A Primer on Music Sales for the Independent Music Artist or New Music Label

Nov. 2, 2014 - PRLog -- So you want to be a musician and write and sell music.  You need to create your first album.  Your songs are products.  They have to be manufactured, packaged and sold to the public.  Or you have to write the song and the music associated with it.  Copyright your work and register your work with industry associations.  If you want to be a music artist who lives off the sales of your music, you will have to start your own business, a sole proprietorship.  You need to know all the costs associated with the creation of a well recorded song.  Once the song is created, copyrighted and protected, this is your first product. Repeat this process until you have recorded at least 7 songs.  This is your first album.  The costs associated with the creation of an album can be high, unless you begin to learn and do a lot of the recording and audio engineering work yourself.  You can reduce the costs of recording your first album by purchasing the proper audio equipment and learning some basic recording skills on your own.  You can also rent or pay professionals for this effort, but the price will reach $10,000 or more, so you will want to keep receipts and use these as deductibles on your taxes.

Now that you have spent the resources to create your first album, you will have to market it to the audiences you believe will enjoy your songs the most.  You can manufacture your first CDs or Mp3s on any desktop with free software tools and desktop printing.  Free concerts are a great way to determine your perfect customers.  Give free concerts in various communities and sell your products.  You will start to see patterns in the type of people drawn to your music. Take note of these types of people and communicate with them.  Anyone who buys your music should receive regular communications from you.  In these communications you should learn about their tastes, what they like to read, movie choices, clothing, & etc.  Learn your audience, use creative ways to get them to share this information.  This information will teach you where to advertise to reach similar people.  A small audience is a perfect learning forum for your music.  Learn your audiences.

Through free concerts and communicating with your audiences, you are now familiar with your customers.  When you create music for them, always start with your established audiences and advertise to similar types of people with hopes of gaining new audience members.  Hold small concerts and give your current fans preferential seating or pricing.  Introduce new songs and delight your audiences.  Sell your songs online.  There are many online publishing techniques that you can use to better serve your small audiences.  Now that you have an audience and online publishing, you no longer need to develop a whole album.  Now you release a new song once every 3 months to your established audience and run an advertising campaign to find new audience members.

To find new audience members, you will need to find the places that they gather.  Your audience will tell you, if you ask them in creative ways.  However approaching a stranger and trying to sell them your music is RUDE.  You need a friend to introduce you.  TV shows and movies are good friends to new products, because they create places where audiences come together and introduces them to new things.  TV shows and movies build audiences of a certain character.  So advertising with them is finding shows and movies with audiences who are similar to your own.  You would sponsor a TV show and insert an advertisement for your new songs in its episodes.  So that every time this audience sees the show, they see you.  Because this audience is so similar to your own established audience, the likelihood that you will see new purchases and audience members is very high.

You support this TV show and make it free for audience members to enjoy.  This show promotes itself as free to enjoy and because it has episodes it continues to build more viewers.  Consistently supporting a quality episodic show, with an audience that is very similar to your own, will ensure that you will develop a steady stream of new audience members.  As the show builds audience, so will you.  This type of advertising used to be very expensive, but streaming video online has provided a way to gain access to TV programming and support it for reasonable prices.

The Christian Library on Demand has access to 25,000 hours of Christian and family friendly content, TV shows and movies which reflect the values of our users.  We are the choice for Christian entertainment available worldwide. Our app sponsors can build a target audience which fits their brand audiences at affordable rates for independent artists.  Music labels with many artists can sponsor specific programming and offer full length shows for free.  We use these free episodes to build audiences to suit, for our program sponsors.

Contact Terrence A. Lovett or Darcey Hutchinson for details

Terrence_Lovett@Christianlibraryondemand.com

Darcey_Hutchinson@Christianlibraryondemand.com

720-275-5387