have a lot more time to spend on things that really matter to us. So one of my life goals is to get better at music. And I actually did this mentorship consultation with this lady who actually writes for really big K pop artists like Ina and Red Velvet. And she basically told me that I should spend 70% of my efforts on the top line and 30% of my efforts on production because I’m trying to get better and better at music. So I can write for big artists and just make music I’m proud of now that was really great advice from her because I try to do both. Like I try to make the beat and I try to write the song, I try to do all the things to create a full song. But what happens is it takes a really long time for me to finish sometimes all collaborate with friends, and they never finished their parts. So I have all these unfinished projects. Whereas now because of that advice, I’m now hiring people on Fiverr to make the beats for me to mix and master everything for me. So I don’t have to do it all myself. Now, I thought this would be kind of interesting to you guys. Because I spent different amounts of money for each different gig and different results came out of each one. Now if you guys don’t know what Fiverr is, Fiverr is a great place to actually make money. I talk about it a lot on my side hustle videos where you can make money just doing different things like singing Happy Birthday to someone like doing a custom audio message for people right or you can do gigs like this, like with music. If you have passion in music, you can make beats for people or sing parts for people. And this is a great way to make money. Now in the past, I have created gigs and actually made money from fiber. But this time, I’m going to be on the hiring side. And I’m going to show you guys what I hired and what the project sound like. So I have a bunch of like unfinished songs, and I decided I was going to hire a lot of different producers, I can see like their quality first. And I basically sent it to five different producers, two of them are still in progress one has been finished. And the other two are in revision mode where I already got projects back from them. So we’re gonna review three different producers works, I want to show you guys an example of like how I coordinated with these producers. So I basically message them and told them I was interested in their premium gig and was wondering if I send them vocals, would they be able to produce the custom beat around it and then mix and master everything. So when I say mix and master, it basically means to make it sound professional, like volume wise. So all the different layers, make sure they’re not like overpowering each other, they each have a certain frequency within the track. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty. But basically, I reached out to every single producer and asked if this was a possibility because most of the time people are just hiring these producers without sending them any vocals but I’m basically doing it where I’ve already written the songs and I just wanted to get them to create the beat for them. So there was a pretty large range, right, so let’s go back into my orders. These are four of the five so with this project, I ended up getting all the stems afterwards, which is basically all the different track layers and then I ended up editing it myself because there’s certain changes that I needed to be done that I decided it’d be easier if I just got all the files and I fixed it up later. So let’s go ahead and listen to it

Unknown Speaker 4:22
okay, so I really liked this beat, I had to work with him on different pieces of feedback, like added more kicks and snares and things like that on first I requested certain things by my vocals. So all in all like this was a really good experience with this $138 gig. I was really happy with it. So with this producer, though I’ve kind of felt uncomfortable asking for more changes. I did ask for a lot of different changes. Even though the gig said unlimited revisions, I didn’t feel very comfortable. So I decided afterwards to edit certain things myself because he sent me all the different layers, the stems of the tracks so that I could edit it afterwards. But other than that common

Unknown Speaker 5:00
I felt really pleased with how everything came out, he made an amazing beat, like production wise, I was extremely happy mixing and mastering and fixing certain things like I think there could be some improvements. But overall super happy with this gig, he created the beat, put together the vocals and mix and mastered everything. So that was fair pricing for that. And now the gig is at $180, which with the fees and might be around $200. But I still think it’s a good deal. And I’m probably going to hire him again. Alright, let’s go to the next beat. So I paid $58 For this one, as you guys can see here, this one’s crazy, because he said he would finish the beat and 24 hours. So I didn’t know what to expect with the quality but actually went on YouTube. And I found other videos kind of just like this, where they go over the beats. And a lot of the comments were like, it’s so funny how as it got more expensive, the quality seemed to have gotten worse, I was like, okay, maybe I should give it a chance and hire some cheaper producers and things like that. And that’s another thing to note too that like you think that pricing would be best if you lower your pricing. But for services like this, I actually started looking for higher priced gigs because I didn’t want low quality beats. So remember that when you are selling a product, you should definitely make sure to price it fairly at what you think it is worth because people do actually judge the quality of the product based off of the pricing. So with this purchase, he wasn’t going to mix and master my vocals. So he was just going to send me the beat. So I’m just going to play the beat for you guys. And you guys can hear it

