There was a similar discussion regarding income from music here on the forum several years ago. A young girl loved to create music and dreamed of being a star but life, children, exposure, luck and all the other variables and factors had her in a position she knew she'd never become a big star. She realized what she could do was develop a fan base of a specific number that would purchase an album and piece of merchandise for a $25 value. Her purpose was to locate a group of hard core fans to some particular niche/genre of music that were fiercely loyal to the genre and would become repeat customers and purchase her new album and new merchandise piece each year.

If she could locate and make a $25 sale to 1,000 people, worldwide from her website over the period of a year and retain half after taxes and expenses of the $25,000 gross income, she could net a minimum wage income without having to work a 32-40 hour repetitive week of labor. She was creating a passive income of a years salary from a one time creation of her music into an album release and an accompanying piece of merchandise attached to it that she only has to create and produce once and replicate it thereafter.

With her fan base comprised of loyal fans of the genre and her music composed in that genre, she would retain a percentage of repeat customers to buy her new album the second year and would not have to locate an entire new fan base of 1,000 fans. Also, each album remains on line and available year after year for new customers to find and purchase.

I shared this story because to me, there's a bit of parallel and this discussion about retirement from a single hit music income. You nailed it about "people who have set up businesses that do little other than "sell the dream" of making it big in songwriting." However, that's different than someone wanting to retire with $xx amount of income per month. Two different dreams.

It's the $xx amount that's important more so than the labor source that generated the money or how long it took to accumulate the total. Regardless if an income amount comes from music royalties over the period of a year or monthly payments into a 401k account over 30 years, a $300,000 net lump sum is the same to a person's retirement account. Couple a $1,300 monthly net draw from a lump sum retirement account with the average net $1,200 social security amount, and it's possible to retire comfortably on $2,500 per month retirement. Taking lump sum retirement payments and placing accounts with these retirement specialty companies is done millions of times per year.

The same net $300,000 amount that you estimated is possible income from a massive hit is the same net dollar amount derived from pension payments and generates enough net monthly income for someone to retire.

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