Are Royalties Considered Passive Income?

Royalties are payments that are a legal requirement to an individual for the ongoing use of an asset. The asset can be anything from a copyrighted work, franchise or natural resources. Royalties are used across the digital world from small musical pieces that are used on YouTube videos or in podcasts, to images used on blog posts and more.

The idea of royalties is that it is a way for the artist or owner of the asset to be compensated for the work that they’ve previously done by those who want to use it.

The idea of royalties is that an asset owner can create one piece of content, like music or images and this can then be used across numerous other articles/assets in whole or in part. However, the original creator is compensated for their work.

The person using the asset can expect the royalties to be a lot cheaper than if they were commissioned for original work to be completed. And the artists can expect regular, but smaller pieces of work to be created.

When you’re using a website platform, like Shopify, you can build a strong library of assets that can be sold to users for use in their projects. You can determine the license agreement too. For instance, you can state that the customer can only use the asset for so long or on so many different projects.

Numerous products could be considered royalty products. These include:

• Photographs
• Artwork
• Music
• Sound effects
• Gifs
• Stock videos
• Website coding
• Software coding

Other assets might be considered for royalties as well. And these can all be sold on Shopify.

Royalties are passive income because once the initial asset has been created, there is generally very little work that needs to be done. This makes them an excellent investment opportunity.

One of the things that’s not a passive income, but sometimes considered as one by the market is NFTs. These are small pieces of digital artwork owned by one person. The reason why these are not passive income is that the artist needs to create unique pieces for each sale.

If there was more than one version, their value would be a lot lower and they wouldn’t be technically counted as an NFT.