An Easy Way For Any Musician to Grow and Shine

When should we say "Music is life"?

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All musicians had elevated their expertise by basically having music to their lifestyle ex. constant listening to songs and albums, exploring different genres, attending concerts, reading, jamming, etc. until they were able to play various musical instruments, or at least could sing better than before. And eventually their dreams of being a music personality pushes their determination to aim success in this field.

The Ultimate Advantage of Every Musician

The best advantage of being a musician for me is that your success will be based on your own determination, and i wanted to share with you guys a little more exposure or maybe an opportunity (depends to the reason of your music performance) to your masterpiece and probably monetize your own music performance. And it's just so easy.

Record your performance, and Join the Openmic contest

The openmic contest is an online weekly music contest that's currently running in the blockchain-based social media website Steemit (this website). And joining Steemit is free and always will be (like Facebook). For those interested, you could sign up now. Here's the coverage of my post and i will then give you brief information in each process further.

1. Joining Steemit, basic informations about www.steemit.com
2. Introducing yourself to the Steemit platform
3. Recording your performance
4. Creating your openmic entry and information about the contest
5. Earning rewards, the prizes you could get, and monetizing your content (even you didn't win the contest)
6. Bits of information about Steemit and Openmic system, rules, and its community
7. Many more things you can do in the Steemit platform

A little information about Steemit

This is my what my Steemit profile looks like:

As you can see, the interface is like the same as Twitter or Instagram. On this time of writing, i have 627 followers, 765 people that i follow (i think 25% are musicians and 75% bloggers and majority of those bloggers are my fellow Filipinos), and i have a total of 586 posts (comments and replies are included in the count). And here's the thing that makes Steemit standout to other social-media websites; it pays each member for creating and curating contents. It basically means you earn when your post (whatever topic it is) receive upvotes (or called likes in facebook) you'll get rewards, a cryptocurrency (which can be converted into real cash). If this escalated your interest, please read further...

The Bright Side of Sharing Your Voice in Steemit

The number of your followers won't define your earnings in Steemit because all your posts will be public. The amount of your earnings depends to the user's Steem Power (which basically means Influence points) who will upvote (likes) your post. For an instance, a post with a hundred upvotes from minnows (beginners) could be smaller than of a single user who earned more than any of them and has many more Steem Power than all of those minnows. Quality is much seen here than of quantity. Same applies to creating your contents. The more quality, the more earnings and friends you'll gain without begging them to follow (which is a very bad idea).

Steemit openmic has a huge number of supporters and Steemit members with lots of Steem Power involved, so i think you got the catch right now 'eh. I also written about monetizing the Steemit payouts further as we go but first, here are the things you should know about the Steemit's openmic contest:

The openmic contest is a weekly contest hosted by our Steemit users @luzcypher and @pfunk.

Check this out to see the full details and rules to join the openmic contest. For newcomers, please read further for more basic information.

The cutoff date for entries is Friday. The contest begins on Sunday and ends on Friday.

Additional information before you make an Openmic Entry

For those who doesn't have a Steemit account yet:

• First, you need to sign up. Steemit requires an email and a phone number to verify.
• When your account was verified, you will then receive an email for a successful registration. Be patient because in some other cases it would took you half to 5 days because Steemit is still in beta.
• When you already have an account, introduce yourself, my tip to earn a reputation early in your Steemit journey is to be genuine to gain respect and followers.

Creating a Steemit post

Here's an example of writing a post. It requires you to fill-up 3 entries such as the title, the content, and the tags below.
Proper tagging is one of the trickiest part of the Steemit platform. If you post and introduction of yourself, the proper tag is "introducemyself" or "introduceyourself" so that your post can be seen at the right section where many Steemians are greeting the newcomers and upvoting newcomer's stuffs.

As i said, you must be genuine to gain followers and upvotes. This is highly recommended. One example and an effective way to convince a follower is that you upload a photo of you holding a fansign of steemit and has a signature of you plus a date of posting that's written.

This also applies when you create your first openmic entry. Before you create your openmic entry, Check out the contest rules first. This will also give you a few instructions about making a legitimate entry for the contest including the proper format for your post should be and what to do before recording your performance. All credit goes to @luzcypher and @pfunk who hosts and fund the contest.

One of the basic rules in writing an openmic entry is that you must tag your post with the "openmic" as the first word like this:

Disregard the contents i've written. You can be creative, in my case i written my lyrics and some other stuffs in my entry. I personally use Youtube to upload my video then i copy-pasted the video URL there to make a thumbnail of my post and a quick preview.

Participation and Prizes

Here's my first entry in the openmic.

It's a bad performance i know (because the quality of the video is low and i don't have a golden voice) but the small effort pays-off. I earned $27 SBD in my entry and i also had an opportunity to win the weekly competition. My entry was a bad one actually, but many, i mean there are actually many user entries that earned above $100 in their earnings, you can view the trending openmic entries right here for you to see https://steemit.com/trending/openmic.