Unknown Speaker 6:56
all right, so that was basically the gist of the song. And I was actually very pleased with this as well. So I was surprised right for 58 bucks, and he finished it within one day, I didn’t expect the quality to be so good. But it really felt like it would fit with the song that I’m making, I am definitely going to be using this beat, I will just hire someone else to mix and master everything basically putting together my vocals and making it sound like a complete track. But I’m very pleased with it. I sent over revisions on how to format the song because I’ve written some parts for it. And I wanted to make sure that it has the right format in terms of verse pre chorus, chorus, and then also the bridge later at the end. So I basically wanted to communicate that and he’s supposedly gonna finish that and send that back tomorrow. So I’m really excited for this. So again, I was very satisfied with this one as well as the previous project. So the pricing is very different right now that other one is going to be around $200 whereas this one is around $58. Granted, I do have to mix and master that externally but overall I think this pricing was value was the best so far. So I’m definitely going to be working with this guy again. As you can see, I am making EDM songs but also r&b songs, I usually make r&b songs, so I had to hire different producers that specialize in different types of beats. So basically when I first messaged him though, he said that he would charge $225 per song, including the vocal mixing and mastering and then he would make it for under $5 If I did two songs, I decided to just go with one song because I wasn’t sure what the quality was gonna be like and initially I thought okay, this guy seemed really good from his portfolio. I was excited to work with him and see what was gonna happen but this one was definitely the most expensive producer so far and I ended up just hiring him for the beat initially and I think he would charge me $100 more if I decided to send him vocals for him to mix and master so again most expensive gig so far so I’m gonna play the beat right now

Unknown Speaker 9:21
alright, so I was actually not very happy with this beat especially because I’m comparing it with all the other beats I’m just like this felt very empty I didn’t feel like he really put an effort into it to be honest because the song that I sent him already had that piano line I played it initially he just use the same piano line use the chords without adding that many layers like as you could hear there wasn’t too much to it right and then when I kind of asked for you no more to make it a little bit more epic like add more to the beat. He mentioned he had to keep charging more money like oh, you have to pay $25 for more drums and more this and that. So I just

Unknown Speaker 10:00
kind of felt like, I’m probably not going to work with this guy. Again, I’m just gonna get my order done. And I’m not even sure if I’m going to use this beat. Because basically, I feel like whatever I request, you just gonna keep charging more for every single request. And with all the changes that I want, I don’t think it’s gonna get to where I want it to be. So I don’t think it’s worth it to keep pursuing this. So this would have been a gay, that’d be $225 plus the service fees and might be more like $245. So I’m just gonna leave it at the $131.88, I’m probably not going to order extra things from him like the mixing and mastering and just call it a day, and maybe use someone else in the future. Or I can see how I can edit what he already has, if he gives me all the different layers, and I can try to edit it further. So I thought it was really interesting that the most expensive gig I was most unhappy about to be honest, I still have two other beats that are coming in one was $79.13. And the other one was $100.23. Now they both include mixing and mastering. So I thought both of them are very good deals if they do a good job. So I don’t have the results of those yet. But I’m really excited to see what’s going to happen. And I’m just excited for everything I’ve been doing. So far, I’ve been working on a lot of music, I actually posted it on my stories recently. And I got a lot of positive feedback. And I think that gave me a lot more motivation and confidence around music. Because I was starting to feel like wow, I have a lot of work to do, especially after that mentorship consultation, she kind of put into perspective, the amount of work I need to do, but because I am hiring people and forcing myself to write a lot more, I’m actually really excited to see where everything goes. And because of all the positive comments, I’m like, okay, maybe I can do this, maybe I should keep putting an effort into this, because I did work on a lot of music in the past. So I’m like, You know what, I shouldn’t give this up, especially now that I have a lot of time because I was working on music before I decided to stop and work on passive income and building my finances. And after these past like eight years or so I’ve been able to get to a good place where I feel like I have the time to focus on music or any other projects that I want to do. I would say another tip is really to hire people, like I paid for this consultation. And it really helped a lot. And she has this $1,200 day rate, which is pretty expensive. But I’m probably going to do it because she’s basically going to show me how she writes her music. And I can just watch her for hours and ask questions, maybe participate and help along. And whatever she writes, she pitches apparently to big artists. So that’s going to be really exciting to see. And I want to get that experience and learn a lot more. And if I didn’t get that consultation, I wouldn’t have known to focus on one thing versus trying to do every single thing. So always invest in yourself, pay for courses, pay for mentorship, whatever you need to get to whatever goals you have, I read in this book that you should invest 3% of your income into yourself and in your business. So that’s kind of what I like to do now because it can really change the game if you do that. And I used to be really bad about doing that. But now I’m like if I’m going to spend money somewhere I’m going to invest in the things that further me and my goals. Now since we’re talking about life after retiring. Another thing I’ve been doing as well is Twitch streaming. So I’ve just been having a lot of fun playing video games. As you guys know from my past life after retiring episodes, I was talking about how my husband and I just play for like three or four hours. So I’m like, why not just stream it. So I’ve been streaming like many days out of the week. I just started like a few days ago, but it’s just been really fun. Even though not many people join like sometimes I’ll talk to nobody in these streams but I’m like I might as well kind of try it out. So it’s been fun kind of experimenting with these different things. Aside from this, we have been working on our businesses a bit more like we’re trying to improve our email funnels trying to run paid ads that’s another thing that I started doing but we’re just testing it out and hopefully it works out I’ll keep you guys posted on the results. But I hope you guys enjoyed this episode life after retiring chapter four, about my journey hiring different fire producers, I would say takeaways are that you shouldn’t judge based off of pricing should definitely listen to their sample work. Try out different people. It goes with not just music, but with any gig you hire, make sure you kind of check through their work and see if even a cheaper gig could make sense. Another tip is not to be afraid to hire people and invest in your success in getting you to your goals and things like that. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai