Lessons

Lesson Info

Digital Content & Fulfillment Services

Online purchases online purchases of course we have paypal we also have e commerce solutions like shopify square space they allow you to make as a lee beautiful e commerce sites out of nowhere these start costing some money both for the transaction and also to set them up. So now you're startinto wander into e commerce and they know that ok, setting up a store for an average small business person spending say thirty dollars a month might made sense for them as a music business thirty dollars a month is an awful lot of album sales to get there, you have to get quite a few once you get to the point where you have that though sure, consider it it makes a lot of sense yes are these platforms that you can put on your own web site or they separate web sites there both they allow you it's more for their they're mostly standalone solutions, though they do allow I believe widget based stuff for the commerce stores that you're doing where you can pull it elsewhere, but by the time you're paying ...

for these solutions, they allow you to make very beautiful looking websites image based very easy to navigate e commerce style sites and I know that square space we've been talking to them lately because they've been doing some interesting stuff squarespace into making it mohr musician friendly so it's really easy to share sound assets and other things like that and to put all this stuff together to sell the digital downloads just to do all that kind of stuff. Now everything we talked about yesterday still holds so like now you're asking them to swipe a new credit card where they wouldn't turn they have to download the music and then put it in their music library and then add it it's not something that everybody knows how to dio is why itunes is usually still the first sale, but this is where I look this is an intermediate to advanced type of thing we're telling you how to grow up once you hit that point, you may want more of an e commerce style look and feel and it's, so this is one way to handle the next layer. Paypal is the easiest because you can just stick a little button on your website, start taking payments right away very easy to set up that this is the next level of just keep in mind this is that middle man thing, you've got to check the terms and make sure that it will work for you. How do you handle selling digital content? So this is something that you might end up doing there's lots of reasons to do it, you could sell videos, you could sell your music, you could sell the efs of all of your lyrics there's all kinds of digital assets that you might want to sell digital assets are tremendous things to sell because you don't have an inventory you go through all the trouble you put all this stuff together and actually sending this stuff to fans are very easy very easy to dio you have sites like payloads they can handle this for you it's entirely insistence is there to sell digital assets and to do it and of course all the things we talked about before the shopify square space can do it there's many, many, many other solutions out there but again this is another area where ok we said adams that bits but this is down to the bits but then again there could be some nice package solutions for this the nice thing about this bits type of area is that it costs so little to actually make it making a new product for this might be like that again using what jason said earlier use your creativity think about anything that you make along the lines of making an album you might have extras we have these lyric sheets with scrawls all over the place that actually could be something good for us got all that stuff and we certainly have all the like the very, very raw devils that wouldn't be good for uploading the itunes but if somebody wants to hear like how song of the day develop we've got all these really crude files and things like that, so it works out pretty well shipping merchandise, not something you have to worry about if you do this online mass customization where you're just up loading an image and then letting them handle everything but this is an area of business called fulfillment if you haven't heard of it before and the good news it being a general business thing that you need to solve is that it goes beyond just a music thing it's actually something that all businesses need, they make stuff like little perfume bottles with, you know, like a cent in it or whatever, best so they actually still have to handle taking payments, packing it up, going to the whatever shipping service they use and getting it to the customer. Amazon, of course, does this brilliantly they're very, very, very good at this, they take a nice cut for doing it, but the fact that they're handling all of it and then it's in a store where people are I mean, if there is a search bar for music, we talked about this before it's youtube. If there's a search for for commerce, I think the closest thing you could find his amazon so the fact that you get your stuff in here is a big deal, it can be really cool, but named it is the company that we entered? We talked teo, and I remember talking to him on the phone and they said, oh, we've got shelves back here, we'll ship anything you want, just send us stuff and we'll put it on ourselves and we'll take payments for it, and we'll ship it out to people I mean, this is again, I'm sorry we're in the mechanical part is not as exciting, but in the earlier part, we talked about the creativity make any product she want, you can even make something that's handmade and make a whole bunch of them. Now you gotta handle shipping and fulfillment. This is where we are, so let's, just talk about a little bit of things about learning more sections of a book that might be handy how to make t shirts um, I'm getting images, we have a lot of different resource is actually about many different areas. We go in a little more detail about making a traditional t shirt, which we didn't spend a lot of time here for, but I will say this go to your local t shirt store even before you decide to make t shirts. The reason is, every time we've done that, they're very knowledgeable, they have graphic artists on hand, they know what looks good and what doesn't they can quote you on exactly what each t shirt will cost you because they're very aware you're doing this for business purposes, right? They know that you're trying to get the price to