How a business plan will help you to have a full-time career in the future
With more & more artists looking to convert their music career into a full-time venture, it’s understandable to learn that many are creating business plans as to how about they will achieve financial freedom and long-term success within electronic dance music. Alternatively, there are also a handful of producers wishing to be successful who are oblivious to the reasons why a business plan can help guide their career. Does a business plan guarantee success? What should be included in the plan? And how can you use it as a resource to guide your every move within the electronic dance music industry? That’s what we’re going to be discussing in this article.
Firstly, your business plan as an artist must make financial sense. It’s essential. After all, you are literally risking your time & other resources in order to make your dream come true. If you are unable to generate any substantial revenue from your music career, it doesn’t make sense to go full-time just yet. It’s that simple. By critiquing what can potentially go wrong once you venture into the unknown, you will essentially set yourself up for any event that may occur. For example, you want to make sure that you’re not reliant on just one source of income in case it fades away for whatever reason.
Having a clear vision is also key to ensuring that your artist career is a success. Where do you want to take your career? What are your long-term goals over the next decade? What is your definition of success? Those are all questions that you must ask yourself in order to become more self-aware about your aims & ambitions within the music industry. Once you understand this, it becomes much easier to reverse engineer your goals so that you can set out a clear strategy as to how you will go about achieving them.
Once you have a clear vision for where you want to take your artistic brand, you need to set out your strengths so that you’re able to brainstorm revenue opportunities around them in order to make the venture financially sustainable. Unless you’re getting 10 million streams per release, earning a living solely from Spotify & Apple Music is not a viable solution. Therefore, other ways to generate revenue have to be available to you. For example, you could do production masterclasses, offer mastering services, ghost production, or a variety of other high-profit activities that will help you to be financially stable as a producer within the music industry. But of course, the process does not stop there. How will you attract clients? What is your ideal demographic for new customers? Where are they spending their time? What sets you apart from the thousands of other producers offering exactly the same service? By generating personalized answers to these questions, you will be much more prepared to find ways to make money as an EDM producer.
Once your vision is established and your ways to generate revenue are fully thought-out, it’s time to reverse engineer your objectives so that you can actually become financially free as a music producer and not have to work a job you hate in the middle of the city. Do you want to be the most established mastering engineer for dubstep producers? Offer your services at a low price to build a portfolio of astounding work, and then use that as leverage to charge higher fees to bigger names within the industry. If you’re able to email 500 dubstep producers per month at a 4% conversion rate whilst charging $300 per track, that’s $8,000 in revenue per month just from mastering. Do you want to play as many festivals as possible? Do dozens of gigs at a low price/free, and then use them as leverage to get into the bigger festivals by establishing a great network of contacts as you progress. You simply have to reverse engineer your ambitions over the desired timeframe.
Understanding the market is absolutely essential to becoming financially stable as a music producer. If you are offering a service that hardly anyone wants, your sales are going to be extremely low. Likewise, having a good reputation amongst established figures within the industry is also crucial to earning reasonable rates. What are people looking for right now that is in low supply? Spotify promo? Mastering services? Influencer advertising placements? If you are able to provide what the market wants at a reasonable rate, you are going to be the first person that people go to for a particular service. It’s worth noting that some people will try to rip you off or claim that your product is too expensive. For example, they could say “I only want to pay $40 for mastering” when you are charging $350. Although it may be disheartening, getting rid of the time wasters is a natural part of the business. Focus on who is able to afford your product, and market to those exact people.
Having a well-thought-out business plan that has a clear structure is absolutely crucial to success. As well as guiding you through your career objectives, it can also help you define your strengths & weaknesses so that you’re able to optimize them in the most efficient way possible. With more & more electronic music producers wanting to become financially free from their careers, it is understandable that they want a clear path as to how to achieve that dream. A business plan for your music career is the key to success, financial freedom, and more prosperous career in EDM.