If you made your music available for free, would more people take you up on the opportunity to get it?

Here’s my view: Yes - and no.

Yes, there would be an increase in the number of people wanting to get your CD or download. Because people just like free stuff.

But no, if you don’t do any marketing. If you do nothing and keep going on, you’ll see an initial spike in the free stuff from your current network, but you won’t grow exponentially if you don’t get more people to know about your offer.

Tarun Stevenson, a Musicians Mastermind member, gives his entire album away for free at his website. Maybe he’ll share his results in the comments.

What is your view?

Let’s discuss…

I had a request recently on how to write a music business plan. Here’s the format I recommend my clients to follow. Call it a template. A music business plan gives you a sense of leadership, strategy and direction and I discussed it briefly in my free e-book, How To Design A Winning And Profitable Music Business.

If you’re still not convinced on the importance of writing a music business plan for your career, here’s a very simple analogy: If I were to ask you to come to my home in London, I’d tell you the address and point you to Google Maps to get your directions from where you’re starting out. If you didn’t have those directions and my address, it’d be very difficult to get here without the map. Your business plan acts in the same way for your music career.

Whether you are a band, solo artist, songwriter, instrumentalist, producer, manager or any other music industry individual, you need a plan to help you achieve your goals and be fulfilled. The template below will help you create one. In helping to make this template real, I’m going to use a fictitious R&B/soul artist called Tina.

Music business plans can be created in many ways, but there are four core components that I like to advise people to write up: Operations (the activities you do in your music business), Marketing (how you’ll get those activities out to more people), Financials (how you’ll spend and make money) and Action (your time-line for getting things done).

Covering these four sections creates a very simple and excellent plan for your business. If you are looking to create a business plan that will help seek investment in your music business, you may need to go to more detail like analyzing your market, understanding your infrastructure, etc, but that is not the purpose of this article.

Let’s look at the four sections mentioned in more detail.

OPERATIONS.

For this operations section, write about the activities you will do in your music business. You can break them up into these two categories: Income-generating Projects and Non-income-generating Projects. The first category includes your gig projects, music products, workshops and any teaching. Basically, things you will do that make you money.

In the second category, list down and write about everything else you will do in your music business that doesn’t make you money immediately. Things like administration, recording, band rehearsals, etc. 

The goal is to get down in this section everything your music business does. Think through every single thing you do and ensure it is written down. Take as much time as you need. As the focus of writing your music business plan is about achieving in 2009, make sure you do this:

Look at all the activities you are doing and ask yourself these three key questions:

“What from this list is not making me money and can I get rid of?”

“What from this list do I not want to continue doing in 2009?”

“What other activities do I want to instigate in my music business in 2009?”

Then edit the section properly.

Taking our fictitious artist, Tina’s income-generating projects includes a regular monthly gig at Club Sachet. She has a good relationship built up with the venue and promoter and now manages to get a good following and pay. She wants more of that but yet doesn’t have the agreement.

She also has a CD out which she sells on average 100 a month. Tina is going to get rid of her free monthly gig at the Rhythm Cafe which she feels is not helping and going to start giving vocal lessons to only five very committed students that should help her bring in an additional stream of income. 

Tina’s non-income-generating activities include her weekly open mic gig, her administration and her fortnightly booking of a room for band rehearsals. 

 MARKETING.

This is everyone’s least favorite section by a stretch but probably the most important. In this section, we are looking at everything you need to do to get your activities out to more people. I prefer to call marketing and sales ‘Customer Acquisition and Customer Nurturing’.  Acquisition is all about getting people to your fan funnel (concept discussed in this free e-book) and nurturing is all about building trust, training your audience, and getting people on a journey on your website.

Here’s what you need to do in this section:

• 1. Make a list of all the things you are currently doing to promote your music.

• 2. For each one, write down what you feel has worked well and what has not worked well. Be honest and it will serve you well. Don’t gloss over the results even if you enjoyed using the specific strategy.

• 3. Then going forward, decide which three key strategies you will continue to use as you go forward in the first Q1 of 2009. If you want to try new strategies, then you are welcome to add them in. I would only choose two new maximum. The key is to have 3 that work and 2 new you will test. Do more than that and you will overwhelm yourself and spread yourself too thin.

