We were lucky to catch up with Josh Butcher recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Josh, thanks for joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

Graduating from college (Full Sail University) with a degree in recording arts meant I was sure to land a job at a high-paying studio somewhere right out of school and never worry about money again…

This was a reality I learned was very much not true.

Making money as a musician or audio professional of any kind can be very difficult and stressful to the point where most give up and get a “REAL” job after struggling to make ends meet for so long; especially with a huge student debt payment looming over my head.

I found a way to crack this code and provide myself with multiple streams of passive income by breaking the “norm” of what most audio engineers do. I do all of this from my home studio and with as little as a few hours of work a week. I chose my own route to success and haven’t looked back since.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Josh Butcher and I am an audio engineer, a videographer, and a creative entrepreneur. I’m 31 and I have been running my company, Mad Rez Studios since 2017. I help recording artists make professional music from their home studios.

After graduating in 2014 from Full Sail University with my Bachelor’s degree in Recording Arts, I had one simple goal. To make money from music.

This seemed so simple yet so difficult to manifest at first. I had a range of skills and a solid degree in my pocket yet finding a really good source of income using these skills seemed to be much more of a challenge. The traditional way of doing things when you want to become an audio engineer is to intern at a studio for free and hope you can earn yourself a paid position at some point. I played this game for a while and interned at a few really great recording studios across the U.S.

I spent the next few years soaking up knowledge from big-name engineers and learning the ropes of the full production process and just how the music industry worked. I was getting pretty dam good at engineering at this point! One thing I noticed during these times was how unhappy these engineers seemed to be even tho they had the “dream job” to me. They weren’t miserable but they still seemed to want more and feel like they were stuck in a job instead of living the dream of working on music they cared about every day. I decided this path wasn’t for me and I decided I needed to go my own route.

Making money from my music skills was difficult because it’s something I had always done for the love of it and never considered what to charge people for my services. I wasn’t making much and need supplemental work to make ends meet. Around this time I also began to develop a very big passion for film and videography. I began a YouTube channel for fun in 2016 just to try out my video ideas and learn more about this skill that I found to be so addicting.

After getting pretty good at videography, I found a gig with a small local e-commerce business that allowed me to do video work for them. This was the start of my freelance life and starting to make money from my skills. I started Mad Rez Studios as a production company for professional audio and video with this e-commerce company as my first official client.

Over the next 2 years, I gained skills in marketing, e-commerce, and product development. Plus, my videography had improved to a professional level at this point and I was able to fully produce content that was directly leading to sales for the company. This was huge. This is when I had the eye-opening moment that I needed to be using these skills to create my OWN solution to problems in my industry and create my own income streams from this.

I launched a website and began making my own content teaching artists and engineers what I wish I knew when I was in school learning audio engineering. I was a bit nervous at first to give away all my “secrets” that I had learned over the years. I was afraid no one would ever hire me if I was giving away my secrets, they would just do it themselves and have no need to call me again. Boy was I wrong!

The content I was making started to do very well and before I knew it, I was getting more clients online than I was from my word-of-mouth clients. I also started selling presets and templates that I had created to help others save time and get better results when they are making their own music from home. I later launched a full course that I call “Homemade Hip Hop”, which teaches my entire process of making hip hop music from your home studio.

I can now proudly say I have thousands of artists and engineers who have learned from my techniques and used my templates and presets to achieve their goals of making great sounding music all from the comfort of their own homes. I also have gotten the pleasure of working with talented artists from across the world because of this online presence and I couldn’t be more grateful for the doors this has opened for me. This all would have never been possible had I not gone my own route and stuck to what my original goal always was, to make money from music.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When Covid hit in early 2020, my business model at the time was based on working directly with clients to help them make video content for their businesses. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option during lock down and thats when I knew I had to make some adjustments.

I was fairly confident in my skills at this point and knew I could create some content for myself that would more than likely do pretty well during this lockdown time. I decided this was my time to bet on myself do what I had always wanted and to really establish myself an online presence.

I knew from the beginning of my journey in the music industry that I would eventually want to have my own brand and potentially sell products and merch and have a bunch of followers on social media, you know, all that cool stuff. Seeing as I had some downtime and no way of working with others, this seemed to be the time to get this ball rolling.

This is when I made my first YouTube video for Mad Rez Studios and in that video, I had a link to download a free template. This first video was teaching people how to mix their own vocals when recording at home. I also gave them my template I was using in the video to help them follow along better. Little did I know this would be the start of my new business model and the future of Mad Rez Studios.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

I use Shopify to host and sell my products and services. I use Kajabi to host my online course and private community of students. Both of these platforms are so easy to use and have allowed me to make money passively while I sleep so I can focus on working on projects I enjoy most and work less. I would recommend Shopify or Kajabi to anyone looking to set up a similar business model to mine.

The only “con” I guess I would say is these platforms allow you to build your store and host your products but you will need to do your own marketing. Places like Etsy or Amazon have a network of shoppers already viewing these sites looking for new sellers and products to buy. If you don’t create content or plan to run advertising, you may find Shopify or Kajabi difficult to get eyes on your products.

This is why I use YouTube to make content that my audience is searching for, and I solve their problems with my teachings and products so that they have a reason to come and buy from me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://madrezstudios.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madrezstudios/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/madrezstudios
• Other: https://www.homemadehiphop.com/