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Righto, you’re in the swing of things now but you’re not making money. Lets change that!
You know you can make money out of royalties because its on The Music Business Model in post 1 of this blog series in the “Elevate” section, which is wanky speak for things that make you moolah.
Here’s how royalties work. Email your local APRA rep if it’s doing your head in and they’ll explain it more. You can find the contacts you need here.
Ok. Checklist time.
You’ve got
A great live show (no torturing from the stage from you).
Great songs.
An online presence.
You’re gigging.
And you’ve spent the money to make a single and you’re ready to put it out DIY without spending a cent on people ready to take your easy money for doing something thats really quite simple.
Or maybe you’ve released a couple singles, but they haven’t gone as well as you’d hoped.
Or maybe you’ve spent money on a plugger, and you’re not entirely sure what even just happened with your song .
Here’s my go to simple strategy to releasing a song.
And if you’re not sure which aggregator to choose in the first place, Ari has you covered.
Now, if that just confused the hell out of you or you want a deeper dive into getting this part right - jump into a coaching session. I’ll get you sorted in an hour.
Now before you get ready to send your music out to people to try and get a gig or get your music onto radio, make sure your press kit is looking excellent. It’s essentially your online business card and is the difference between a yes and a no. If you’re struggling to get responses from your “can I please have a gig” emails or “will you play my song” emails, have a look to see if your press kit makes you look gig or is torturing the poor soul on the end of your email.
When someone doesn’t respond to your email, and your follow up email, and your hey did you get my email, email - it’s either a they’re too busy and they don’t need more people pitching them right now, come back later situation. OR it’s a polite no.
So what goes into a press kit ?
You can have a look at mine here as a reference.
If you’re still not sure how to make yourself look good online - don’t forget, coaching’s cheap! Much cheaper than giving yourself a shit reputation because you sent out crappy content and no one had the balls to tell you to start over with your videos, and now those people you’ve sent that link to just assume you’re a bit shit - when you’re really quite great at what you do.
Part of what I do here at Touring Australia is also helping you establish things like your website, your social media graphics and platforms & your mailing list integration with your website. if this is something you’re interested in, hit me with an email and we can look at building your press kit in the space of an hour.
Money spent on coaching could literally pay for itself simply by having a 10 minute chat about what site to establish your website on before you accidentally spend $200 on the thing you can’t drive because you didn’t know better in the first place. I’ve tested just about every digital thing going, and based on your skills can get you setup and driving this week online.
But, If you’re still determined to DIY (which I hope you are! because SAVE YOUR MONEY !!) Ari’s got you covered again for your website choice! What a bloody legend!
The other way to expose your music to an audience is through marketing tactics. This is where publicity comes into play. Learn how the media works and start making relationships with people - on the other end of the radio are listeners ready for new music. The people reading music media (blogs, newspapers etc.) is your new audience waiting to hear all about who the hell you are and why they should care.
The more time someone hears about you, hears a snippet of a song or looks at your name somewhere - they start to recognise that name and eventually - when they do see something online that they like - like a live performance video or a song on the radio, they might just like it enough to get themselves to a gig.
Once they’re at the gig you win them over with your live show and you can move onto the elevate part of The Music Business Model which is a wanky word for ways of making money out of the people that like your music.
I do an hour coaching session on DIY radio servicing to help you save money getting your music out there. I’ll plug you into the exact same systems that radio pluggers use to get your music to radio presenters. Considering pluggers start at $125 for a basic blanket email to a radio list and range right up to $1500, you should know what they actually do and how they do it before spending the big bucks right?
Hit me with an email if you’re keen, it’s cheap as chips!
When you are indeed busy and you find a plugger who does a great job, provides transparent reports about where they’ve sent your music and they give you the ability to follow up for radio interviewers - by all means pay those guys. What an excellent service they’re providing to busy people.
And if you find an excellent publicist who does the full shebang, with servicing, interviews & reporting - MARRY THEM! They are few and far between and should be treated as royalty. If you’re in the market for a professional publicist and have the budget , get in touch with our mate Deb Edwards or legend man Leigh McGrane. They are the true gems of the music industry and come highly recommended.
(PS They don’t pay me to say that, they’re just really really great!).
You’ll see at the top of The Music Business Model posted in Part 1 that you need three things first of all. The songs, a story (which is essentially your brand and your content) and your skills (also known as your craft). Without these three things no amount of business strategy will help. A shit song is still a shit song. And a shit song performed terribly is similar to some kind of torture techniques they used in the 1940s in Nazi camps.
If you have any question over your songs, your story or your skill - go back to school before sending a cent. Do a music degree, get a vocal coach. Pay great players to play in your bands. Learn an instrument and play it well so you can always be engaging as a solo artist. There is nothing sadder than gaining some momentum in your career and then breaking up with your guitarist boyfriend and having to wait 6 months before you can replace him and get the set back up to where it was. Seriously, learn the things.
If you’re a great cover artist and engaging live performer but you’re struggling to write good songs - you can learn about that to! Check out The Academy of Country Music and The DAG Songwriting Retreat. There’s also uni degrees in each state on popular music. You can learn to write better from a songwriting coach and from co-writing with others. And then there’s also the 10,000 hours rule to master anything. Spend 10,000 hours writing songs before you step into the first studio.
Chris Stapleton wrote 3 songs a day for a year before recording his first album Traveller. Spend some time getting the craft and your live performance to a point that its GREAT.
As for your story, you need to decide what kind of artist you are. What genre you fit, what your brand is going to say about your music and how you present that to the world. This is reflected in your photo’s, video’s, choice of clothes etc. and will shape where you pitch yourself to play. Not all venues and festivals are the right fit for what you do. Figure out which lane you’re going to play in based on the kind of music you most naturally write.
