By Stephen Pate
Yes you can sell your music and pocket more than 70% of the money by listing on iTunes. You already knew that of course. Isn’t that better than struggling to become signed with a label and have them take 90% of your money? Yehaw!
So how do you get people to buy. List on MySpace: you’re doing that. Get on Facebook: good but getting harder as Facebook cracks down on mass messaging anymore than 200 messages at a time. It really is inefficient.
I read an article that makes sense. The band claimed they were selling iTunes songs in the 10,000’s. I’ve heard of singer songwriters who have pushed 400,000 copies of a great song this way. 10,000 songs is worth about $7,300 to the band.
Selling 101
When we started selling computers on PEI, no one wanted to buy them. Can you believe that way back in 1984 if you asked a business or almost anyone to buy a computer they would laugh. Who needs one?
Just like your new songs. Computers were cool and so are your songs but you can’t find the people to buy them in this big world.
What we used to do was take the phone book yellow pages and start dialing for dollars. Started at A and called every business on the page, then the next page. Here’s what we said:
“Hello, my name is Stephen (or Sue how do you do?) and I’m with Island Computer. Does your business use a computer?”
Then you’re supposed to shut up and write down what they tell you. From their answers we’d find something that our computer can do for them and ask would they be interested in seeing that done better, faster and cheaper. If they said yes, we made an appointment and if they said no…watch this…ask if they might know 2 or 3 people who could use a computer to make their business better. People will give you names to ease their conscience from not helping you otherwise.
Prospecting 101
You rarely leave a call with nothing: either an appointment, some notes about that call and maybe some prospects. Stick with me: we’ll get to your music in a second.
If you call 10 people, you will, on average, get one appointment and about 5 – 10 other names. We were so busy for the rest of the week we would forget to do the same thing tomorrow but you must do that for 30 to 60 minutes a day. Island Computer became the first successful computer reseller on PEI with 300% sales growth for 3 years running.
It’s Sales and Marketing 101. So how do you sell your music and make money from home?
What the band in Ontario did was exactly Island Computer had done. Every morning, five days a week, each band member got on the phone – no!
They got on their computers and emailed anyone who showed the tiniest bit of interest in their music. These could be people from gigs, Facebook, MySpace, friends, school mates, anyone. The Internet is full of open email addresses to pluck and try. Oh get some band cards first with your email address and real names .
FREE CARDS –you can get 250 free band cards a week from VistaPrint.ca. They charge a little more for your logo. They catch is: they will try to sell you everything you don’t want during the check out. If you have low sales resistance go to to Kwik Copy or some else.
The drill is this simple. “Hi I’m Brian from Rockin Pneumonia. We have a new CD with rockin tunes. Would you like a free download?”
Don’t do this on MySpace or Facebook because they control the email list and you want control not some big c0mpany.
Every band member has to put in an hour and sure enough the replies started trickling back, sometimes right away. Aren’t we all nuts connected to keyboards somewhere?
Here’s where it changes. Instead of just sending them the key for iTunes, send them a key and strike up a conversation.
How are you? What do you do? What kind of music do you like, which bands? Learn something about them. Since you are using your email – Outlook or something with a good contact manager, you can cut and paste important things they say in their contact record to remember later. This is important because once you have 5,000 email fans for your band, it’s impossible to tell them apart.
Once you get them chatting with you, see if they want to chat on MSN. Fans love to chat with musicians. Group chats can be fun too although most people respond better to personal attention. Since many musicians are not into that, you will jump to the head of the line for friendliness. Group chats can be once a week on a special night to talk about the new music that’s coming, a tour, a gig or somebody had a baby.
Do not get familiar, talk about your sex life or how you’d like to date them. These are customers not lovers. Some of the old animal magnetism never hurts though! You might think I’m old fashioned. Sex breaks up bands. Sex with your fan club will break it up too. Of course, lots of people meet their partners and lovers at work so why not, but weigh the risks.
You will be able to quickly move to the viral part of your marketing – making the same offer to their friends. Send me an email to get a song. Send it to your friends and they get a song. You don’t need to give another song for leads. You want the sales and most people want to share what they like in music.
If your songs suck or they don’t like them, more people are waiting for your emails.
If no one buys your music, don’t quit.
Ask your message friends what they think? Learn from your customers what needs to be fixed. Like maybe your mix is wrong and they don’t feel the beat, hear the lead singer – listen to them. They know more than anyone since they are the customers.
I know I know, your art. Well music is a business when you want people to part with money in any significant volume.
Consider Feist, an indie artist with no sales to speak of and then she clicks with a simple little tune and chorus that strikes a happy emotion, despite the downbeat words in the verse. She has been honing her craft for years with all kinds of bands to get to that stage. She listened and it finally worked for her.
With this strategy you can create a fan base in a city far away and create a market for a tour or single bit gig that would never come your way.
It takes one hour a day from each band member, working from their own home on their own computer. If a fan wants to message the drummer, pass it on. You have to be a reasonably decent and friendly person but that’s not that hard. I mean you want fans don’t you. Well show them you want them by taking some interest. The time for the glowering self-absorbed artist is after your first two CD’s go platinum.
At a certain point the volume of work could overpower you. Set up you most fervent fans as chapter presidents in their area. They will harvest addresses for you and filter some of the chatter. But always be available when a fan wants YOU. This is not that hard: you can send replies from hotel rooms, bars have wifi etc. Get a cheap laptop once the volume starts.
Band marketing 101
Oh, have 10 or 20 good songs on iTunes. If not, get them recorded. Don’t let your marketing get ahead of delivery. Use standard prospecting and marketing techniques over the new media – internet – to levergage the distance from your fans. Soon your band will be a music business and you can afford to buy strings.
Once you get that down, go on Amazon.com and buy the most popular books on making money in the music biz. Pick ideas that have worked before but not ones that everybody is using. Novelty is a big advantage in breaking out from the 1,000,000 bands who want attention.
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