So how about the idea of building a website with all your songs, all your videos, all your blogs, all your lyrics, all your photos, just basically heaps of content and charging people $10 a month to hang out there?
You’d only need 200 people and you could probably think about quitting your job. 500 and you’d be looking pretty good. It’s not really hard or expensive to do. On my new paid membership community I’ll be explaining exactly how you can do it, and when you might be ready to do it.
I haven’t talked to much about the monetized music site I’ll be building as an extention of kurb because for the next few months anyway, it’ll be more of a hobby project designed to promote my artists.
I’ve also decided to start developing an advertising network. Because even with pay per click ads like google, you’re still only getting half the money.But lets not get too carried away. by now you should be aware of all the changes we’re preparing for.
Sometime in the next week or so you’ll be able to check out
which is my brand new community. I’m excited about the community because it’s allowing me deliver content and service to more artists and provide more, but in a controlled situation where I’m monetizing directly from the value created there.
How can you use these ideas to create revenue from a community around your muisc and content?
Also before we go on - this blog will be shifting to it’s new home athttp://musicmarketingblog.info
As you can see I’m leaning heavily on the keywords - I did a bit of research into determining that “music marketing” is the most heavily searched term in my niche so although it’ll take several months, in the long game, I expect it to pay off.
But this blog post is more about applying the concept of a monetized community to your own online promotion efforts.Your entry level of maintaining your community is of course building and maintaining your mailing list. In internet marketing they just call it your list.
You’ve got reverbnation, and fanbridge for free musicians options, whereas I’ve downloaded phplist which is the most popular free mailing list application for general use. For a professional solution (once you’re well over 1000 you’ll want to be thinking about this) a lot of big names recommend Aweber.
But this is a fundamental concept behind web 2.0 and online communities - if you’ve got a platform to provide value to a large audience digitally, why wouldn’t you use that platform to create additional value by fostering interaction between those who place value in the content they are receiving?
So the kind of revenue model I’m describing here is based on the need to renegotiate the price of copied music. People just do not see a $1 worth of value in a song, thanks to industry ineptitude people expect to download music for free now. That’s the times we’re living in, and there’s not much we can do about that.
The only way to renegotiate this deal with customers is to attempt to provide a greater level of service and provide relative value! It comes back to economics.You’ve got infinite amounts of your digital products - copies of your content - where is the REAL value?
It’s you. It’s not just what you’ve done, it’s what you’re doing and what you’re going to do. That’s what you can sell. The album survived so long on the idea you pay for a few decent songs and a bunch of “filler”, selling membership to an all access community exchanges as much value as you can possibly give for as much as you can possibly charge for it.
We could talk about what you could charge forever. You could charge a lot and vigourously create value consistently. You could charge a little and promote and market vigourously. You could have different tiers of premium access. You could charge a little bit for a month, more for a year or you could charge $100 or more and say look. You can have full access to everything on this site, download everything I ever release.
You’ve got to innovate around the value you provide to create a proposition.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
JaWar 06.15.08 at 11:57 pm
Right on. Thank you for this post. I will be referring others to your music business blog. This is a good topic to be discussed at various music conferences.
Holli Vals 06.16.08 at 6:48 am
Hey there!
I´m currently working on my next “album”, but probably going for a single at the time.
Anyway, I googled “Digital Promotion” and you came in third, thought you´d find that interesting; “As you can see I’m leaning heavily on the keywords - I did a bit of research into determining that “music marketing” is the most heavily searched term in my niche so although it’ll take several months, in the long game, I expect it to pay off.”
Looking forward to read more here.