In this section, also consider the following:

POSITIONING. How are you positioning your art in the music industry? There is no space for just another pop or R&B singer. Just as there isn’t for a simple jazz musician. What is your niche or specific focus area? Become the go-to musician in that niche and you will grow and get exposed much faster. Based on your experience, skills and flexibility, you will always be able to carve out a niche for yourself.

MARKETING MIX. This is all about ensuring that the strategies you choose to pursue above are a variety that allow you to get exposure in multiple ways. Whether it is news releases, video on the internet, blogging or podcasting, flyers, networking or anything else, be sure to ensure its something that you know already works or something you’d like to try.

SALES. Be aware that getting people to know about your stuff is one thing and getting people to buy it is another thing. Sales is all about coming up with the portals, systems or methods to get people to buy your music, merchandise or other offerings whether its by distribution or at your website. Write up a section on how you intend to do this in your music business. 

Let’s look at this section from Tina’s point of view. In 2008, she has used news releases, blogging and social media to grow her profile. When she has played gigs, she used flyers to promote locally as well. She has seen that her blogging and social media is picking up and she can see it working slowly.

The news releases aren’t working effectively so she has decided that going forward, instead of posting a release once a week, she’ll post one every three weeks. That will allow her to measure the effectiveness of having an online PR account. The flyers work to bring in a small number of people but is not worth the investment so she’s going to stop doing them unless she has more funds to spare when promoting.

She wants to use video as well and so will be taking videos of all her gigs and uploading them to YouTube. She knows the effect video can have as it is visual, auditory and perhaps kinesthetic so will use that to further gain more exposure as a new strategy. 

Overall, she finds herself singing R&B and soul. It is a common niche that she’s taken space in but is not yet thinking of international work, just stuff on the East of USA so she is happy with that positioning. (I still feel that there must be a way for her to differentiate herself from others in order to make her more reachable for the general public). 

As for sales, Tina is currently selling her CD at cdbaby.com. She is not selling at her website and rather directing people to that website. She has three different pages on her website that sell the same CD and she is currently testing which one sells better so she has a better conversion rate. Tina is not so marketing savvy, which is why she sought whatever help she needed and was open to doing that.

FINANCIALS.

In this third section, we analyze and plan the financials of your music business. The key to your music business succeeding is that you try to spend less than you make all the time. It’s the same in life too, right?

Part of the financials is understanding your ongoing expenses as well as where your income will come from. The music business is usually unstable (for most musicians) as they get paid per gig or per CD sold. They have no way of creating sustainable income and so I want to address that briefly.

Firstly, though, list down all the expenses your business is going to make on a regular basis. Using my own Tabla career as an example, I pay a monthly fee for my e-mail management system. I also pay for a rehearsal room once a month. Apart from that, I have no other regular expenses. Then list down potential ad-hoc expenses for 2009. For me, this includes flyers, business cards, paying accompanists, web design for LT and much more.

Also list down your projected income, i.e. where you think income will come into your music business from and an estimate of how much. For me, I expect about £10,000 from corporate work in 2009. I also expect to record a new album and make £3,000 selling 300 CDs at £10 a piece each month, so that’s £36,000 in GROSS in the year. (Maybe £30k as I won’t sell for two months of production and pre-marketing).

Once you’ve done that, you will have a good grounding of your realistic business outcomes next year. The key is that it is REALISTIC. (I feel I can sell 300 CDs because I have the mailing list and know-how to do so. If you don’t realistically believe you can shift 300 a month, don’t put that figure in).

Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that I will shift 300 CDs a month until I set up and there is still a few months till I launch the album. You may probably be in the same space too. For that reason, you’ll need to find a way to create a project that allows you some regular income on a regular basis and that you are aware of it. Whether it’s locking-in to a regular gig at a venue and creating several projects like that or deciding to teach and having a few regular students to make you money, think about how you can do this for your music business.

Let’s look at Tina’s financial plan now. Tina’s expenses include a monthly fee for the e-mail management system she uses - $49/month. She also pays for the rehearsal room twice a month totaling $50. She pays for her news release service at $80/month. That’s a total of $179 per month in ongoing expenses. She also adds another $100 for miscellaneous stuff.

