“In plain English, please explain where an artist should invest time and money.”
👆 That’s the question I submitted to this email list last week in the hope of soliciting the wisdom of the crowd. Well, as per usual, the crowd’s wisdom was easily solicited and the people had many varied things to say. In today’s newsletter, I’ll include some of them, lightly (only very lightly) edited for clarity and brevity.
Without further ado, here’s what other people think you should do with your time and money.
“Create and advertise your own playlist.”
“My suggestion: Create either a playlist on Spotify for your own song (“This is Donald Duck”, for example) or a genre playlist like “Great Avian Songs” into which you interweave your own songs. Take a monthly subscription to Hypeddit or use Submithub to run Meta ads for you (don’t bother with the easy option and the playlist submissions).
Run for a month. See if they get your new song over 1,000 streams on Spotify.”
– Simon
“Get focused.”
“My answer is to focus one or two tactical vehicles, instead of trying to do everything.
I have budget to work with, which allows me to spread my tactical “assault” across multiple channels: paid print and digital, Facebook, YouTube, and my website. But if I had little to no budget, I’d pick one or two communication channels and ignore everything else. Get it out of your head that you can do more than this. In fact, one channel would be better than two.
With limited money and time, available focus is the only hope. That’s how the universe (and marketing) works.”
– Chris W.
“Set a realistic goal and work backward.”
“Each action is a small step towards a goal of being a full time musician. Most people will need a yearly income of say $60,000 to feel like they can sort of pay their bills. So we are aiming for $5,000/month from our music.
If we were to earn that from streaming, that’s about 6.5 million streams per month. I’m talking about real world numbers, based on my $150 that I earned from $200k streams. That’s because I split each song’s streams with collaborators, and I assume most of us will do that for a lot of our streams.
In theory you could use services like Two Story and Playlist Push and Groover, and pay and pay and pay, and at some point enough people would love your songs that you could stop paying playlist services, and people would still stream your music to the tunes of millions of streams per month. Unfortunately it’s hard to know how much you would have to pay. I’d guess something like $400,000 over 2 years, marketing a growing catalog of songs people add as favorites at a high rate. Then it would take almost 5 years of 6.5 million streams per month without paying for them to recoup.
So what’s another way to earn $60,000 per year? You are selling memberships, you are selling tickets to live shows, and you are selling merch.
A fan is someone who, throughout a year, pays $50 online for your merch and music. After expenses, let’s say you get $30 of that. To make $60,000 from merch each year, you need 2000 fans. However, industry data indicate that only 5% of committed fans buy something each month. So you need to have 2,000 x 20 = 40,000 fans each month, to make $60,000 a year from merch sales.
Now we’re edging into what we can control. We can sell merch directly to our mailing list. So to make $60,000, we need a mailing list with 40,000 fans on it, 5% of whom plunk down $50 when we offer them a limited edition hoodie, or a one time only artist necklace, each month. And growing a mailing list is, well, not easy, but simple.
There are Meta ad campaigns specifically designed to grow artist mailing lists. Each live show you perform, you need to bring a friend who canvases the crowd and gets email addresses, specifically telling each signee that they are joining a support team for the artist. Your goal is to get 40,000 people on the mailing list. Currently I have 50 on mine. I haven’t played live yet, and I haven’t used Meta ads targeted at mailing list growth. (Opportunity is calling me! I’m gonna answer!)
Live shows can be free, or they can give you half the bar, or they can pay your rate, or they pay whatever your manager can get. Only you know how much you should receive from a live show right now. If you got $1,000 per show, which I think Jon’s brother gets pretty regularly, then 60 shows per year would earn your yearly salary. Get your manager to work with a booking agent and set up a tour. If you don’t have a manager, you can make an EPK and use it to get one. Or just ask a sibling. That might work even better. And you need a professional, well rehearsed live set.
Each little step, a few people added to the mailing list, a small live show that pays $50, a couple hundred streams from a SubmitHub list, is heading toward the larger goal. Each small step is also opening a door. Most of the time when you open these spiritual doors, nothing happens. But sometimes, a friend who needs a song for a movie walks through. Or a manager who’s artist had to cancel a festival appearance, and who needs another band to step in, walks through. Or someone who just started a small vinyl press, and is willing to give you a cost-only deal on 100 pressings, walks through.
If you have 1,000 fans who pay $7.50 per month to be on your Patreon, and Patreon takes $1.50 per month of each, then you have your $60,000. Think of it: a mere 1,000 fans who are true fans, who are invested in you as an artist, and are willing to pay $90 per year to keep you putting out music and performing. If you are playing live sets, you can get these fans on your mailing list. You can market your Patreon to them. Each month you do a members-only Zoom (non-members pay $25) where you explain how you wrote your most recent song and play a short acoustic set.
