Marketing Plan

                                                            Marketing Plan

                                         Let's look at a simple plan for making $45,000/year.

 What you need is  3,000 fans that will spend $15 dollars a year on your stuff.  (CD's, downloads. merchandise , ring tones ,  etc )  Getting these loyal patrons can seem impossible until you have a step by step plan and  some solid goals.    We are constantly searching through peoples plans and success stories to find the ones that really work.  We'll assume frist that you have some tracks finished and mastered and you are looking to sell them and promote yourself.   Your first and most important step is to build a sales page,  or what is called a Squeeze Page.   The purpose of this landing page is to introduce you to the potential audience member and get them interested enough to "squeeze" their email address out of them. This is your foot in the door.   Once you have their email address you can begin the flirtation.   Send them free stuff,  tell them stories , get them interested and involved.  Then magically they will start to buy your stuff.   Its a long hard process, but the rewards are the freedom to CREATE.

Step 1.    Give People A Place to Buy Your Music   

Simple concept , but crucial decisions must me made.   The Internet is a huge and confusing place and things are changing all the time.   To simplify this step we reccomend  CD BABY as a great place to start.    They have been around forever and have always done a great job at making music available for sale.   For about $35  your CD's will be available at their online store and distributed digitally all over the web.  They'll put your music on i-tunes, Rhapsody,  Spotify.  Basically everywhere.   There are other options and for those click here.

Step 2  Set up a Mass E-Mail Account  

A good e-mail company is essential to your marketing program.  There are ways to do this for free but e-mail marketing is tricky.   You can get in a lot of trouble if people think your spamming.  Putting a legit company in charge of this makes it easier and safer for you. We recommend  MAD MIMI .  They are the cheapest we've found and their customer sercice is great.  Real people who really care.  Your email company will collect new sign-ups for you and allow you to update all your fans and eventually sell them your new products. For a detailed comparison of all the available email providers click here.

Step 3    A Website  and a blog.   

This is another basic need for music marketing.   We would recommend Yola.   You get 5 websites for free.  You can make it look really good.  You can add videos and music . They can handle massive traffic .  And you can always upgrade to a better looking site with them.  The website is where potential fans will go to check you out.  Remember music consumers are very picky these days ,  There's a lot of new music out there .  You must make a website that tells your story and excites the people who will like your music.    You should include  lots of information abour your music and most importantly an email signup form from your email provider.   Every visit to your site is crucial and should ideally result in a sign-up.

Step 4   A Squeeze Page   

This is a page on your web site where email address's are "squeezed" out of your visitors.   Internet marketers know this as the sales page.   It is where users are convinced to make a decision about your product.   We recommend an offer of free MP3's of your songs in exchange for an email address.  Reverbnation has some great free widgets that will do this for you if you want.   You need contact information to make these interested individuals fans.   The visit to your site is the beginning of a process that will eventually lead to them buying your products,  hopefully for the rest of their lives.

Step 5  Publicity 

The Trap is now set and you must provide the cheese.   You need to expose your music wherever you can with links back to your website and email signup forms.   You can publicize your music by sending out  FREE PRESS RELEASES ,   sending friend requests to fans of similar music on FACEBOOK or MYSPACE,  Sending CD's to Music Reviewers,  Contacting Music Blogs about your Music,   ADDING TWITTER FRIENDS then tweeting updates about your music,  Making Music Videos and posting them on YouTube,  Writing Articles about a topic of interest and including information about your music and  submitting it to Article Databases.    Publicizing music is an amazing task .  The Internet has made it very easy to get the word out. But like anything in life its about knowing how to get the best bang for the buck.   Creativity is always rewarded in Music Marketing. One very innovative Marketing Method is to write articles about your band or something related to music and submit them to Article Directories to spead throughout the Web.  There is software available that will do this automatically and definitely will bring a lot of traffic to your Web Site.  .

Step 6  Milking Your List      

If you have been diligent about your publicity campaign it should be paying off on your email list.    It will trickle at first, then the flow will begin.   Many people will sigh up to get your free tunes.   The next step is very delicate.   You must begin an email campaign to gradually introduce yourself to your prospect.     This is a dance that that takes time to master.   But if you have done it right after several emails you should start asking them to buy something.  If they buy and like ,  you 

         Trent Reznors Advice to Aspiring Musicians

Here's a post by Trent Reznor on his  NIN forum  which seems to really sum up Modern Music Marketing ,  He makes a big point of how uncertain everyone is about a real model ,  This begs us to use unique approaches and forge new pathways.

