LessonFace: Make Money Teaching Music & Acting

LessonFace Review:

If you’re looking for an opportunity to make some money with music or acting, you may be able to teach these skills through Lessonface. The site provides an online interface where students can find people teaching everything from how to sing to how to play the violin.

(This post may include affiliate links. You can read about our affiliate policy here.)

Registration is free, but teachers must have teaching experience or extraordinary skill to pass the site’s rigorous vetting system. Specifically, the site requires a minimum of 2 years of teaching experience, 5 years of professional experience or that the teacher be an “extraordinary exception.” We’re thinking that means Mozart, Beethoven or, say, LeeAnn Rimes.

Lessonface interviews those who meet the criteria to see if they would be a good fit for the platform.

How it works

Teachers who are accepted to the platform set their own rates and schedules. When you book a student, you pay a commission to the site for collection and using the platform.

The fee depends on where the student came from and whether you’re teaching an individual lesson, group lesson or selling a “self-paced course.”

With individual lessons, where you bring in the student and simply bill and communicate through LessonFace, the site charges just 5%. If the student found you through LessonFace, the site charges a higher — 15% — fee.

Groups and self-paced courses

Until recently, LessonFace focused on individual lessons taught via Zoom. However, the site recently added group lessons and self-paced courses, which work much like courses sold through Udemy or Teachable.

Self-paced courses typically involve some combination of text, video, images, and PDFs. But it’s up to the teachers to determine what sort of content they want to include, and how they want to price it.

Group lessons can include up to 500 people. However, teachers set the caps.

Both group lessons and self-paced courses provide opportunities for teachers to earn higher hourly rates. With group lessons, that’s simply because more students participate at once. With self-paced courses, the teacher comes up with the course once and can sell it an infinite number of times.

Group/self-paced site fees

The site fees for group lessons and self-paced courses — i.e. a pre-packaged taped lesson — are higher. With group lessons, the fees range from 20% to 30%; for self-paced courses, between 10% and 30%.

However, since you set your own rates, you can adjust your prices to account for the higher fees. And, even though these fees are higher than they are for individual lessons, they remain competitive with other tutoring platforms, such as Wyzant and TakeLessons.

Teacher pay

Teachers are generally paid by direct deposit within 3 days of telling the platform that a lesson is complete, which should be done promptly. (If you fail to acknowledge completed lessons within four weeks, you give-up your payment. Don’t do that.)

Lessonface also requires teachers to respond to requests for lessons within 48 hours to prevent an account lockout. The site says that average teacher pay ranges from about $41 to $43 per hour.

Recommendations

LessonFace is our top recommendation for music, dance and art teachers. If you tutor in any other subjects, we recommend Wyzant, which is one of the nation’s most popular tutoring platforms.

Want to sign up with LessonFace?

Click here to try it.

What their teachers say (from an email interview with SideHusl)

I’ve been teaching with Lessonface since 2015, and I continue to teach there.  My specialties are flamenco and classical guitar, and I teach beginning and intermediate students in almost all genres (fingerstyle, acoustic guitar, etc).

Lessonface has been especially useful in building a studio of flamenco guitar students.  Flamenco guitar is a very specialized genre that evolved in Andalucia, Spain.  Flamenco scenes and instructors just don’t exist in many parts of the USA (and the rest of the world).  I’m based in Seville, Spain, so Lessonface helps me reach interested students in all corners of the world.

I have found lots of students through Lessonface.  However, the idea is not to set up a profile and sit back and wait for students to sign up. There are lots of teachers for many instruments. Teachers need to be proactive about recruiting their own students. And, if they want their profile to be well-placed, they need to get good reviews from their students, invite students to Lessons, and otherwise participate in the site. — Leah Kruszewski @ www.leahguitar.com