How To Make More Music, More Money & More Fan Impact
In this video, I’ll reveal…
The 3 letters that can help you make more music - that makes more of an impact on your fans - and make you more money from your music (and saves you time and money in the process!)
Why the traditional album cycle will lose you fans
How to avoid the humiliation of a deafening silence when you drop your next album
How to overcome your crippling perfectionism and make more music
Why done is better than perfect
Why you should be a mother bird to your songs
Why imperfection creates a stronger connection with your fans
Are you releasing enough music? How regularly are you releasing music? Are you just putting out an album every 2 or 3 years? Why is it even important? Your fans don't want to wait 2 or 3 years to hear from you in between albums. They expect music from you more regularly. We live in an age of instant gratification where we consume music and entertainment at a much faster pace than we used to. So if you're not putting new content in front of your fans regularly, you risk losing their attention and their engagement. There is plenty of other music and other artists that they can listen to. They're going to get distracted, and they'll just move on and forget about you, they'll stop buying your albums and stop coming to your gigs. When you've worked so hard to get their attention in the first place, this is the last thing you want. It undermines all of that hard work you've done.
There's an idea that can help you make more music, and make music that makes more of an impact on your fans, save you time and massive amounts of money, and ultimately make you more money from your music.
It's an approach to product development that comes from the entrepreneurial world called MVP or minimum viable product. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development.
You can think of MVP as a form of market research. You're putting out an early version of the product, a prototype, to see how people respond to it before you invest massive amounts of time or money to create the final version of the product. There's two advantages to using this strategy. The first is that results from an MVP test will tell you if you should even bother to build the product to begin with. This way you avoid wasting time and money building products that customers aren't going to buy. The second is that it focuses on continual product iteration and refinement based on customer feedback. So you're continually improving your product.
What do we typically do as artists? We write a bunch of songs, go into the studio for months and spend 5, 10, 15, 20 grand to record an EP or an album. Then we drop the album and... no one buys it. And then we feel bitter that no one has bought it and we're bummed that we've spent all this money and the last year of our lives and all we've got to show for it is a box full of CDs that's collecting dust under our bed.
Why are we so surprised at that no one buys our albums or EPs? We haven't done any market research to see if anyone actually wants it in the first place. The MVP approach would be to find out if the market wants the CD before we spend heaps of time or money to record it.
You might object to this because it seems like you're selling out or running your music career by committee and you're trying to please everyone. You're not trying to please everyone; you're trying to delight your true fans. These are people who are already on board with your creative vision to a large extent, so you shouldn't have to do anything that's radically different from that vision. In a way, I think it actually brings you into closer alignment with the essence of your vision.
It's one thing to make art for yourself, as an act of creative expression – that's fine. But most of us want our music to resonate with people and we want to make a career from our music. If you're trying to make something that your true fans love and resonate with, why not consult them on what they want? You're collaborating with your fans and they're going to be much more invested in your music. Just think for a minute how awesome it would be if your favourite artist asked you for your input into their music. We've all had that experience of loving an artist and then at some point they release an album that doesn't gel for us. It doesn't feel aligned with who we think that artist is, and they lose us. From that point onward, we probably don't listen to their new music or buy any more of their albums.
Don't expect that your fans are going to automatically love everything you do just because you made it. But they will be open to listening to it and giving it a chance. The world doesn't owe you something just because you wrote a song or recorded an album. Relieve yourself of that sense of entitlement that just because you wrote a song, people should automatically love it. You need to test.
A lot of us identify as perfectionists. I do. I've struggled with that my entire life. But perfectionism is only partly about wanting to do a good job and create something amazing that we can be proud of. Perfectionism is mostly about wanting to avoid criticism and negative judgement from others. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. When we experience rejection, we conflate that with failure. But how can you fail at something that you have no control over? We take that feeling of rejection, that so-called failure, and think it means something deeper about us, we globalise it to our whole identity and we think that we're inferior or inadequate. And then we give up ever wanting to try again. But ultimately, it's not failure, it's feedback.
Let go of the need for something to be perfect before you put it out in the world. Done is better than perfect. When you're working on a song there's a threshold of diminishing returns. If you keep working beyond that threshold, it's going to yield diminishing marginal returns relative to the amount of time you're putting in, and no-one is going to notice or care except you because of your obsessive desire to make something perfect.
I'm giving you permission to be messy. When you put your music out into the world and treat it as a science experiment, you're going to get feedback. And you can take that feedback and tweak and refine and then craft something truly amazing that touches and inspires and transforms your fans. That's going to get your music to make more of an impact than obsessing about minutiae will.
So how can you use this idea of MVP? You could use it when you write a new song. Rather than waiting until you've recorded a fully produced version of it and spent lots of time and money, just release a demo version of it on Facebook or Youtube or Patreon with you singing and accompanying yourself on guitar or piano, or if you're in a band do a band demo. So you'd want to have the structural elements of the song there; melody, chords, lyrics. Maybe you've got the hook, maybe you don't. You probably won't have the arrangement worked out perfectly. And it doesn't have to be the most pristine audio quality. It might just be recorded in your voice recorder on your smart phone. You're just trying to provide the minimum amount of information to give people an idea of what you're trying to do. And then encourage them to give you honest feedback.
So if you do this with 10 or 20 or 30 songs, you'll see which ones your fans are responding to most. And then you might pick those songs that are winners to go and record for your album or EP. Because now you've got proof of concept, you've got some feedback from the market, you can justify going and spending some time and money to produce a fully-realised version of those songs. Another way is you can take their feedback on board and go and reiterate and then present the 2nd version of the song to them and see what they say to that. If you get more positive feedback than the first time, great. Move ahead with that song. If you don't get any more favourable feedback, then it's probably not worth continuing to reiterate and refine it. So you'd be better off moving on and writing another song.
As musicians we tend to treat our songs like our children. We're very protective of them, and we're very attached to all of them and we don't want to abandon any of them. Don't be so attached to them. Instead, treat your songs like a mother bird treats her chicks. She'll feed them and nourish them for a short time and then she'll push them out of the nest. Some of them fly, and some of them plummet to their doom. Do that with your songs. Push them out of the nest as soon as possible to see which ones fly and which ones are turkeys.
The other thing you'll start to notice is patterns in terms of what your fans respond to in your songs. It could be something that you're doing with your voice. It could be particular themes or subject matter in the lyrics. It could be certain kinds of chord progressions. It could be a mood or a vibe. It might be a particular instrument or tone, maybe you're using a certain guitar effect. This is really valuable feedback, because now you've got an insight into particular elements that resonate with your fans. The world is giving you a message. It's saying “This is what we want from you. Give us more of this!” It might be different than what you had envisioned. That's OK.
That feedback gives you a template that you can use to craft your music going forward. This can help define and shape your identity and sound as an artist. In the process, you're going to give your fans more of what they love about your music. You're creating more value for your fans, and as a result they're going to become loyal and support you financially by buying your albums, coming to your gigs, contributing to your crowdfunding campaigns, and becoming your patrons and giving you money every month.
The other advantage to this MVP model is, because they're seeing works in progress, you're giving your fans a peak behind the scenes. And they'll really appreciate that, especially if they're not musicians and they're outsiders to this world we inhabit as creatives. People find what we do as artists fascinating. Invite them in and give them a peak into your creative process. That lifts the veil of mystique around your art, but that's OK. The age of the enigmatic rock star shrouded in mystique and mythology is dead and gone. Your fans want connection first and foremost. They want to know you're a real human, not some god-like entity. They'll respond much more to vulnerability than to impenetrability. It makes you more relatable.