If you’ve ever listened to a YouTube video of “lo-fi beats to study or relax to,” you might have interacted with Michael Turner’s music.
Turner, 26, is a full-time musician who makes pop music under the name PLVTINUM. A year and a half ago, he started spending some of his weekends producing music in what he calls the passive listening space — and quickly found “lo-fi” music production to be a “very easy” side hustle.
It’s lucrative, too. Under the name Bonsai Beats — a band mostly comprised of Turner and guitarist Mike Bono — he’s earned an extra $33,139 over the past year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Lo-fi stands for “low fidelity,” which essentially means it lacks the high production value you’d find in most professional music. It’s meant to be listened to in the background as you cook, work, study or even sleep.
That means Turner’s goal is simple: quantity over quality. When he and Bono collaborate on lo-fi tracks, they set a timer — just two minutes for writing, producing and naming each song. Together, they’ve made almost $60,000 over the past year from 85 tracks, which only took a total of roughly three hours to create.
The alleviation of expectations that comes with lo-fi music production is “kind of therapeutic,” Turner says, and the extra cash doesn’t hurt. Here’s how he built and manages his lo-fi music side hustle.
Producing lo-fi music is ‘much simpler than people realize’
At age 18, Turner posted a YouTube video of himself singing and playing an original song, and it racked up more than a million views. “That was my first exposure to what internet virality can do, and I became addicted from then on out,” he says.
Lo-fi tracks may not always rack up as many streams as Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but they can still become popular: Lofi Girl, a popular streamer on YouTube, has 13.6 million subscribers and videos that regularly accrue millions of views.
Bonsai Beats has roughly 12,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, according to its…
Read the full article here