There’s a version of this floating around YouTube and Reddit: open an AI music generator, type “lofi chill beats,” export, upload it to Spotify through a distributor, wait for royalties. Repeat fifty times, quit your job.

It doesn’t work like that. If you’ve already tried it, you found out why.

Most AI music tools, Mubert included, license generated tracks for use inside your content, not for resale as standalone songs. Mubert’s license terms say it directly: registering a generated track under Content ID, or putting it on Spotify, Apple Music, or stock libraries like Epidemic Sound and Artlist, isn’t allowed. Upload one anyway and a distributor like DistroKid will likely reject it, because it’s a generated output under a usage license, not a master recording you own outright.

So the passive-royalty version is out. Here’s what people are actually doing instead, with real numbers attached.

1. Make background tracks for people who need them, for a fee

Right now on Fiverr, “background music for YouTube video” gigs start around $15 and run up to $100-200 for sellers with more reviews and faster turnaround. That’s the market you’re competing in. The job: a client tells you the mood, length, and where it’s going, you generate a handful of options in Mubert Render, pick or tweak the one that fits, and deliver a file within a day or two.

The generation itself takes seconds. The actual work is everything around it: listening through five regenerations because the first three felt too aggressive for a cooking channel, swapping out individual stems (Mubert lets you replace drums, bass, leads, or pads in a track without starting over) when 90% of a track works and one element doesn’t, and going back and forth with a client who says “can you make it punchier” without being able to tell you what that means musically.

You need a commercial plan to legally sell this. Mubert’s free tier is non-commercial. Pro is the minimum at roughly $32 a month, Business is $149 a month if you’re running more than one or two clients at a time. Do the math before you price anything: at $39/month for Pro, you need two $25 gigs a month just to cover the tool. Everything past that is what you’re actually making for your time, and your time is two hours per track, easily, once you count revisions.

2. Build a small app or tool that generates music for other people

This is the route Canva, Picsart, and Restream took, all running on the Mubert API instead of hiring composers. But those are companies with engineering teams. If you’re one person with no dev background, this is the hardest and slowest of the four routes here, not the easiest, even though it sounds like the most “tech business.”

What it actually requires: either you can build something yourself (a Shopify app, a Chrome extension, a small web tool) or you’re paying a freelance developer to build it for you, and you’re paying Mubert’s API fee every month before you have a single paying user. The Trial tier is $49/month for 100 generations, mostly useful for testing. Startup is $199/month for 5,000 generations, which is where you’d land once you have real traffic. That’s real money going out for months before anything comes in, and most small tools never get enough users to justify it. This route makes sense if you already have an audience or a product idea with some traction — not as a first move with zero resources.

3. Get small businesses off illegal Spotify-through-speakers setups

Most cafes, gyms, and salons are playing a personal Spotify or Apple Music account through their speakers, which isn’t licensed for commercial playback. Almost none of them know that, and almost none of them are getting caught, but the risk is real and it’s an easy thing to point out. Mubert Business runs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year for DMCA-cleared stations built for retail, fitness, and hospitality.

The actual job is in-person sales to local businesses, which means a lot of “no thanks” before a “sure.” A realistic pitch: you set up and manage it for a flat fee, say $50-100 to configure the system and pick stations that match their space, plus an optional $15-20 a month if they want you to keep adjusting it instead of touching it themselves. This is slow to build and depends entirely on how many doors you’re willing to knock on. It is not a route for someone who doesn’t want to talk to strangers.

4. Refer people to Mubert and take a cut

Mubert’s affiliate program pays 30% recurring commission, paid monthly through PayPal, tracked for 60 days after someone clicks your link. In real dollars: refer someone to the Pro plan and you’re making about $11.70 a month for as long as they stay subscribed. Refer a business to the $199/month API Startup tier and that’s roughly $60 a month. Refer someone to the $9.99 Business plan and it’s about $3 a month.

That adds up if you already have an audience that trusts your recommendations, a YouTube channel about content tools, a newsletter for indie developers. It does close to nothing if you’re starting from zero and have to build the audience first.

What to actually do this week

Pick one of the four. If you’re going the freelance route, post one gig and price it in the $25-50 range, not the $15 bottom of the market, $15 doesn’t cover your time once you count revisions. If you’re going local-business, write down five businesses within walking distance and visit, don’t email, because nobody reads a cold email about their speaker setup from a stranger.

None of this is passive. The freelance and consulting routes are trading time for money. The API route is you spending money before you make any. The affiliate route is the closest thing to passive here, and it only works if people already trust you.

For context on why royalty-style passive income from music was never the easy lane: sync licensing, the entire global market for placing music in ads, film, and games, generated roughly $650 million in 2024, about 2.2% of total recorded music revenue, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report. That money is concentrated among major catalogs with decades of industry relationships. AI tools didn’t open a shortcut into that. What they opened is a way to be useful in music-related work without being able to play a single instrument.