Her income looks like this: 100 CDs a month at $7 a piece gives her $700. Her regular gig at Club Sachet gives her $200 a month. That’s a total of $900 a month in income. Other income could come in from time to time such as corporate gigs or workshops but she has not accounted for that possibility yet. She is also looking to take on five vocal students for which she will charge $80 per student for four hours. Multiply by five and it gives her $400 for her coaching. So based on the above, with five students, she’s making $1300 income, $279 in expenses and therefore $1021 NET per month.

ACTIONS.

Probably my most favorite part of the entire planning is taking all I’ve done in the first three stages and putting them into a time-line to help you formulate a schedule for achieving your goals both for the long term (3-to-5 years) as well as the short term (6-to-12 months).

The best way to approach this is to first list down your goals for the long term and short term. Then for each goal, take the time to create a time-line to achieving it, starting from where you are today. What do you need to do to get the task achieved? Space the actions out appropriately to reach your end-goal so that you can also accommodate other goals.

Back to Tina. Tina has the following three goals for 2009:

• 1. To grow her fan base to 5,000 by 31st Dec 2009.
• 2. To get three additional regular gigs booked in by May 2009.
• 3. To be selling 150 CDs a month by May 2009 and 200 a month by Dec 2009.

Tina recognizes the value and importance of growing her mailing list before doing another recording so she’s deciding to spend 2009 focusing on that, with her bigger plan to release a new album in 2010. That may also work to her benefit if the recession really kicks in. She will continue to write and release new stuff but will not go all out with a new album production project. 

Taking one goal of hers as an example, let’s look at her goal time-line. To get three gigs by May 2009, she will shortlist 100 venues and send out a mail shot to them by 30th Nov 2008. She’ll follow up by 31st Dec 2008 with all of them and book in the first gig with as many as possible. Target bookings: 15 gigs. She will allow for a contingency period throughout January to continue following up as she knows December is always a hectic period.

By January she’ll have at least 3 gigs booked, although her target is 15. Once the first gigs are done by April 2009, she’ll sit down and try to get another gig with each of them. With some venues she will just book another gig, and with others, if she senses both parties are ready, she will ask to have some kind of verbal (or written) agreement for a monthly gig. 

This is just a simple time-line that Tina has charted for her second goal. If she focuses on getting it done, it will naturally result in a good amount of additional income for her. This is her being productive.

Do the same for your goals too.

–

Remember, this is a basic template of how to construct your music business plan for the coming year and I’ve used Tina as an example. If you are seeking investment for your music business, this template is not sufficient and there are other things you should add in for which this lengthy article is not the subject of. I will cover the specifics in a future article.

Writing a music business plan is not easy and it will take time so be sure to give it the time it deserves. Do each section individually and allow yourself ample breaks so you can be creative and clear in your direction when planning. It is easy to get overwhelmed and following this plan will make it easier for you. I have consulted with many musicians on this process and it has taken an average of one month to get it down in its entirety, following many drafts.

Go ahead - start the process. You will be glad you did.

Let’s discuss…. (leave a comment)

Apple iTunes is probably the most popular place people can buy downloads on the internet, but why do many musicians not make much money from it? The key reason is because they’re not directing their traffic properly.

I tell all my clients that although building a mailing list and community is very important, the next step is all about creating and taking your fans on a journey that allows you to build trust and sell your music products to them. When you have a clear idea of what path you want to take your fans on, you can direct them in the right direction and avoid getting them in a state of confusion.

The first step is to get your fans to want to buy your music, whether by having built up a good relationship with them (and they buy into you) or you give them lots of samples of your music (and they buy into your music).

Once you have got them into a state of ‘wanting to buy’ you can then direct them to one reliable place they can buy your downloads or physical CD, be it CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or any other retailer.

The key thing is to direct them to just one retailer rather than multiple retailers. The decision of having to choose one, however silly it sounds, can cause buyer confusion and so by building up your profile and creating momentum with one retailer you’ll see better results.

As a side point, the benefit of selling your music at another retailer compared to your own website is that all the billing and fulfillment is done by a 3rd-party credible system. Many of them also give you customer details so you grow your list.  

