A few days ago I was scrolling through the live feeds on YouTube to see what people were doing and I ran into an interesting stream that was just a stock photo of a coffee scene with background music playing. Looking at their channel I realized they had over a dozen live streams playing at the same time. I think this is actually a brilliant approach for a relatively passive YouTube business.

As far as I can tell they use some music they have rights to and loop it together into a continuous stream and then rename a bunch of the live streams something that is relevant to the day/season, some examples from a Saturday before Christmas are Christmas Jazz, Saturday Jazz, Happy Winter Jazz. I think the live streams favor better in the YouTube algorithm letting them grow their channel. The channel started in September 2021 and since then they’ve gained nearly 70,000 subscribers and have had 24.5 million views.

Using a common estimate of $0.50-$5 per 1,000 video views this channel has made $12,000-$122,000 in 15 months! That’s $800 to $8,100 a month in a relatively easy business, although one that is ripe for copycats.

But this gets more interesting the deeper you go! A little more exploring brings you to Elegant Jazz Music that also started in September 2021 and has the same formula with multiple jazz streams…

Then there’s Jazz Cafe Ambience that was started in December 2021 and has had 4.7 million views in the past year. They still use the live streaming, but it looks a bit different with an animated stock video.

Now I don’t know who is behind these and how many channels they are running, but this seems like a pretty slick business for the people who got in first and have the YouTube algorithm working for them. Essentially you create or buy royalty free music, loop it so you can stream it for 3-24 hours and then it’s all about creating new thumbnails and titles for the videos and then streaming 3-12 streams a day every day… That’s a pretty repeatable business model and even though it lacks any competitive moat I could imagine that if someone had success doing this they would have started multiple channels.

How Could You Create Your Own Passive Music Business on YouTube?

Okay it’s not entirely passive, but I have to admit I was tempted to not post this and just try my luck on creating a channel like this. One issue is trying to be different and another is getting royalty free music that you can purchase once and use over and over again. But once you have that it’s as simple as buying stock video or photos, creating your thumbnails on something like Canva and then streaming live every day.

The biggest issue I ran into when researching the idea is that some licenses only allow you to use the music if it’s part of your video and not the main feature. So if you used it for an advertisement, or background music to your guided meditation, then that’s fine, but you couldn’t just play the music in the video. But you just have to dig a bit deeper to get the appropriate license if you’re looking to create a channel similar to this. Pixabay and Bensound were popular sites for royalty free music, but again, check the license and terms of use.

A Different Approach To Publishing Music on YouTube

Typically when an artist publishes a song on YouTube they focus on the individual song. But this approach would be a novel way for an amateur to publish their work. If you’re an aspiring artist and have a catalog of music that could be used as chill background music then you could easily put it together into a multiple hour stream and use the multiple streams per day under different titles to get noticed and generate revenue.