Thomas J. West Music

Private music instructors often work as freelance self-employed individuals or teach lessons at a music studio of some kind, often times a retail store that offers lessons or a music academy. If you are considering teaching private lessons as a second income, both options have advantages and disadvantages.

Freelance Private Music Teachers

Pros:

• Set your own hours
• Be your own boss
• Set your own pay rates and keep all the profit

Cons:

• Manage your own schedule, student procurement, and billing
• Handle your own rescheduling and problem situations (no backup)
• Manage your own taxes, including expenses and deductions
  

Studio Music Teachers

Pros:

• Studio handles procuring, scheduling, and billing students
• Studio deals with problems with billing for you
• Studio work provides a fairly steady stream of students

Cons:

• Studio takes a cut of your profits (sometimes a significant one)
• Studios require you to sign contracts as commissioned service providers
• Studio contracts can require consistant service locked in for a year or more

What Works Best For You?

When teaching lessons for a studio, you are basically trading flexibility and control for assitance in managing your business. Depending on how much money and time you are able to invest in being a private instructor, your choice to go solo or use the resources of a studio is an important one.

I have tried both of these approaches, advertising my own local private lessons as well as my online webcam music lessons. I have also worked for both Musika and Take Lessons and had a variety of good and bad experiences with both. It all comes back to how much of your captial (time and money) you are willing to leverage. What gets you the best income for the least amount of personal time consumed?

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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