My Challenge to The Music Industry Day 1: Giving Your Music Away For Free

Posted by Eric Hebert on May 20, 2011 in Distribution | Comments

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock this week, you no doubt probably know by now that I’ve just launched the Evolvor Music Industry Certification program, with the first class kicking off in July. I’m super excited to get my hands dirty working with new bands and artists, and know it’s going to be a lot of fun and rewarding for all participants.

There are a ton of reasons why I decided to start my own training course, and I wanted to elaborate more about them outside of the actual sales page. Over the next few days I will be offering challenges to you that I go into detail with in the course, but want to give you a taste of some of things we talk about.

So I’ve been a consultant/web developer/marketing go-to-guy for about 4 years now in this industry, and it’s been a lot of fun. While I haven’t yet gotten the opportunity to work on a super-popular major label acts of anything of that nature, I have worked with independent musicians and other industry-related projects all over the world, and it’s been cool to meet so many talented people.

I would say the biggest challenge I have in this industry is, well, challenging those who are trying to find success in it. There is a huge cloud of misunderstanding about how the web and marketing and even the business model is that weighs over every artist that most of the time my biggest success lies in just getting them to think outside of the traditional “box” and embrace new and more intelligent ideas about how to “make it” in this business.

Giving Away Your Music for Free

This is the first hurdle I have to jump when working with new artists. The usual mindset is “Okay we just got our CD’s in the mail and have the album on iTunes. Now we want to sell thousands of copies and become rockstars. Oh and we are broke and have no money to promote it”.

Wait a minute, hold your horses their buck-o. You want to make money selling CDs? Um didn’t you get the news flash that CD sales have been on the decline for, oh about 10 years now?

OH and you think you’re gonna make a living selling tracks on iTunes? Even though they get most of the cut of revenue? Did you stop and actually think about how many tracks you’d have to sell in order to live comfortably? There aren’t too many independent musicians selling more than 100,000 tracks a year out there, and that’s what you would have to sell in order to afford a mediocre steak for dinner.

So give your damn music away already, use THAT as your marketing tool. It’s supposed to be all about the music right, that’s why you got into this? So give it away and build a fanbase. The only really great thing about this business is once you do build a substantial fanbase, most of them will probably stick around for life if you keep them happy. So you have to do all the hard grunt work now as you’re starting out and in a few years you can think about the money side of things.

And speaking of the “money side of things”, this business isn’t about CD sales or even digital sales – they are just a small chunk of the revenue model. Any good business is one that has multiple revenue streams, and this business ONLY works well if they are in place. We’re talking live/ticket revenue, merchandise, licensing, bundling and fan club/membership revenue. That’s where it’s all at kid.

So why don’t you try giving your music away for free for a little while (obviously in exchange for an email), and keep a track of how many new fans you get along the way.

Stay tuned for our next post where we’ll discuss the misconception of marketing. And don’t forget to grab a seat in our certification class (special pricing is not going to last long!)