If you combine all four methods (stream payments, live show fees, merch sales, Patreon) you could find yourself earning even more than $60,000.
You will know if you’re likely to succeed after each live show. If people come over and stand waiting with a big smile to tell you how much they loved it, and to give you their contact info, and say they would like to help you in any small way they can, and this happens after every show, you will quickly have a network, and you can play in a wider area, and you will have colleagues and new friends and yes, fans.
If you are fabulous and talented and dedicated and amazing, it will happen. Per Sombr, at some point someone will walk through one of the spiritual open doors and offer you a label contract. They will offer you $100,000 to be their musical servant for 5 years. It might be worth it, although they will own your masters and you’ll have to pay that $100,000 back.
But you may become famous, which will allow you, once the label contract ends, to earn money from live shows and appearances, and to have a big mailing list to market to. Before signing, make sure to get a lawyer to read any contract, and study the fine print.
Good luck and God bless!”
– Chris H.
“Stay off the DSPs and sell your music.”
“My current investment plan is:
- Record music for a CD, get it mixed and mastered
- Hand-make my own CD case and booklet (with the assistance of a generous good friend who dropped all of my layout into easy-to-print-at-the-local-print-shop templates)
- Print 100 each of those cases and booklets, and then put them together
- Get the CD pressed (again assistance from generous friend with template)
- Once CD is complete, sell it via shows, Bandcamp, and Subvert, where the option for buying only the download for much less will be available
- Make some easy, low cost to produce merchandise to sell and give away (several ideas already in motion)
That’s the plan I am banking (pun intended) on. Right now I plan to completely avoid the DSPs, mainly because of the proliferation of AI on pretty much all of them. But who knows? The future could change my mind. 😊”
– Mark
“Make good music and promote it on social media.”
“Okay Jon, here is my take.
- Make certain you have your most well-written, catchy or magnetically deep song ever, with the best and most professional production of anything you’ve done.
- Research how to grab FREE publicity.
- Craft, in advance, the most compelling short video that will work on Facebook, Intagram, and other formats you use for yourself.
- Plunk down a solid portion of your ad budget right out of the gate.
- Use a service that promotes your song on social media (like Hypeddit) and stretch your budget in a ways that make sense over a three-month period.
- Check your stats at least twice a week to determine what you should double down on and what you should adjust.”
– Gary
“Build things over time in a sustainable way.”
“Here’s what I’d say…
“Create and advertise your own playlist.”
- Get a cheap home recording setup and record, release, repeat at a rate that’s sustainable for you long-term.
- Post honest, authentic content on social media consistently – and completely destroy any feelings of being afraid to post.
- Five days a week, reach out to a media outlet each day… local blog, magazine, community radio station, newspaper, etc. Never stop doing this until you’re big enough that the media outlets are coming to you, or you’ve hired someone else to do this job for you.
- Five days a week, spend 20 minutes educating yourself on music marketing / music business stuff. Read a book, blog, Two Story Media’s emails or Music Marketing Club, watch a YouTube video, etc.
- Stop trying to play gigs and stop trying to do any networking associated with music industry people. You need a fan base, not a contact at a large booking agency who works with much bigger artists than you. Spending time on these things will only take time away from you being successful at steps one through four.
- Wait til you have an appropriately sizable fan base, then play gigs. In the meantime, just play once a year (maybe twice) – a sick house party or something like that. Pack all your friends in. Film the entire night. Have multiple friends filming and taking photos. This is all you need to show off the live-performance side of your project for the next 6-to-12 months. And realize that, until you have a big fan base, footage/photos is really the only substantial benefit you’re gonna get from playing a gig.
(This is assuming you don’t have a fear of playing in front of crowds. If you do, then ignore nearly everything I’ve said and get out there and play 100 open mics or other small gigs over the next year until you’ve crushed that fear.)”
– Brook
…And let’s cap it there.
Some interesting thoughts, no? I think you could follow any one of these prescriptions and have some success, although the measure of that depends on the sort of success for which you’re looking. Some of the paths outlined above are, of course, entirely contradictory, which is a good sign that they lead to real places.
Personally, I think Chris has it right that… but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I’ll give you my own more detailed thoughts next week.
In the meantime, thanks very much to everyone who answered! Your advice beat the usual variety by miles because not only was it solicited, it was also pretty good. And to everyone else: Here’s hoping that whatever you choose to do with your time and money, it works.
– Jon
