February 13th, 2007
Categorized under: Code, Geekiness, Music, ThisSite, php

Make Money By Listening to Music

Ok, it isn’t quite that easy – but almost; I’ve done the hard work of building a revenue stream from listening to music – you just need people to care what your listening to, have a blog, a last.fm account, and an amazon associate id. With these ingredients you can, potentially, make money simply by listening to music. How? Well, I’m about to tell you.

First off you need a blog and a way to display RSS feeds in your blog. I use wordpress and a plugin I wrote for it called FeedList. FeedList is pretty easy to use and is what shows “My Recent Music” on the homepage of this site. Secondly you need a Last.fm account. Last.fm is a cool service that provides a way to keep track of what music you are listening to. It then makes that list of music available via an RSS feed. That RSS feed is then consumed by the wordpress plugin FeedList and displayed on your blog. Nothing to difficult yet I hope.

Now, however, instead of using the last.fm RSS feed in the normal way I created a Yahoo! Pipe that will convert your last.fm RSS feed into a different RSS feed. This new RSS feed contains links to Amazon.com instead of last.fm and each link has, embedded in it, your amazon associate id so that when people click on the link and buy that music from amazon you get a referral fee.

That’s it. You listen to music, last.fm collects the info about the music you listen to, then yahoo Pipes grabs that info and sends you an RSS feed with amazon links that you can then display on your blog for people to click on. I told you it was easy!

OK so that is the easy overview. Here are some more complete instructions:

  1. Create a last.fm account and keep your username handy
  2. Download and install the last.fm plugin that works with the program you use to listen to music with. The plugins are about halfway down the page.
  3. Create an amazon affiliate account and keep your amazon affiliate id. If you don’t you can use mine strictlymovies-20
  4. Setup a blog using wordpress, or some other blog engine, just make sure the one you pick has a plugin, or the native ability, to display RSS feeds on the blog
  5. Use the following URL as the feed URL you want to display in your blog. 
    
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=7d20665c0dc0240fd18516ec360efe21&_render=rss&amid=YOURASSOCIATEID&lfid=YOURUSERNAME

    Just replace YOURUSERNAME with your last.fm username and YOURASSOCIATEID with your amazon associate id (or mine; just note if you use mine I will make money because you are listening to music).

  6. Get people to view your blog; tell your family and friends, write blog posts, etc.

You can make even more money by showing ads on your blog (google adsense) but using your music to automatically generate ads is a lot less intrusive and far more personalized to you. So, go on, give it a try!

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Comments

  1. I don’t see your amazon links anywhere. Did you resort to the basic last.fm? I tried the pipes converter without any success. I assume last.fm changed their code around.


    Merv
    April 23rd, 2007

  2. You are right Merv, I am not using the pipe here on my page. I looked into the pipe and, something about it changed and “broke it” so thanks for the heads up.

    I fixed it. But yahoo pipes are having some kind of issue at the moment so I can’t test it.

    I wasn’t running it on my site, because honestly, I was too lazy to update my last.fm feed to point to the yahoo pipes feed. I wasn’t, as we say in the software biz, “eating my own dog food”.


    Bill
    April 25th, 2007

  3. Hi,

    Are these instructions still valid?

    It’s now 2009 and I’m looking for a way to monetise my blog Boatsnthingsuk.com I have adsense and amazon ads, but this sounds quite a cool way to get more revenue. However, the comments above would suggest that its not working. Is that the case? Or have you now found a better way of doing it?

    Regards
    Pete


    Pete Fulham
    May 5th, 2009

  4. I have updated the URL in the instructions for the feed URL and I have added a bit to my sidebar that is utilizing the functionality.


    Bill
    May 5th, 2009

  5. This is an excellent step by step approach for adding music to your blog and being able to make some coin at the same time.

    Well thought out and logical.

    I have a blog this might be perfect for.

    Jeff


    Jeff
    May 22nd, 2009

  6. was a very nice article thank you I’d put my archive


    Okey Oyna
    June 13th, 2009

  7. You can find some easy work from home at this site, and earn some good money, depends how you’ll work:

    http://www.fastcashcredit.co.cc/homebusiness


    5stars
    June 14th, 2009

  8. Now this is a fresh idea about making money with music. Thumbs up for sharing this.


    Music Community
    February 1st, 2010

  9. Hi
    thanks for good info..
    husnain


    makemoneyonlinepk
    March 1st, 2010

  10. Thanks for giving us this info, it's really nice. I don't usually leave comments.


    Hip Hop
    June 22nd, 2010

  11. Awesome.
    Thanks mate


    Live Rock Music
    August 5th, 2010

  12. Thank you for review a valuble article. This useful for me and my friend, I will follow your blog for continue reading your news.


    LEE
    September 2nd, 2010

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