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:
- Create a last.fm account and keep your username handy
- 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.
- Create an amazon affiliate account and keep your amazon affiliate id. If you don't you can use mine strictlymovies-20
- 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
- Use the following URL as the feed URL you want to display in your blog.
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). - 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!