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I asked myself
this crucial question when writing my latest e-book, "What are the
important skills and practices required to create a winning and
profitable music business apart from good music?"
The answer rests in being a good leader of your ship,
having a well-designed and communicated strategy and a good marketing
plan that can be executed to promote your music in a structured way.
If you re-read that last paragraph, you'll see how much I
emphasize the idea of strategy and structure. It is with this careful
planning and well-understood principles that your music business will
become profitable.
STRATEGY
A strategy comes to life through its ability to
influence hundreds and thousands of decisions, both big and small, made
by anyone from the director level to the street team level. It is, at
its core, a guide to how you behave and provides an external reflection
of your music business.
A good strategy fuels and ignites your fire to more
compelling actions and results. It leads you to a destination that is
clear in your mind. A bad strategy on the other hand leads you to a
less competitive, less differentiated position. It is simply a waste of
time and energy as it does not move you forward; instead, it keeps you
where you're already at.
The word "winning" is important in this context. An
average strategy plan, when executed, gets you mediocre results and may
not be a fair reflection of your true talent. A winning strategy plan
on the other hand transforms your current situation into monster
success through developing the right tools, people, techniques and
street teams to share your art with the wider world.
As musicians, we are explorers. As explorers, our job is
to explore the depths of our hearts and souls to share the music that
feels most at home to us. Our job is to experiment, and experimentation
takes time before it is successful.
Your music business needs a framework for achieving
results that can be built upon to achieve your specific goals in your
specific music genre. When you start to put together a puzzle, you
would start by finding the corners and the edge pieces before building
and assembling the inner pieces. It is the same with putting together
the framework for your music business.
Constructing a music business plan is the first step in
gaining clarity and direction in what you'll do, how often you'll
release an album, how you'll market your music and how you'll make
money. The framework of your music business is what holds it all
together - the operations, the marketing, the management and the
finances. Let's look at each one separately.
OPERATIONS PLAN
Your business operations is the activities
your music business will do in order to share your music. These are
usually gigs (what type of gigs?), recording (how often? when?),
distribution (whom? how?), sponsorship, and other avenues of generating
revenue.
MARKETING PLAN
The activities and tactics you will
undertake to promote your music through your music business. These may
include PR, social networking on Facebook, Myspace, etc, blogging,
podcasting, video blogging, flyer and poster marketing, etc.
MANAGEMENT PLAN
Who will form your core team for your
music business and what will they do? Regardless of whether you have
the capacity to get these people involved, knowing what you want is
core to getting a framework to build your music business.
FINANCE PLAN
Knowing what money goes out and what comes in
is crucial to understanding how your music business can be successful.
My accountant often tells me that the success of my business is equal
to how well I can understand the numbers on my cash flow sheet. He is
right and I pass this advice on to you
This article you just read is an excerpt from Kavit's new e-book called "How to Design a Winning & Profitable Music Business."
Released 9th Sept. Available for free download from:
www.innerrhythm.org/ebook
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