For a long time, I gave my music away. Not because I didn't value it — I did, deeply — but because I had absorbed a story that said creative work only counted if other people validated it, and validation required accessibility, and accessibility meant free. If I charged for it, who would listen? If I asked people to pay, wasn't I being presumptuous? Wasn't I claiming a worth I hadn't yet proven?
I have heard versions of this story from almost every creative person I know. It is one of the most common and most damaging beliefs in the creative world. And it took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand what it was actually costing me.
What Giving It Away Was Really About
Here is the honest truth: giving my music away for free was not generosity. It was fear wearing the costume of generosity.
I was afraid that if I charged for my work, people would say no. And a no, in my mind, was not just a financial transaction declined — it was a verdict on the work itself, on me, on whether I had any right to call myself a musician. Keeping the price at zero meant the rejection could never come. No one could tell me my music wasn't worth paying for if I never asked them to pay.
That logic protected me from rejection. It also prevented me from ever finding out what my work was actually worth to people. And it kept me in a permanent state of creative poverty — not just financial, but energetic. When you give and give without any exchange, you deplete. The well runs dry. And then you wonder why you feel resentful, why the creativity has gone quiet, why making things feels like obligation instead of joy.
The Moment Something Shifted
I wrote a custom song for a friend's mother who had passed. I wrote it from the stories her daughter shared with me — the small details, the particular laugh, the way she always had something on the stove. I wrote it as a gift, because that is what I did then. Everything was a gift.
When the daughter heard it, she called me in tears. She said it was the most precious thing she had ever received. She said she would keep it forever. She said she didn't know how to thank me.
And I sat with that — with the depth of what the song had meant to her — and I thought: I gave this away. I gave something that precious, that irreplaceable, away. Not because I had abundance to spare, but because I didn't believe I was allowed to ask for what it was worth.
That was the moment I understood that undervaluing your work is not humility. It is a form of dishonesty — about the true cost of creation, about the real value of what you make, and about what you deserve in return for bringing something meaningful into the world.
What Changed When I Started Charging
I want to be clear: I did not become mercenary. I did not stop caring about the people I make music for. What changed was the quality of the exchange.
When someone pays for a custom song — even at the entry tier — something shifts in how they engage with the process. They take it seriously. They share the story with more care. They trust the result more fully. The transaction, paradoxically, deepens the relationship rather than commercializing it.
And on my end, something shifted too. When I know that someone has invested in the work, I bring my full self to it. Not because I was withholding before, but because the exchange creates a container — a mutual commitment that says: this matters. We are both showing up for this.
The songs I write now, for people who have chosen to invest in them, are better than the ones I gave away. Not because I try harder, but because the whole energetic field of the exchange is different. There is intention on both sides.
What I Want Other Creatives to Hear
If you are giving your work away because you believe it isn't worth paying for, I want to gently challenge that belief. Not because money is the measure of worth — it isn't — but because the story underneath that belief is usually not about the work at all. It is about whether you are allowed to take up space. Whether you are allowed to ask. Whether you are allowed to receive.
You are.
The work you make — the songs, the writing, the art, the music, the handmade things — took something from you to create. Time, yes. But also attention, emotional labour, skill built over years, the particular way you see and feel the world that no one else can replicate. That is not nothing. That is not free.
Charging for your work is not arrogance. It is accuracy. It is telling the truth about what creation costs and what it gives.
I stopped giving my music away for free the day I understood that. I have not looked back.
Emy J is a musician, writer, and song maker based in Ottawa, Ontario. She creates custom songs for real people and real moments — birthdays, memorials, anniversaries, and the ones that make people say WOW. Learn more at emyj888.com/music.