Music Think Tank

Perhaps with some tweaking, here’s what current wisdom tells you:

Make music.
Give your music away; it’s your best advertisement.
Organize into a business entity.
Go on tour.
Build an audience.
Sell stuff and a bit of music when you can.
Go on tour again.
Sell even more stuff.
And when you stop touring, your revenue stream will slow to a crawl.

As new interactive digital products enter the marketplace (and they are), your digital future will look something like this:

Make music
Give your music away; it’s your best advertisement.
Sell high-margin interactive digital products to fans.
Go on tour if you want; it won’t be necessary to making a living.
The reoccurring revenue never has to stop.

Make money from home…
I’m reminding everyone of this now because some of you are making serious decisions based upon the current wisdom outlined above. New interactive digital products will enable you to generate reoccurring revenue from your bedroom, provided that fans learn about you through your songs. Timeline: 2012 and beyond.

Illegal sharing and your digital future…
Aside from the wildest interactive capabilities that you can imagine, the question that’s on everyone’s mind is: Will illegal sharing crush these products also? The answer is no. The products that will come into the marketplace will capture the personalized (and for example: weighted, scored and ranked over time) digital relationship that you have with each of your fans. Fans will not share (their login credentials to) these highly personalized products.

Preparing for this future…
Artists have been giving away everything from baby pictures, to blog posts, to bedroom videos to sell music. Flip it all around and contemplate a day where ‘everything’ is part of your interactive package, whilst your songs are simply your banner ads. Hold things back today, to include in your digital tomorrow.

about Bruce Warila