Sep 16
Musicians are bad business people. A quick lesson in making money.
Unfortunately, musicians aren't usually good business people. Actually, most "business people" aren't good business people, but that's for another day.
It is 2011 and musicians STILL insist on only selling CDs at live shows. Guess what? I haven't had a CD player in 3-4 years. Guess what else? A lot of other people don't buy CDs either. Guess what else? You'll make more money selling a download card since the cost is near nil. Guess what else? It's very easy to implement. Guess what else? You can even include audio/video/multimedia bonuses with the download! Value add! Bam!
If I was the manager for a touring band (that attracted at least 100 fans per show) they would actually make money. No doubt about it. It's an industry I've had a love/hate relationship with my whole life and one I've mostly stayed away from (besides having a bunch of friends in touring bands). Dealing with dinosaurs isn't my idea of a good time.
This is just the start of how my bands would make more money:
1) They'd use https://squareup.com/ to accept credit cards. Guarantee that would boost merch sales by a significant amount. CDBaby has given bands the option of accepting credit cards for 10 years. I've never seen small bands utilize this.
2) They'd sell download cards and USB drives in addition to CDs and vinyl. Download cards: cdbaby.com has that option. But it's easy enough to implement with e-junkie.com. Here's how:
- Make the sale (either cash or through the Square credit card processing).
- Ask for e-mail address.
- Login to e-junkie and send a free secure download through e-junkie. You can send 200 per day I believe. (they might not have a limit anymore, but I think this was the case before)
Alternately, you can have a programmer set up a download system for a few hundred bucks. I'd go with the $5/month e-junkie account until you grow past it.
USB drives: go to alibaba and you can buy hundreds/thousands of USB drives for very cheap. You can probably even have them set up with the content pre-loaded for just a few cents more. After shipping and everything I'd guess ~$2 per USB.
3) I wouldn't let anybody leave a show without getting something. A free live download of a few songs in exchange for e-mail address, for example. The e-mail list is important no matter what business you're in. And not everybody at live shows has money to spend. (Although accepting credit cards will help diminish this barrier.)
4) If the band was playing decent sized venues with good sound boards I'd sell the live recordings of *that show* for $5. "Buy tonight's show for $5 at our merch table. We'll e-mail you the download within 48 hours." I'd have bought so many live shows over the years if this was an option. $5 is a no brainer for something like this. A band that fills 1,000 seat venues would probably sell 100 of these per show. $500 buys a lot of gas/food/booze/hotels. And a band that fills 100 capacity venues (any decent touring band) should sell at least 10. $50 for a small band is a lot. (The issue here is that if you're playing to 100 people you might not be playing a venue with a good sound board.)
Note: A huge band (the Stones, Gaga, Britney, Taylor Swift, Metallica, anybody who plays stadiums) would be able to sell the live recordings for $10-$20 and add an easy $100k - $1mil to their day's gross revenues. No doubt about it.
There is so much that can be done. There is no reason that a *good* (operative word; people must like you and you must have fans) touring band isn't making money.
