The following is a guest blog post was written by Marcus Taylor, author of The Musicians Guide. For more tips you can read Marcus’ music marketing blog.
I would guess that around 9 out of 10 musicians have the charitable philosophy,“Money isn’t an issue. I’m in it for the love” when it comes to writing and performing as an artist. While I have endless amounts of respect for this attitude, we’ve all got bills to pay and ultimately if you can create a successful business from your music it will empower you to spend a larger portion of your time doing what it is that you love; writing and performing music.
But how can you turn your music into a business?
Start Perceiving Your Music Career as a Business
The first hurdle is to perceive your music career as a business. There are two fundamental things that a business needs in order to have the potential to be successful.
1) A product or service that there is a monetary demand for
2) Access to the market where this product or service can be sold
Have you got both of these bases covered?
What are Your Products?
It’s got to be your music, right? Well yes and no – while music does still retain some monetary value in its raw form, it’s probably not going to support you fully on its own unless you have a considerable amount of loyal fans. The bands who are being real smart about running their business are the ones who are creating products that cater to all of the different types of fans with a variety of products such as VIP tickets, Merchandise, DVD’s, CD’s, Affiliate Systems, Posters etc.
By having a large range of different products to offer it allows you to target a larger market and potentially increase the value per fan – as fans are more likely to buy two or three products rather than just a CD if that’s all you offered.
Finding your market
So let’s assume you’ve got yourself a neat collection of products to sell; now you’ve got to start shifting them. The simplest way to do this is to understand where your markets are – one half of your market can be located at gigs or venues where potential or existing fans are and the other half is online.
The first half of the market is fairly simple; you just have to make sure you prioritise performing at gigs where you’re likely to reach with your target audience. When it comes to capturing news fans online it’s a bit different as its important not to play with guesswork. If you have an official site with Google Analytics installed then get conversion tracking set up – that way you know exactly where paying customers are coming from, which allows you to work out which websites are most valuable to you and are worth investing more time or money in.
What are your thoughts on treating your music like a business? Leave your comments below.
Image Credit: Adam Foster
View Comments
Trackbacks
Leave a Reply
Recent Posts
Your Back To School Soundtrack
Although we have about a month left of summer, Labor Day marks the unofficial start of the new season. That means for a lot of us vacation is over, kids are going back to school and parents are in a frenzy to buy back to school essentials. Doesn't sound like a huge opportunity for musicians unless more
The Anti-Social Musician
I'm not a very social person in real life. I get really nervous when I have to speak in front more
Are You Treating Your Music Career like a Charity or a Corporation?
I would guess that around 9 out of 10 musicians have the charitable philosophy,“Money isn’t an issue. I’m in it for the love” more
Why labels should cut down on CD promos
I never copy and paste news from another site (we have enough bloggers regurgitating material out there) but this article more
Risen on 
My thoughts are creating a innovative way to gain the world as a fan
I feel like this is some of the best advice any aspiring artist needs to hear. For the longest time I took the charitable approach to my music, and while I had fun making the music and getting out there for free…whenever it came time to stand up and say, this is what I'm doing with my life as a career…the question of money always came up….I hated it and felt like anyone who mentioned it was against. Now I'm in the corporation state of mind and enjoying my life as an artist so much more, its really just exciting learning the ins and outs of the biz…whilst still tryna make something I can be proud of. At the end of the day, once I finally put a value on my music other than just the love of it, I actually started appreciating it more too and being able to pride myself in my career choice.
Hi Kevin, great article which poses a great question.
For the vast majority of musicians do not have a “music career” – in terms of income. I think that has always been the case. I think there are too many promises on-line of the get rich quick “selling your music”. I am in contact with talented musicians from all over the World and very few are making big bucks, certainly not enough to give up the day job. Mostly they are working toward the more business like approach, but still retaining the “for the love of it attitude”.
I think looking at other ways of working and presenting music is certainly a move forward – collaborating with games makers and video makers, but there are (copyright) issues there. Certainly getting out and gigging in the real World is probably going to get more loyalty and dollars than sitting on-line waiting to make money from downloads. Applaud your enthusiasm and for posing the questions – my take from personal experience is – It 'aint Easy.
Very great article, Marcus! This information might seem pretty obvious to people like you and me, but this is THE very important first step in the transition between a music hobby and a music career.
Many artists that I work with absolutely hate viewing their music as a business, but some do anyways, and the ones that do are the ones making money, and the ones who were able to quit their day jobs to pursue what they love. Artists don't have to stop loving creating music to start viewing their music as a business….it's a just switch in perception (and a huge increase in boring, administrative work, lol).
Thanks for this!
Thanks Chris!
You're totally right, it's not a case of changing what you're doing with your music it's just changing your perception and making sure that you can find some overlap in the 'make a business' and 'love music' areas. Creating new products should be a fun process but also very rewarding financially, similarly, participating in a target market and selling your product should be fun and a great opportunity to meet and create new fans. It's really a win win situation, but as you say there is likely to be some boring administrative work alongside.. but that's nothing a heap of coffee and a few hours knuckling down can't fix!
Hi Bran,
You're right.. through publishing and other lucrative methods such as touring, sponsorship and generating royalties you can certainly total more than downloads etc. But I think the beauty of the online sales is that if you can create that loyalty amongst your fans offline then online sales should provide a kind of 'effortless' income in the sense that you can wake up in the morning, check your email and see that you've made a heap of sales while you were sleeping – which is a real cool thing on top of a consistent offline income.
It's certainly not an easy thing to achieve, but if you can apply this first step of changing your perception to focus on the things that will ultimately allow you to see your music as a potential career then it's possible. In other words, you have to work really hard to earn that privilege of being able to live off music, but the fact it is possible is amazing!
Thanks a lot for this blog. I had thought that I had done just about everything and heard just about everything. The article was very helpful and I am in the midst of starting some new kind of business plan. Peace
Thanks man. Let me know if you need any assistance with that. Business planning is my specialty.
Sent from my iPad