a certain point, so you can charge twenty five dollars or whatever for your shirt so that you could make a certain amount and what you'll be able to do from this, which is, um, a slide here and it's, just something to think about is that when you decide to make a run of traditional shirts, you're gonna have ok, so I'm shelling out like x hundred dollars, and I'm selling it for this much how many shirts don't have to sell the break even? And then every shirt beyond that is pure profit is one way to think about it, but that's just one way shorthand to do this thing you do, you try and do this with the print on demand services, you'll find that the margins so small you'll make that run. You have to sell quite a few shirts until you get to that pure profit thing. You do the t shirt thing with your local traditional place, you know, traditional t shirt manufacturer, you'll be able to get to that point quicker than you think so just just that sequence we talked about at the beginning, where you're trying out a bunch of shirts. It doesn't take you as long as you might think to say yep, this is a good design let's go we'll make a small run of these you'll find out what a small run means by talking to the traditional place and then you'll put it together and your shows will start to become more profitable for you because you're selling more than just a cd or on album of download card usb all the help all the other solutions we talked about yesterday I had a question from miguel angelus on twitter of that very, very exact oh no kidding what did they say? They wanted to know what to do if they want to sell a little bit better quality shirts and you just answered it for the absolute yes which would be the best shipping and fulfillment situation when you're dealing with international fans. Oh excellent question you know when you say international it depends on where in the world they are, so you have to know where you're actually doing touring or business or anything like that. Um you you need to keep your stuff close to where your fans would be now keep in mind that they actually have to pay for the shipping if they're going to buy from the u s to somewhere else, but if your fans air in spain like we had somebody yesterday asking a question from spain well then it's got to be closer to them to make it more worthwhile for them now that said, some of the print on demand solutions places may actually have places and other parts of the world in which case, the only thing they're transferring is a file with the image on it, and then it comes out there, so it makes more sense for I guess my question was more if for some reason you're doing it personally with, like, actual inventory that you have already oh, oh, yeah shipping it okay, yeah, sorry, yeah, would it make more sense to use, like amazon fulfillment or been bit or when it makes more sense for you to do it personally? Do you know a lot of times, it's just like if you shipping off a one off to somebody right in spain for yeah, then you just want to go to your post office and find out what what's their rates do I trust him and then go to like a ups or fedex or whatever like that, right? That and many artists have done that ship and then then they're in the business of shipping their merchandise all over the world. Uh, george, rob comes to mind oh, yeah uh, and so you want to evaluate that at the time, he wouldn't just go oh, I have this one off and now I want amazon to do all this stuff okay? It just depends on how many of your shipping per year and but then your box and then I'll open filling out custom forms and stuff yeah, good question we had him handsome a conversation in the chat rooms about how within this segment what you'll implement from this session about branding and merchandising has a really great responses raise yeah we'd love to hear hannah said my first step is going to be setting up on demand products and selling from my website yes what other good examples here from people doing some sort of out of the box marketing and distribution techniques I love this quote from nuff who says in mexico we got a friend with a taco stand to let us die some sort dyson tortillas and create limited edition tacos and then giving them out to the family watch create he would have been able to figure out how to implement that into is like music stuff yeah, you know, thinking outside the box great free thinking outside the bun way ahead of keith again saying in terms of what he's going to do in terms of a branding and merchandising that he he wants to selling his back backing tracks with q r codes and earlier he had said he feels like he'd be a sellout so he's joking says all become a cell that's good. Yeah, well, you know, that leads to a point if I could just make a quip justcause you're selling something doesn't mean you're sellouts, right? You mean they what do they expect you to live on? Its one point his fans now it's actually has more not to do with what you sell or what you're selling, but I think it comes to your question it comes to how you sell things because I mean there's plenty of artists who do things and you don't think that air sellouts, but they're making so much money it's crazy he and it's it's about how it appears. I mean, this is where that whole image thing becomes really important, and I think keeping yourself a little bit separate from that, I think that's a very good point, it's also completely okay too. So how you pitch it? Um a lot of artists that we've interviewed, uh, they actually say, like on their website where the story is they say, look, you know, money for this actually supports me so I can continue to make this music and it's okay to help connect helped the fan or the customer connect the dots that, like, you're buying something, you'll get something, but on top of that you are supporting me so I can continue to do this artistic stuff you dig that you like, and and that's. I think what you're talking about, as opposed to just hard, sells a bite. But by this coffee mug, you know, so it is the way that you say it is perfectly ok to say that on your website, it's perfectly ok to say that from the stage and say, you know, just, you know, uh, you can support me by buying an album by an extra album for your friends and spread the word, um, you know, by t shirt, something like that. It's. Ok? And I think when fans love music, they're sad. When the music goes away, they want that music, cystic or home.