Here is one specific way to increase exposure of your music within iTunes itself: 

The best way I have found to promote music on iTunes (and it gets people a lot of exposure and sales) is to create iMixes, a collection of songs that are uploaded as a playlist to the music store. The idea is to take a specific niche and create a playlist for it, including your song(s) in it. iMixes are popularly searched and an easy way for people to find you.

Over time, as you create more iMixes, your album/song will start to appear in the “Listeners Also Bought” section and it will market virally like that. Within a few months you should start to see some results from your efforts. The key is creating momentum and not to give up. It’s not about overnight success.

In many personal development circles, this is about the time when people start asking whether you are starting to reflect on what you have achieved this year and what you are planning for next year. I wanted to just throw out a blog post here based on that, but from the perspective of your music business.

The question “What do you really want?“ tends to be the basis on which this kind of discussion trips us up a lot. I’ll rephrase it to focus on your music career:

“What do you want to achieve in your music business in 2009?”

“How many gigs do you intend to play next year?”

“What’s the goal for your mailing list size, and how do you plan to get there?”

“How many CDs do you plan to sell and how do you intend to do that?” 

Imagine if today is the first day of the rest of your life. You’ve probably heard that before. But it implies that there is both good news and bad news. 

Bad News: You’ll never get today back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Good News: Right now, the day is ahead of you. The choice is up to you: spend your time doing things that are unimportant or uninteresting to you, or spend it on things that move you closer to who and where you want to be.

Here’s what I recommend you do:

1. Break down your music career into segments: marketing, administration, gigs, recording, production, etc

2. Then list down your goals for the year in each of your segments.

3. Break down the goals further by each quarter.

However easy this may sound, it usually is not if it’s done correctly. It requires a lot of thinking, dedication and self-questioning to get out of yourself the real goals you have for yourself, not the superficial ones. Musicians Mastermind members go through many exercises in the first 3 weeks to get clear and create a road map for their success.

There is still some time to go before the end of this year and the start of the next, but I suggest you make some time to plan right now. Then leave it and return to your planning in a few weeks time to see what you have written and whether it still makes sense for you.

The problem with goal setting only at the turn of the year is that you have a lot of motivation and energy but you don’t follow through to achieve all the goals because they are created out of excitement rather than true desire.

Please give your feedback:

January has always been an amazing time for musicians to kickstart their businesses to even higher levels of success. I have found that musicians in the audience of January workshops always seem to outperform and achieve better results throughout the year than those musicians who attend at any other time of the year. 

Based on this and other feedback I have received from readers, I am considering running a 30-day KickStart your Music Business 2009 program based on the internet so I can work with people around the world. I will include the right planning documents that my private clients use to supercharge their careers with laser focus. I will also include training teleconferences, daily e-mails and personal support where applicable.

Whether you want to get more exposure, more paid gigs or more sales, this program will kickstart you to that success in 2009. If you achieve your music business goals, would it be worth paying for the support to get you there? I’d like to know your thoughts on having this type of a program and whether you would join. 

Let’s discuss… (leave a comment)

Until today, I’ve never had business/contact cards for myself as a Tabla player. I never saw a real need for it - in fact, I still don’t. I got them because one, there is sometimes the odd occasion where I am doing private work and I get people come up to find out more and how I can play at their events, and two, I just wanted some MOO cards.

Yes - I got the above cards from MOO.com. They are mini-cards rather than standard business card sizes. Printed on high quality 350gsm card which makes them feel really special. And with MOO I can have as many images as I want on the front. I chose 4 different ones - although after seeing them, I only like two in particular.

So are business cards necessary for musicians?

When you are networking with industry executives or other musicians and need to give them your contact details, it is sometimes good to have a contact card. Your contact card should stand out. It’s like the recent discussion on whether MP3 or CD as a demo is better. What will make you stand out?

My personal music website www.londontabla.com, although still in its re-construction stage, pulls in a lot of teaching and private and corporate gig enquiries each and every week. More than I can take on. Therefore in creating my contact cards, I had to think about the number and type of enquiries they would bring in and whether or not these cards would really add value to my business.

The biggest place they will have an impact is when people see me performing and ask how they can learn to play as well. I am shifting my limited teaching schedule to focus only on working with adults now rather than children as I used to and I feel that they will have a good return on these, but I yet have no concrete statistics on this to share with you. 

