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Building and Monetizing Your Fan Club

Lesson 19 from: DIY Music Business 101

Tomas George

Building and Monetizing Your Fan Club

Lesson 19 from: DIY Music Business 101

Tomas George

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Lesson Info

19. Building and Monetizing Your Fan Club

<b>In this video, we'll show you a few ways that you can build a fan club that will happily pay you for exclusive content.</b>

Lesson Info

Building and Monetizing Your Fan Club

Hi. In this video, I wanna show you just a couple of ways that you can build a fan club that will happily pay you for exclusive content and creates a great way for you to kind of make money as an artist on the back end of your brand as opposed to just selling music. So what I've got open here is a website called patreon.com. Patreon's a great website for artists and creators who are looking to create another income stream that offers more value to their fans. So think of it as like a fan club or as Ari Hsan likes to call it crowdfunding 2.0 so crowdfunding traditionally is, let's say that you are launching an album and you get everyone to pledge for that album. And if you hit the goal, then they get the album or any benefits that they get when they signed up to pledge for it. Patreon or crowdfunding 2.0 is more of a subscription thing where your fans sign up and they subscribe to you and in exchange for subscribing to you, they get access to exclusive stuff, exclusive content, exclusiv...

e rewards that they get as a member of your Patreon or any other subscription service. Some fans will happily pledge $1 a month or something like that just to support you. But that's a bit more charitable. You can't really bank on that as a business. But what you can bank on is offering value in exchange for money. And what I mean by that is you might create a system using Patreon where they can subscribe to you for like $5 or more per month, for example. But inside that tier, you can offer like pre release content, maybe free downloads of your music live streams that are exclusive to them as well. Anything that you can offer, that makes it feel more exclusive and offers them more value. Because in this day and age, you don't just have a bunch of fans and they all support you in the same way, you have to kind of create a tiered system of fandom, maybe at the top layer, it's just people listen to your music on Spotify. But then underneath that, there's like a fan club and the first tier is just like $5 or more. Then underneath that, maybe it's $10 or more and you're offering even more value. So you have all the opportunity now to be creative of how you build that business and platforms like Patreon, help you do that. OK. So here's a good example, this guy Jacob Colley, I've been following this guy for a while now, he's really, really talented musician. But what is just as impressive is how he goes about building his business online and how he adds value to his fans. So this is Patreon page. What I've seen him do previously with his Patreon page is he used to do this reward system for his fans called I Harm where he harmonizes with melodies that his fans submit to him. So he's very creative about it and he's well into his harmony. But right now he's just got a basic reward system going on and it's probably working for him because it is quite a simple concept. It's just $5 or more per month. And you get Patreon only monthly Q and A's first access to content and early updates on his current album. So right now it's branded to his current project and I've seen that change and that can change over time as well. So you could have it branded for an album that you're currently making or the next single release or you could just have a simple subscription service where they get access to you directly where you just offer value that you're not offering on social media for free, for example. OK. So it's something to bear in mind in terms of like getting traffic to your Patreon page that's kind of up to you and how you build out your free content on social media on youtube. But you can easily have the link to your Patreon page like this one, for example, and you can add that as a caption to the free content that you make on Facebook. Maybe you can have it as the link on your bio on Instagram or you can add it to the videos that you make on Facebook or youtube, whatever works for you. But you gotta think of this as like a tiered system. OK? So you've got the top layer where you've got free content that you're putting out on all of the platforms, which is the discovery content that people are discovering you on and then you kind of funnel them down to like a Patreon page where they have the option to sign up for more content and support you more. OK? So this is just one way of doing it. There are other examples of people in music who are using Patreon to build out their business as well. OK? So this one is called Look Mum. No, computer is creating music and crazy music, electronic machines and educational videos. Pretty cool. And they have these different tiers here as you can see. So people can just sign up, you know, and Patreon takes care of all of the money side of it. You can just create the tier system and focus on content and focus on music and get in traffic over to the Patreon page. Here are another example and these are just examples that are currently existing at the recording of this video, all of this is subject to change. So keep an eye on it for sure. So one way you can effectively use this to kind of sell your music is to offer free downloads of your music within a certain tier. And what you can do is you can post links or you post those MP threes to your Patreon page, but only those who are signed up to a certain tier can access the content of those posts. As you can see here, you can unlock this post by becoming a Patreon at $3 or more per creation. You can also do on a per month basis or a per creation basis. You kind of gotta figure that out and what works for you, what works for your fans, but you can lock certain pieces of content in the posts that are only available to patreons of certain tiers, ok? So you could offer your music, your free downloads. You could say, for example, if you sign up for $5 a month, you get free high quality downloads of all my music that comes out in the future and stuff like that. So figure it out and you can just use this to build the music business that works for you and works for your audience. The website band camp.com also offers a subscription service that's tied to their platform. If you don't know about band camp already, then it's definitely something you wanna look at. Band camp.com is actually an independent music platform where artists can upload their music and they can upload their artwork and they can sell their music directly to their fans just through band camp. The thing with band camp is you don't have to go through a distributor like CD baby or anything like that. They're completely independent and you can have full control over how much your music sells for, whether it's free or whether it's paid. But they also have a subscription service as well. So you could do like $5 a month. For example, for all of your music, again, band camp is just another way of doing it. You could actually combine band camp just as a music platform with Patreon and offer stuff there as well. So again, just another option for you to make money as an artist and offer value to your fans. Thank you for watching this video all about building a fan base and offering more value and in turn building a more profitable music business, hope that was useful and I'll see you in the next video.

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