Music Think Tank - MTT Open

As an artist I have made money and lost money on album releases. The difference in me profiting and losing money wasn’t in relation to my buzz, pr or quality of music, it was all a matter of philosophy. As artists many times we adopt some heavily flawed strategies that make no sense to anyone in any other field. One of the WORST ones is to give everything away to get your name out. Studios aren’t giving away sessions for free, engineers aren’t giving out mixes for free and CD manufacturers aren’t pressing up any product for free. Now giving away music for free can be a viable strategy if there is a plan in place and you know the reason behind why your doing this. But just to keep spending money, recording music and have no plan other then a hope that people see it and you build a name is border line insanity.

If your an independent artist financing the production of your work, you are a small business owner. That’s how you have to think, I know that we all have our dream and passions but we also have financial responsibilties. Follow your heart but think with your head. I am going to explain a simple way for you to create a successful and profitable release. Before we get into it, we need to start by redefining success. Success is the progressive realization of a goal, it’s not getting “on”, its progression. If 10 people listened to your last song on Sound Cloud and 12 listened to your new one this week that is a successful release. Everyone’s success is different but the only one you need to be concerned about is yours.

How To Record, Promote and Profit From an Album Release

Come up with an esimate of how many “True Fans” that you have. These are people that you know without a doubt will support your music and purchase your album
Using the amount of True Fans you have, combined with family members, friends, associates, organization members , people in your neighborhood etc. come with a Worst Case Scenario Sales Projection this means that if your album tanked, recieved no attention from any new fans, media or anything like that how many could you sell just from True Fans and associates.
Multiply the Sales Projections times your price you are going to charge for your album.
Give yourself 50% of this number as your recording budget, use remainder of funds for art work and photos. Try not to spend over 75% of this budget

Example

Say Rapper A knows that worst case scenario he can sell 200 copies of his album and 40 shirts to his fans and family members etc.
He projects $1,400 (200*7) in worst case sales projections and $240 ($6 profit on shirts) in T Shirt Profit giving him a total of $1640
He gives himself an $800 budget to record album, spends $200 on digital distribution and artwork
Promotes extra hard to true fans to purchase album on I tunes on relase date
Album is released and 95 percent of his true fans purchase during the first 30 days and he’s already $500 in the profit and no longer is recouping upfront cost. His sales are all profit now

I know this isn’t the glamour plan, but this allows you to take the first step towards monetizing your music.