I just formed my LLC (I know, crazy!!!) so I’m officially Veronica North Music, LLC. YAY! But… did you know it costs like $500 to become an LLC? Yes, it’s a write off, but that license just barely scratches the surface of the expenses I take on as a small, independent artist… so let’s break it down.
Making the music
Thankfully I write all my own songs so the very beginnings of every song are essentially free… although I’ll talk more about opportunity costs later… (nothing is free!) The expenses start adding up when I am ready to take my songs to production. I work with my producer Trey Brockman III to make most of my music. I send him what’s called a ‘scratch demo’ of a song (just a very basic recording of my vocals and usually piano or guitar to support) to give him an idea of how the song is structured. We then discuss overall vibes / sounds we are going for and then Trey starts building. He’s over qualified for this and has a real gift for bringing my bare bones songs to life. He then sends me back a demo and I usually have no notes. Kidding. I always have a few notes but honestly not much. We are creatively very aligned so I never have to ask for a total overhaul of what he’s developed – it’s usually just a few small edits. Then we get final vocal takes and it’s almost ready for final mixing! Trey is invaluable and he has been extremely generous to give me a ridiculous friend discount for the services he offers, but usually a project is around $1000 for his time. We have a unique relationship that is built on a lot of trust, and like I said earlier, I usually don’t have many edits for him. This means he can *usually* work (relatively) quickly on projects and bring them to a finalized version without grueling over details for hours and hours.
After producing and mixing costs comes mastering! A mastering engineer is ideally someone different from the mixing engineer because it’s good to have another set of ears go over the music and also they are listening in a more broad, taking it all in kind of way – different from the mixing engineer who gets very focused on details of each part in a song. Historically I have always worked with Jason Nelson who does an incredible job of mastering my music and giving it that final polish! His price is $100 per song! This is also on the lower end for my budget while receiving really high quality work – but imagine, if I write an album with 10 songs, that is another $1000 for mastering.
Distribution and publishing
Distributing and publishing actually costs money too, believe it or not! You can’t just freely upload your music to streaming platforms. You have to pay a company who will ‘send it to stores’ (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon music, etc). I use distrokid, who just announced they are raising their base prices for the next calendar year. Their services cost about $45/year. Not terrible but it’s just another cost tacked on to the long list of expenses.
I am also a member of ASCAP. ASCAP stands for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP makes sure songwriters and composers get paid when their songs are publicly performed. For example, when a restaurant is playing music over their speakers for their guests to enjoy - artists should get paid for those listens. Or, when I perform my own music live, I am entitled to royalties because I’m letting you hear the song live! It’s not a perfect system but basically these venues have to pay licenses annually that allows them to play music (either live or recorded) for people to hear. When my song gets played, I get a slice of that pool of money that comes in from those licenses. Pretty cool! It’s not much but in the last year I made about $40 from it last year, so that almost covers the cost of distributing!
Live performance preparations
Thankfully most of the gear purchases I have made in the last year are flat fees that should last us years, but it’s been an expensive journey getting to the point where we have most of what we need to put on really great live shows now. Andy Klassen, my music director and electric guitar player, is my go-to guy for all things gear/live sound/performance production. He will message me via facebook marketplace almost weekly and say “we need this - this is a good price, do you want to buy it” haha. He’s the best because he knows I don’t want to learn about how all of it works but I just trust that he knows what we need, he knows what we should spend more money on and what we can go cheaper on to start out. It’s been super helpful to work closely with him and his wife Mackenzie as we have been building out Veronica North Music live shows. In the last year I purchased a “rack” which is basically a rolling box that holds the machine that runs all of our live instruments through it, runs our tracks (pre-recorded parts), and in-ear monitor system. Now, this is pretty extra and definitely not needed if you’re just starting out - but one of my goals was to be able to put on a stadium quality show at my local venues - and you need good gear to do that well. All of that (equipment, cables, etc) cost me about $3000 so far and slowly we keep adding more pieces to it, so it’s a bit of an ongoing expense. Mackenzie painted the new rack we got recently and I had no idea she was such an amazing artist!!! She painted flowers (inspired by the Taylor Swift acoustic set piano, iykyk) and my logo! We try to save money by rehearsing at home but sometimes we rent a rehearsal space and that can be anywhere from $75-$300.
I can’t really identify every expense here because each of my band members has also put their own money into making the live shows what they are! All of our own instruments, our own in-ears, amps, symbols, anything on stage we use - we bought it ourselves.
Marketing
I don’t spend a lot of dollars on marketing, but I spend a lot of time. Again, I’m doing this on my own without a team… most of my marketing is done via social media. I try to post at least daily. And videos do much better than plain posts. To share some stats, in the last month I have had over 185,000 unique views on my Instagram page and about half of those are non-followers. These views mostly come from Reels. I have hired my good friend Joey Winkler on a monthly basis to make video content with me, whether that be style shoots or live concert footage. Having that footage is really helpful because I can make a lot of social media content with it. When it comes to promoting a specific show, I will usually print posters and reach out to local news centers like magazines and newspapers. This comes with a small cost sometimes. Occasionally I have used Meta ads, which I think are effective in gaining some new, unlikely followers, but overall isn’t really worth the cost for me at this stage.
“The Look”
I get asked all the time how I afford a fun new dress for every show! To me, it’s important to have my image on stage and in photos/videos be thematic but constantly changing. And you’re right - I CAN’T afford to get a new dress for everything! Thankfully that’s where nuuly comes in. Nuuly is a clothing rental service that my good friend Olivia Statham (Bellingham’s best real estate agent) introduced me to a few years ago. Monthly, for about $100 you can rent 6 items. Honestly it just saves me a lot of brain space to be able to order a few options for each new event and try on in the comfort of my home. As for my hair and makeup, I do that by myself a few hours before a show! If it’s for a photoshoot sometimes I will hire that out, most recently Austyn of Moxie KILLED my makeup and I will definitely be hiring her again some day. I usually get a spray tan by Taylor at Low Tide Tans which is always unbelievably life changing. I think some day I should have a section on the website that just links all my clothes and beauty tips because it’s such a fun part of this. Let me know if you’d be interested in that!!!
Wrapping it up here…
Okay as I’m writing all of this out I’m realizing there are WAY too many things to cover in one blog! I didn’t even touch on buying merch, traveling expenses or opportunity costs! Sheesh! However, if you want hard numbers, here it is…
After completing my 2025 taxes I discovered that I earned a total of $13,131 (WOW!!!) and spent a little over $14k (wow…..). So, no profit yet, but I’m getting there! Honestly very proud of this for my small business in its second year of operation that relies solely on me creating art that people want to support. I’m an open book when it comes to how I’m managing any of this and if anyone is interested in learning more, please just ask! I’m down to meet for coffee or hop on a call and go over it with you. Chat soon!! ILYSM!
