Before I share this week's training module, I'd like to take a quick moment to thank k all of you who have followed along with this series so far, I've already heard about a small amount of impact my training series has had!
We have someone rethinking their next release and how to go about marketing it as a result!
We also have another individual who is going to take the plunge with gaining social proof by creating a targeted Facebook ad to get artist page likes!
Words cannot describe how jacked I am that this information I put out for free is helping real people! You know I could have turned this training series into a paid online course similar to some there that I have taken, but I feel that not as many people would be a part of it that way, and my goal is to reach and help as many indie artists as possible, not to profit from them.
As well, if you are an indie artist and have not yet joined our discord channel, what are you waiting for???
https://discord.gg/vEuYBB
Now for this week's Module!
So to recap,
we have
-made a song
- got our artistry brand set up
- started growing our fanbase
- interacted with them a few times (hopefully 7 or more)
- released a single
....now we have an entire EP, or album that we have been preparing our fans to receive and got them buttered up to jump on it when the time comes.
What does the typical artist do?
Uploads the tracks to SoundCloud, maybe YouTube, launches them on streaming platforms, and tells everyone to go buy it!
Now, this may work somewhat because streaming is now mainstream and people can continue to pay their monthly membership and nothing additional to listen to your track.
But......
Are fans actually paying you money?
Here's a new way to look at your music. What if I told you that you are the product and that your music was just advertising??? Promotional tools if you will.
What if I told you that the way toake the most money was to give your music away for free?!!!
Whaaaa?
Let me explain, so you release your music on all the usual places, and may make a little revenue from streams and YouTube advertising, but nobody has entered their information anywhere and paid you anything. Real businesses have this physical or digital exchange take place where customers pay money directly to the business.
We can do this with our music as well. With the ability to press physical CDs, and being so cheap and having services like Amazon fulfillment, we can get fans to pay us....but not for the music itself.
Here's the formula.
Release the music fine through a distributor like cd baby, distrokid, tunecore etc...
Now, we want to give away free physical copies of the album, but do so in such a way that we
(a) upsell the customer on other swag/fan type gear such as the shirts, posters, buttons, usb keys, etc. During the checkout phase of them completing their shipping only order
-> the idea is that you figure out how much pressing the cd and shipping will cost, tell the customer "just pay shipping" to receive their free album, and price the shipping cost so you at least break even or if you can get buyers, make a little profit from that. The real money income is going to come from selling a 25$ t shirt that costed you 7$ to make, and is shipped along with the album at no cost so you make 18$ on a shirt!
(c) capture the customers email address for future sales and re-marketing
There's a huge golden rule in the internet marketing and product sales industry called "List Building"
That is gaining access into a customer's personal inbox where you can then massage them with content and get them to eventually buy again...and again...and again...
Services like MailChimp and server can be hooked into a sales website to gather the customer email info when they process through your ordering section, and the email will be saved in a database along with every customer who gets a free cd.
There's an entire other course on email marketing I may do that takes this list and makes income off it, but let's stick to the basics for now.
Think of in the long run how valuable this list can be.
If you gather location based data from your customers, say you play a show in _________(name a place). If you know you have 25 customers/fans who received a free cd there, you can directly send them all a message to come pay to see you play live in their hometown!
As you expand your brand with more products you can remarketing to these people on your list. Every album that you drop can be sold to them again!
This list also helps market for things like crowdfunding if you choose to do that for your releases. There's so many options to make money from having a list of fans.
So you use your music as a gateway into putting people into a list to be sold later on many things. Its like multiplying your income. Now think if you just tried to sell CDs directly without this whole process.
You might make a couple hundred sales, and with any luck, capture the customer info and re sell on those.
Remember in lesson 1 where I talked about the psychology of people on the internet and the way to play on those intricacies. Thesame thing applies here, where when people see the word "free" they can't help but want that free thing. Its just the way humans are built.
You stand a much greater chance of bringing people through a sales funnel to collect their info by giving them something labelled "free". Everybody knows they have to pay shipping for things to come to them from the internet so they don't see you as the bad guy/gal for having to pay shipping on your free album.
I hope this can help you make more money on the back end of your music when you release albums!
Get caught up if you missed the other lessons here:
- Module 1- Market What?
@christheaudioguy/music-marketing-course-lesson-1-market-what
- Extra - Song Release Checklist
@christheaudioguy/the-official-indie-artist-song-release-checklist - Module 2 - Gaining Fans
@christheaudioguy/indie-music-marketing-training-series-gaining-fans
Cheers
Chris