I
Don't have a TopSpin as a partner? Use Amazon for your transactions and fulfillment. [www.amazon.com]

Use TuneCore to get your music everywhere. [ www.tunecore.com]

Have a realistic idea of what you can expect to make from these and budget your recording appropriately.
The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database).

The Beastie Boys' site offers everything you could possibly want in the formats you would want it in - available right from them, right now. The prices they are charging are more than you should be charging - they are established and you are not. Think this through.

The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on - like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it's dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don't autoplay). Constantly update your site with content - pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any - Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

If you don't know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig - good luck, you're going to be waiting a while.

Hope this helps, and I'll scour responses for intelligent comments I can respond to.

TR

TopSpin Media info:
[topspinmedia.com]


(disclaimer)
This was written on a bumpy Euro-bus ride across the wilderness - may ramble a bit but I think the point gets across.
TR


UPDATE 1:
Thanks for the insightful comments already - when I get a moment (and a reliable internet connection) I'll respond to some of your very valid points. Please keep in mind - these were just some thoughts I quickly wrote down and posted and not meant to be a complete guide by any means. I've neglected to get into publishing and some other things. I'll update pretty soon.


UPDATE 2:
Here's a message from Ian Rogers of TopSpin
[forum.nin.com]


UPDATE 3:
Here's a few responses - more to come when I get time.

Bandcamp
[bandcamp.com]

This looks excellent to me. I have not used it but it appears to be great. This would cover your digital distribution of files and the collecting / amassing of your database. Looks like you'd still need someplace to handle fulfillment of merchandise / physical goods (like the Amazon link above).

Pay-what-you-want model
This is where you offer tracks or albums for a user-determined price. I hate this concept, and here's why.
Some have argued that giving music away free devalues music. I disagree. Asking people what they think music is worth devalues music. Don't believe me? Write and record something you really believe is great and release it to the public as a "pay-what-you-think-it's-worth" model and then let's talk. Read a BB entry from a "fan" rationalizing why your whole album is worth 50 cents because he only likes 5 songs on it. Trust me on this one - you will be disappointed, disheartened and find yourself resenting a faction of your audience. This is your art! This is your life! It has a value and you the artist are not putting that power in the hands of the audience - doing so creates a dangerous perception issue. If the FEE you are charging is zero, you are not empowering the fan to say this is only worth an insultingly low monetary value. Don't be misled by Radiohead's In Rainbows stunt. That works one time for one band once - and you are not Radiohead.

Why put something on iTunes for a price fans can get it from your site for free? Won't it piss people off?
Do it and don't worry about it. Lots of people apparently shop at iTunes exclusively and that's where they get their music. They are generally not the people that would be mad to discover they could have gotten the same record (at a better bit-rate) for free elsewhere. We put The Slip up at nin.com for free at all fidelities and STILL sold a fairly large amount of copies at iTunes for $9.99. At the time iTunes did not allow variable pricing (I don't know what the deal is now).

My Flash comments
I don't hate Flash, just go easy on it and avoid anything that takes time to load - ESPECIALLY your front page.

Managers / booking agents / small labels
Any or all of these may be good for you - or not. Here's a truth: nobody knows what to do right now, me included. The music business model is broken right now. That means every single job position in the music industry has to re-educate itself and learn / discover / adapt a new way. Change can be painful and hard and scary. If any of these entities we're discussing are interested in you, ask them about their strategies IN DETAIL. None of them know for sure what to do. Some of them have an idea of how to negotiate these waters. Most of them don't. If you are young and use the internet, you know more about your audience than they do - for sure. This is a revolution and you can be a part of it. The old guard is dying, if you have good ideas - try them.
Bottom line - before getting involved with anyone else, ask yourself what it is they can clearly bring to your table and is it worth their cut. Do they know what they're talking about, and does their strategies match yours?

I have not gotten into the basics which I believe are self-evident: believe in what you do, do the best work you can, work hard, practice, practice more, find your voice, hone in on it, take chances, play live (if applicable), practice more, keep believing in yourself and prepare for the long haul.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/11/2009 08:30AM by trent_reznor.