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As someone who works in the industry with a lot of major big name composers, I can tell you now, it's a long hard slog to get anywhere near the point you could pay your rent from it.
I know some seriously talented guys, who studied and graduated from the best music schools in the world (Juiliard, Berklee Boston, Royal Conserv. etc) and they barely scratch a living, with maybe one or two of them getting lucky through years of making contacts and being in the right place at the right time.
Because of this, even small paying gigs like local TV commercials can have 200 composers all competing for the same job. To give you an idea of how the big commercials are: One of my mates was of the "lucky" 150 composers selected with a chance of doing 4 x 30 second superbowl ads. He was given 48 hours to compose 4 completely different pieces of music
(and I mean totally diverse from each other). He managed to do it and submitted. Got chosen for the final 10 in which he had to tweak (to new video edit) 3 of them and write one completely new one due to a change of theme. Another 2 days work.
He made it to the final 5 for submissions but didn't get the gig meaning at least 4 days hard work completely unpaid, and on to the next project.
Now bear in mind, this guy went to those schools, top of his class, clasically trained since 4 years old, sub composed for 3 years for one of the biggest names in film score and has even has done medium budget film scores, is incredible at marketing and networking, yet he still just scratches a living out of the dirt.
Not trying to put you off, but every so often, someone comes on to TA with a post like "Hey, I've heard the money is great in film/TV/commercials etc and I'm going to get me some of that pie".
It's so unbelievably more difficult than you could imagine unless your best mate is a film producer or owns a music library, and even then, you need to be fucking talented to get anything out there.
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