How to scale your artistic brand in the music industry
Throughout the music industry, many music producers have ambitions to create a financial income from their music career. However, they often have absolutely no idea how to scale the revenue gained from their activities creating music for the entire world to enjoy. Despite their dreams to achieve big things within the music industry, and generate a sustainable income, the biggest problem that many people face is the mindset that they can genuinely be successful. So in this article, we’re going to be discussing how to scale your income as a music producer within EDM.
Pretty much every single music producer loves the idea of being financially free due to the success of their music career. However, when it comes down to the execution, many fall short due to their lack of commitment and willingness to get the work done. Instead of laying down the foundations for what will make them ultimately successful (networking, branding, good music), they are focused on small tasks which have little relevance in the grand scheme of things.
Due to the instability of revenue from Spotify streams & sales from other platforms, it only makes sense to have multiple revenue streams from your music career. After all, it gives a lot more flexibility when it comes to generating marketing budgets, and reinvesting back into your artistic brand. Within your finances, there are 3 types of cash you need to know about when tracking revenue.
Firstly, cash generated is how much you have sold as a producer. This could include album sales, streams, digital sales of courses (amongst many other things). Essentially, it’s the total amount of revenue that you have generated. Following on from this, cash collected is the total amount that you have transacted to your bank account. So when royalty payments come through, that’s a cash collection. Finally, liability is the expense of delivering your product to market. The fundamentals are pretty basic: create more income than what your expenditure is. After all, the last thing you want is to spend loads of money that haven’t even been transacted to your bank account, and for something to go wrong with the payment.
In order to scale your career, you first need to scale yourself so that more work can be done around your artistic brand in the same timeframe. The most common method is by hiring an assistant to save time. Many producers find social media and finding shows extremely time consuming. Therefore by delegating the work to someone else, it allows you to focus solely on your production. This can be done by either hiring a full-time manager (who will take a percentage of earnings), or a virtual assistant that will most likely charge a flat hourly rate. The choice is yours.
If you are generating significant income, then spending money to reduce the number of problems you have can be a great way to scale your music career. For example, if you are living in a remote area, you could move to a more populous city in order to have higher networking advantages. Or whilst on a plane, you could purchase first class tickets to ensure that you can focus comfortably on your music production & career at all hours of the day.
If you are just starting to scale as a music producer, one of the most productive things you can do is to hire a fully fledged content team to create social media posts around your artistic brand. If you have a relatively large audience, there’s a strong probability of people willing to do it for free (or minimum wage). When expanding your artistic team, there are a few positions that you may want to hire. Of course, hiring people with multiple abilities (such as videographer and editor) will save you a lot of money in the long run.
No matter what type of platform you are using, there are 3 types of content that you need to make: Audio, Written, Visual. Having a content writer is pretty much essential to the success of your brand. Each day, they could write a couple of Medium posts & Linkedin articles surrounding your thoughts on what it’s like to be a music producer in the modern industry. Also, hiring a full-time graphic designer will give you the flexibility to create engagement Instagram stories, album artist, posters, and much more on a regular basis. Finally, having a social media manager to grow your brands across each platform will significantly increase the credibility of your artistic brand (if they do a good job). Having great engagement accompanied by high numbers of followers provides social credibility which can be leveraged for big collaborations, remixes, and potentially record deals. Of course, you can create your own music. But having somebody in charge of the promotion (getting streams & distribution) will save you a lot of time as you won’t have to worry about marketing each time you release a track.
When using these tactics correctly, it instantly allows you to build a lot of momentum around your artistic brand. This is because you no longer have to devote time & energy to tasks that are unimportant to your music production, and thus you can continue to do what you love without the worry of learning social media marketing etc. Scaling your artistic brand is not just about getting more views & streams on your music. By leveraging either time or money, you can significantly impact your effect on the music industry, and the success you have within it.