Salary
Average Salary: $48,900
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $2,042,000
If this is the career you want, you'd better have a trust fund/a parent on Wall Street who trusts you with their credit card/a generous grandmother who left behind cash that accounted for inflation/a knack for taking advantage of the stock market. Alternatively, you can just be the kind of guy who does this work strictly for kicks and just learn to live off very little money.
Of course, there are people like David Foster who are making quasi-bank today, but let's get real: He's one of five, maybe. Out of 50,000 other wannabes. Talk to us when you've produced Celine Dion, Michael Jackson, and Barbara Streisand, okay?
We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but if you were expecting to kick it old school with red carpets and champagne bubble baths, that well has been tapped. It's a gold drought out there in the music world, so bring a canteen (a metaphor for your savings account).
You can work on a freelance basis and ride the wind, getting a flat fee for recording sessions. But chances are you're going to start out doing this business for free until you establish yourself as a person who can actually do it (source). The more you give to the record, however, the more potential money you can get.
If you're better trained in music and sound recording, you become a more valuable producer and have the potential opportunity to claim publishing royalties and get paid up front, no matter what (source).
Once you're more established as a producer, people will be more willing to give you ridiculous loads of cash without going to all that trouble. If you're lucky, you can hop on to their mechanical royalties and you'll be able to negotiate some kind of percentage of their future sales. This percentage will usually be between three and five percent, but this is good news if you're Kanye West's producer.
For those of you who like more steady work with that sweet nine-to-five structure and coffee breaks—and you don't mind producing genres and standards that you may not agree with for the sake of a contract—you can also be employed as a music producer by a record label or music production company (source).
Depending on the label, this is going to get you a salary of around $25,000 for a lesser-known label or a neat $1 million from a company like Columbia Records (source). You may have to work your way up to that.