What this means for you is, keeping records of your business expenses throughout the year so you can take a deduction is important and can potentially save you thousands of dollars. Especially with something as cash demanding as promoting your music. It helps us as artists to offset the startup costs and reach our goals faster by giving us a much needed break on our tax bill. So whether it's the advertising money you invested with us, the music video you shot last year, or the production to your music, don't forget that it can all help to lower your tax bill!
Pro Tip: to quickly estimate how big of a deduction you'd get by spending x amount of money on a business expense, multiply the expense by your effective tax rate. So if you're spending $10,000 and your effective tax rate is 22%, multiply those together to see your rough tax savings from that expense will be around $2,200. So it's really more like you spent $7,800. That's the major benefit to being a business owner!
Business Expenses & Tax Deductions
Introduction to Business Structures
The second you post your first song on Spotify & generate a penny in royalties, in the eyes of the IRS, you are a certified business. The business structure is known as a "Sole Proprietorship" and means you are the sole owner of your business. 100% of the income is yours and 100% of the liability is yours. Most of the artists we've spoken to believe they need to file for an LLC in order to start taking advantage of tax savings benefits of being the owner of a company. But the truth is, in the eyes of the IRS, as soon as you start selling a product or service, you are already a full fledged business.
Even if you were to open an LLC, if you are the sole owner of your company, you are still known as a "Sole Proprietorship" or "Sole Prop" for short, when it comes to the tax implication side of things. The only real difference is in the name of LLC: Limited Liability Company. Meaning, if you were to go bankrupt or get sued, an LLC can help legally protect your personal assets from being seized. But as an independent artist, you don't really need to start worrying about opening an LLC for quite a while. In fact, I know a lot of artists who are well into the 100,000s of monthly listeners who still haven't filed to become an LLC. And you don't need to go further than a Sole Prop to start taking advantage of the benefits of being a business owner in the United States.
In most cases from a tax standpoint, your business structure is either a Sole Proprietorship, a Partnership, or a Corporation and these 3 structures are all treated differently. But for the most part, unless you have an investor or a business partner, you're likely operating in a Sole Prop structure. So that's what we'll be focused on in this article (most LLCs will also be taxed in the same way a Sole Prop is).
Business Expense Deductions
As a business owner, you have the right to take deductions against your income. Both Sole Props & LLCs are what's known as a "Pass Through Entity". Meaning, if you own 100%, the business profits & losses are passed down to you as an individual. So when it comes to actually filing your taxes with a Sole Prop or LLC, more than likely you're submitting your business info on your "Schedule C". Which is just another piece of your typical individual tax return you file each year with the IRS. The rule with business expenses are, a business expense is only deductible if it is ordinary and necessary. As an artist, luckily there are a ton of things that fit the bill. Here's a quick list of some things my company takes deductions on.
Advertising Spend
Advertising Agency Management
Mix & Mastering Engineers
Graphic Designers
Beats from Producers
Software Costs (Spotify service fee, accounting softwares, business emails, etc)
Music Equipment (microphones, plugins, headphones, etc)
Office Supplies
Computer Equipment
Website Fees
As you can see, really anything you invest money into that helps you run your business can be deductible. If you plan taking a lot of different deductions, it's probably best to hire an accountant to help you make sure you're doing it right. But if you're just planning on taking a few deductions like on advertising costs, and song production expenses, Turbotax likely has you covered.
Example Tax Scenario
To help give you a better idea of how this all works, let's run through a quick scenario. Let's say you're a Sole Prop business as an Artist, and you also work full time and have a salary of $50,000 a year. Now let's say you earned $2,000 this year in streaming royalties, $500 in features, and $500 for song writing. So in total, your business income was $3,000.
Now moving onto expenses, let's say you invested $10,000 into advertising expenses, $2,000 into beat costs, $2,000 into mixing and mastering, and another $500 on miscellaneous but ordinary and reasonable business expenses. That puts you at $14,500 total and means your yearly business profit and loss is sitting at -$11,500. For all businesses, it's completely normal to be at a loss in the first few startup years and the IRS understands this.
With that out of the way, now let's say it's time to file our taxes for the year. In income, your job paid you $50,000 and your business generated $3,000, therefore your total gross income for the year was $53,000. Now using an expected tax calculator we'll enter $50,000 for our W2 income, skip the withholding (you can add it in if you know yours), and the calculator tells us we'll likely owe $4,118 in taxes for the year from our W2 income (likely close to your actual withholding you've already paid). Moving down to the business owner section, we'll add in our business loss of -$11,500. Now the calculator tells us it expects us to only owe $3,014! Our business deduction saves us $1,104 on our tax bill! Money we otherwise would've been out of. Just from reporting our business income & expenses. Pretty cool right? What's more, the IRS allows what's called "Loss Carryover" which means "when a loss is greater than the amount allowed by the tax deduction, it can be carried to the following years". So in a lot of cases, not only are you saving money this year if you operated your business at a loss, you'll likely be getting a tax break next year too. This is something your accountant or TurboTax will automatically apply for you.
How this applies to your advertising
In terms of taking a deduction on your advertising spend and agency costs with us, all you really need is to get the total dollars spent from your Facebook account or bank account, and then do the same with the money you paid us. If you need receipts from us, just ask. We're happy to send them your way!
P.S. If you hire an accountant they may tell you you need to send us a 1099 form to report the money you paid us. Our company is structured as an S Corporation. Meaning, we are exempt from the 1099 requirement. Therefore, you do NOT need to send our company a 1099 to take the deduction. So if your accountant asks, just tell them we're an S Corp. Feel free to learn more about this exemption from this article: Do I need to send a 1099 to an S Corp?