Being a participant of the contest will probably get upvotes from many Steemit musicians, judges and supporters even you didn't win the contest. But of course it always depends on quality, or other good factors.

The prizes at stake is 300 Steem per week. You could possibly get them if you stood out, and there were possible tiers. Also, there's an additional 4-5 Steem reward for those who have original songs as their entry. Anyone could make their entries once per week and it's cool!

Let's talk about Money and How could we monetize our Steemit entries/contents

Let me try to explain these things basically. What i like the most about this platform is that it pays back to everyone who creates their own content (posts) or by curating other user's contents. It pays-out Steem Dollars or SBD (A cryptocurrency is a digital currency like of a Bitcoin as opposed to the traditional or fiat currency like the US Dollar or a Philippine Peso) and it goes straight to the wallet in your Steemit account. The current amount of an SBD is almost tied to the US Dollars. You can exchange those earned SBD's to Bitcoin with currency exchange sites like bittrex, poloniex, and blocktrades eventually after the 7-day payout of your posted content. Then those Bitcoins can be converted to fiat currencies ex. US Dollar or Peso via coinbase (USD) coins.ph (Pesos).

Steem Power

Steem Power (Influence points as i basically describe it) is increasing whenever you earn from the posts. So if the user earned MANY steem power and have been upvoted you, the bigger the Steem Power they have, the more earnings you'll get. You could also earn from upvoting (liking) other user's contents and it's called a "curation reward" and it's a great concept. This is how Steemit is defined as a decentralized platform.

In creating your post in Steemit, you have these following options to decide where will the earnings go. Keep in mind that you'll receive the payout of your post in exact 7 days after posting:

• Powerup 100% - If you want to earn PURE STEEM POWER from your post (for a pure investment) all of the money you'll earn from your post cannot be cashed-out and saved it to your account as Steem Power or influence points. The basic advantage of it is that the money will be saved like a piggy bank, and it will increase your Voting Power (the amount of money from your upvote)
• Default 50%-50% - This is the default setting. It means that Steemit requires only the half of your payout to be cashed-out and the other half adds to your influence points. This is what i always do because i send money to my external wallets for cashing-out and monetizing my contents, the other half will be saved as Steem Power and for my future. Steemit don't want to force give all of those payouts from your post but don't you worry because you have the option in your wallet to "Power Down" which means that when you've chosen this process, you could withdraw all your Steem Power but it will divide all your current Steem power in 13 weekly so the whole amount of your saved Steem Power in your account could be withdrawn 13 weeks after you powered down. This is because Steemit doesn't want us to hit-and-run the platform that's what i think as the reason. It is for your future though and a good idea. You could grow up here.
• Decline Payout - If you're a rich guy and don't want to earn the payout and just wanting to voice out something, it's the option for you.

In Steemit, actually you could post about ANYTHING, it's just because openmic and music are the current mainstreams in this platform and seems growing that's why i'm making a separate article for this one and for external invites. There are many more contests however depends to your interest, or you could just stick at blogging or writing.

For those people who live in the Philippines, prepare yourself a coins.ph account for cashout methods This is the most reliable and trusted Bitcoin-to-Peso exchange sites that ever existed. Here's my coins.ph referral code if you want: "xiwxwy" (Use this code to get additional 50 pesos when you verified your account)

For more questions about Steemit and Openmic, please join our Steemit TeamPhilippines Facebook Group and feel free to connect with us.

I also made a Discord Chat server for us to possibly connect personally. Just download Discord with your smartphone, tablet or PC then afterwards, click this Steemit Musicians Discord Channel to enter the chatroom. In here you could leave me a PM, promote your Steemit posts especially your openmic entries, and some other reasons. I strongly recommend that we could create a small guild of musicians that could support each other, so join us.

This is the basic appearance of Discord server when you entered the chat.

I've created 3 channels in this Discord Chat server. The general chat (for general conversations), the openmic (in where you can promote your openmic entries for us to see), and the post-promotion channel (other steemit posts can be promoted in there).

Everything is free, just what i said, your success in this platform will be defined by your own determination. There's zero investment needed to join, so have fun. :-)

I made this post for external promotion of Steemit and the openmic contest because i wanted to suggest this to my friends in PH and especially to some of those good musicians out there who wants to share their music to the world. The more, the merrier. So come and join the Steemit community and the openmic contest party. We're really having fun right here and has the right to say "Music is Life."

About The Author

Oliver Cuico is a Steemian who formerly worked out of Lufthansa Technik Philippines. He loves basketball, cycling, cooking, computer gaming, songwriting and playing musical instruments. When he's not doing all those, he'll go out to bond with his friends or loved ones, to explore and socialize, or he's going to read, then try new things.