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The traditional model to teach music lessons involves an exchange of time for money. You teach a music lesson for one hour and you get compensated with a lesson fee.
The problem with this approach is that it cannot scale. There is only one of you and only twenty-four hours in a day. In addition to the limitation of your time and energy you will find that the lessons you teach to your music students are quite repetitive. Of course every student will be slightly unique in their needs and learning style but the bulk of information conveyed in any given lesson will be the same.
The opportunity for you to teach music online is to create courses and materials that can teach while you sleep. You can help music students all over the world at any time of day and you wont run out of energy or time. This is the power of leverage.
Shifting your mindset
To move away from the time = money mindset you need to think about all the activities you do as a music teacher that could be delivered digitally. Video lessons, PDF booklets, audio files, written text, they all offer ways for you to serve a large student community and earn a living in the process.
So what can you leverage? You might have already been teaching some music lessons online with Zoom so how about teaching groups? This leverages your time spent with one student and uses it to help many students. This could be a focused session on a specific technique, a piece of music, or it could be an open Q&A. If the session is focused or if you edit it to be concise it may also work as a stand-alone piece of content in course or on youtube.
Live sessions are a possibility for group teaching but they are more valuable as research. What questions are students asking? What are the problems they are facing? If you approach live sessions with these questions in mind you will actually be researching topics for your next video lesson or course. Identify pain points for students and address them in a digital format.
To delve in deeper into these topics and set up your first online course have a look at our very own course on how to teach an online course in music.