But, lets pretend you’ve got these three things to an excellent standard and we can get onto the business stuff.
The term audience development means to literally develop your audience. You do this as part of the Expose & Engage part of the Music Business Model in Part 1. Here’s a more in-depth look at what all of that looks like.
To develop a live audience, you’re going to need to borrow an audience from one that already exists somewhere. Now before you go emailing every major act in the country asking for a support gig - start smaller and close to home. If you’re pulling less than 30 people to your own ticketed shows, you can be borrowing audience from artists at your own level and sharing your own audience with them. It’s a good swap because it brings you both value.To start with, your audience will only be your family and friends, and remember they’re there because they love you - its normal for them to naturally drop off as you start playing more gigs. Hopefully by this point you’ve started to develop actual fans. If you’re finding people aren’t coming to your gigs even after some serious time trying - might be a good chance to have another look at that songs, story, skills part and see if you’re live show is resembling something from 1940 war time.
Once you’re in-front of an audience, you then need to engage with them to get them into what the business world calls your “marketing funnel” - which just means the thing that helps you tell them when the next thing is on that they might want to come to. This could be your social media accounts, a newsletter, a text line - or ideally all three.
If you run your music like a business, chances are you’ll make more money than if you just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. I speak to so many people that aren’t clear on why they’re spending their hard earned cash somewhere. Then they get upset when that spend doesn’t get the results and they have to sulk off back to their day job at Target to save the next $5k to make the next thing.
Most of my friends who aren’t clear on their strategy get ripped off because they walk into the mechanic saying “excuse me kind sir, i’m not sure whats wrong with my car but i’ll spend whatever I have to to get it fixed because i’m super committed to it”. So what does old mate Ripper McOfferson do ? He triples his price, doesn’t deliver and you’re left none the wiser.
So what exactly does a music business look like?
Essentially, you provide a product or service (or both) and receive an income from that product or service. The most common music businesses look like this.
In the case of the covers musician - you provide free entertainment to the public to help sell the beer over the bar, and the publican pays you (hopefully) a kindly sum.
In the case of the singer / songwriter - you put your excellent songs onto a CD for someone to enjoy listening to and they pay you $20 for that nice new thing they have in their life now.
In the case of the original musician - you provide a must see experience, and the punter pays you a sum of money to be apart of that experience in the form of a ticket.
If you’re a musician who wants to live off your earnings, you’ll then establish passive income streams, or as I like to call them - survival incomes that makes you money out of the thing you’re already doing if you’re smart enough to get your shit together and get it organised.
This looks like things like merchandise (products), publishing income (a by-product of your recordings), digital sales and streaming revenues and royalties.
And then there’s the really fun stuff which I like to call “getting shit for free”, better known as sponsorships, endorsements, brand partnerships and grant funding.
The music industry is then made up of other businesses servicing singer/songwriters. Producers, Publicists, Radio Pluggers, Session Musician’s, Lawyers, Booking Agents, Managers, Photographer’s, Videographers and Publishers - they’re all people who make their living from an artist paying for services.
And then of course there’s the venues and the festivals who make money from having people in their venue, who purchase services from artists to help bring in the audience in the first place.
The below business model is my approach to developing an artist’s business from the ground up. The “how to eventually fill a 300 capacity room” and not go broke doing it strategy.
Most singer songwriters know only that they have to make music, get gigs and then hope they win an elusive shiny thing which will in-turn attract the music “industry” help to get them to the big time. What they don’t realise is the power is in the people. The audience are the people that buy the things, not the industry.
Everyone’s out to make a dollar off the person who has the ability to entertain an audience in a way that has them buying tickets and records over and over and over again. Because once an artist has a live show and a product, the entire business model is to simply build the crowd bigger to make more money out of them.
What singer / songwriters fail to realise is that they have all of the power to build this audience themselves - and when you independantly run your own ship, you make more money than the person paying for the services of a highly inflated, under-regulated music industry who are out to make the easiest money available to them.
There are a handful of EXCELLENT operators, don’t get me wrong. I hate to generalise the entire industry. My point is, you should be doing it yourself until you’re too busy to do it yourself. When you’re too busy to do it yourself any longer, you’ll be making enough cash to afford the good kind of industry people to help outsource some of the workload that went into making you the overwhelmed burnt out person you hadn’t realised you’ve become. And when that happens, the services you pay for are SO.WORTH.IT because they literally help you from turning into a crazy person.
In the beginning, you should only be outsourcing the things you cannot do - like producing, or drumming on your own gig, photo’s & film-clips that you’re in, graphic design (if you’re really shit at it) and product manufacturing (like CD’s and T-Shirts).
In this 6 part blog series, i’ll break down this music business model and teach you the strategies behind each element so that you can get on with DIY-ing yourself into working in music full-time - because thats the real dream isn’t it. I know you’ve got the nail in the wall for where the gold record will sit one day, and your hearts set on a grammy - but lets get real for a second. You’re probably not going to be Taylor Swift, but if you’re smart - you can probably create a business that affords you the privilege of making music your day job.
So why am I doing this ? Well, firstly because i’m a nerd and I love the business side as much as I like writing songs. But also, because I’m on the road full-time touring too and realistically - it takes A LOT to make a living wage out of music and to keep your head above water.
It’s a privilege to make original music full-time in Australia. It’s afforded to very few of the best artists you know and love - and well, this is another kind of income stream that I call “a side gig”. But most, because I really don’t want to have to go back to my job at Target.
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