I am now in what I like to call the “testing phase” of using 100 contact cards and will report back in a future blog post to see how many results they generate immediately. 

With MOO’s mini-cards you are limited to the amount of text you can have - I think just six lines. More than anything, it makes you focus on what you are doing and what is the core message you want to get across.

I decided to have my name and what I play on the same line. So it reads, “Kavit Haria - Tabla Player”. Even though the front side has an image of my instrument, it’ll help people associate my name with Tabla player which is how I am branded in the Indian music field.

I decided to have a contact number where I can be reachable. As I am normally on the go, I decided against my office number and used my cell phone. I realized that the cards will only be used minimally and to people who were really interested. I am not in the game of aiming to hand out hundreds of cards. I also included my e-mail and web address which is where most of the information of what I do is located. 

An alternative to the mini-card or traditional business card is the CD business card. This is a wallet sized CD that has all of your information on it, as well as a link whether they can go and hear samples, photos and whatever you want. Most place that manufacture audio CDs should offer CD business cards at affordable prices. 

Are business cards really necessary for musicians, and how do you use them?

Let’s discuss… (leave a comment)

This is a side of things we musicians don’t particularly enjoy doing. I’m not sure why. But without a doubt, we still know that it is key to our growth, advancement and success in our careers.

The business end of music is all about the promotion, management, recording and distribution of your music. Of course, there are other things involved like the administration, bookings and legal issues.

More than anything, this is a time management issue because we already know how important doing the business end of things ourselves is at least at the start of our career and so I need not convince you of that.

In my time working on my own business end of performance and consulting other musicians, I have found that the key is to do a small bit on a regular basis. It is all about consistent, never-ending action.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Make a list of all the business end of things you need to do on a monthly basis to help you business tick.

2. Group them into categories - i.e. promotion, management, recording, distribution, press, legal, admin, booking, etc.

3.  Then prioritize each task in each category by A, B and C. (A being most important, B, intermediate and C, least important).

4. Then create a monthly calendar. Slot in all your activities on a daily and weekly basis for the next 30 days. Add into your calendar all the items you need to get done. Try not to slot in more than 30 minutes a day to begin with if you are working a full-time job. If you are focusing on your music business full-time, be sure to do more. 2-3 hours a day is good.

5. Then simply put up your chart where you can see it and take action daily.

6. Do this at the end of each month for the following month.

I guarantee you will be light years ahead within just 4 months than you would ever have been. This is the exact template many of my consulting clients use and I have also instilled it with employees of record labels I have worked with. It works - all that’s left is for you to try it.

Another important point is that you should not give up. We tend to give up when a task becomes hard. Devote some extra time to learning and growing your knowledge so the task is no longer hard. Come join the Musicians Mastermind if you want to get step-by-step marketing instructions for your career.

We all need a time management system that is cutomized for us - not only for the next few months, but for years to come. Something that will help us grow, and be more productive in our careers. 

Try my suggested method out. If it doesn’t work after two months, that’s fine. Drop it and go find something else. But don’t tell me it won’t work for you if you haven’t tried it.

How do you manage your time and get the business end of things done?

Let’s discuss… 

Seth Godin’s new book “Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us” is out in the US. I bought it as an audiobook from iTunes for just £0.95. Not sure why it’s that price for a 3-hour audiobook, but great value indeed. Seth also did an interview geared to the music industry with Bruce Houghton of hypebot - here is part one and part two. 

Every tribe needs a leader who will engage, interact and act on an idea by creating a movement. Bob Dylan did that. The Beatles did that. Michael Jackson did the same.

Out of the independent musicians I have worked with, I can pick out the following as tribe leaders or those currently developing their own tribes: Rhonda Dene’t for special style of work, Evelyne Brink for sharing her messages of confidence through her music, Manisha Shahane for bridging hemispheres, Darren Taylor for spreading Jazz in and around London.

It would be forgivable to think that all artists are leaders and their fans are tribes but that is not the case. Not all artists are leaders. Not all of them have an idea (or ‘hook’ as we like to call it) that gets people energized, excited and hyped up.

Today’s society and modern world caters for us leaders. It gives us the platform to rise. We may run different tribes for different passions. I run a tribe with my Tabla in London. I also run a tribe of serious independent musicians via my writing and speaking on the topic of music marketing. I also run a tribe with my charity work.

The key is to stand up if you want to be a leader and seize the opportunity. Choose your style of music and develop an angle to it that hooks people and start introducing it to your friends, family and current fans.

A tribe is a group of people who follow a particular idea. Simply put, you can look at it as your mailing list. But they are more active than just everyday people who sign up to receive your e-mails. They follow a thought, idea or movement. They want to interact and share their views. They want to engage. This is where a blog is good.

A tribe doesn’t have to be very large. A small one is sometimes better. If you build a loyal tribe, they will continue to buy your music as you release it, for as long as you can keep them in your movement. If you build a large tribe, there is a risk of breaking up your movement. Either way is fine depending on how you look at your music business.

Is your music business and career set up for you to just release one music product? Or are you in it for the long-haul, ready to release regular music products maybe once or twice a year for which you develop good relationships with your tribe so that they buy from you all the time? Decide on your approach first and then decide on the size of tribe you are out to build.

What are your thoughts on this idea of tribe? Let’s discuss… 

The idea is to create a system of milestones, assumptions and tasks to keep your music business on course for achieving your target. You want to set milestones for your music promotion, music sales, gigs and financials. You want to set tasks on a daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly and yearly basis so that you move fast towards those milestones.

Watch his talk on weaving a MAT to get an idea of how you can apply this: 

Andrew Dubber of NewMusicStrategies.com has a really good post up discussing your demo and how to present it. Here are some of the key points that I have picked up (and agree with):

• - Call it your promo, not a demo.
• - Present your promo in both mp3 and CD format. Have both available for different contexts.
• - When you go to conferences, take CDs as calling cards. Have your details printed on them.
• - Packaging, artwork and design are crucial (I’m not sure it’s as crucial as Andrew might think, but it has to get them to open and listen to the CD at least so don’t go pouring hundreds into this)
• - Mp3 etiquette - don’t email them the file. Put it up at your website and send them the link to the page where they can just hit play and listen to it streaming rather than download it. 
• - When you call to enquire about sending your promo to venue managers, be sure to ask whether they’d like it as an mp3 recording or by CD. Most places get CDs just sent in and not many get mp3’s. If you can get the mp3 sent across, you will stand out.

Joe Kirk from NoiseTrade left this suggestion in Andrew’s comments:

I’ve thrown away a lot of CDs at places like SXSW because I didn’t have room in my luggage for the flight home. But I don’t think getting rid of the jewel case is the answer. Instead of giving me a disc when I’m standing in a club or a coffee shop or whatever, ask for my card and tell me you’ll send me a CD later. Then mark the envelope “requested material” so it gets past the intern and goes straight to my desk. When I open the envelope, it will be the only disc in my hand and I’ll be sitting in front of my laptop if I decide I want to hear it then. If not, I’ll at least put it in my MIGHT stack instead of throwing it away before I get back to my desk.

 What are your thoughts on this?

1. Facebook pages.

Go to Facebook and create a musician page. You can put all your music, videos and events there. It’s a really neat looking platform. You can also have a discussion board and host conversations. Start passing the word around and get your fans on that page.

2. Twitter.

As a micro-blogging platform with just 140 characters, Twitter is short, sharp and cool. Build a following there, host discussions and let the people know what you’re up to in life.

3. Myspace.

Myspace is a musician’s favorite, although I don’t really like it. I think it’s great for networking with others in the music industry, musicians and entrepreneurs, but not great for growing your fan base with real people who are not musicians and will actually buy your music. Still get a profile if you like.

4. YouTube.

Get all your gigs recorded. Even record your recording sessions. Put up as many videos as you can and share them on all your other profiles. The key is to create an intertwined network with all your sites. I use blip.tv for videos on this site instead of YouTube because my videos are longer than 10 minutes.

5. Flickr.

This is all about photos (and now videos too). Put up all your photos and again link it around to all your other networks. Create an intertwined network all about YOU.–As you can see, I’ve given you a few options here but if you picked it up, they are all to do with different mediums - i.e. blogging, photos, video, text, etc to get people thinking and attracting all kinds of people. 

Have any of these worked for you?

Do you know any others which you recommend?

Share and let’s discuss…