My Life As A Musicpreneur: 3 Questions Answered. (3/3)

BBy Tommy Darker. The essay was originally published in The Musicpreneur on Medium. Lisa Young In, a talented and ambitious artist promoter from Germany, asked me a few things about the Musicpreneur.

I did my best to answer and now I’m sharing the answers with you. This is part 3/3.

What are the most profitable revenue streams for artists today?

The most profitable revenue streams are the most untapped ones: music experiences (a product of premiumization).

In real numbers, the most profitable revenue streams of the music industry are:

1. Live performances
2. Licensing
3. Selling recorded music

These all can be useful for an artist once they’ve scaled up their reach and have a say in the industry. Can an acoustic guitar player in bars make money from live performances or an unknown soundtrack composer get thousands to have his/her music licensed? No.

Some micro-revenues that serve better smaller artists are:

1. Monetization via third-party content sites (YouTube for instance)
2. Crowdfunding (where the core fanbase pledges to help you get your goals done)
3. Having someone angel-invest on your work (people that will invest on intellectual property, such as music work).

However, as I mentioned in the beginning, the most untapped and powerful revenue stream is the music brand itself.

Every artistic entity is a brand — they have identity, character and energy around them.

They also have a product (music) and a following. Via the procedure of premiumization, this music brand can become a source of various experiences, maybe not even music-related ones, that don’t have a conventional and fixed price. It all comes down to the value the audience perceives for them. The roof is the sky.

David Bowie is a music brand. We all know him.

What kind of challenges, problems and risks does the musician still face or what are new ones that developed in the last years?

One by one:

Risk — There’s no risk in my opinion. On the contrary, music is something you can start for fun and then develop into a sustaining career. There’s zero entry cost, as I’ve mentioned before, anyone can enter the game.

Challenges — The challenge is for the artist to maintain the purity of the vision and not conform in the standard practices that millions of other artists use. It’s easy to start mimicking — 95% of the world does. Especially today, you can easily see what other people are doing (via social media) and the general feeling of transparency is in the air. Because of that, people’s opinions get easily influenced and change direction. Being opinionated and dogmatic is not the way to go, but maintaining your artistic integrity and vision is something that I’d consider to be the biggest challenge.

Problems — There are so many artists out there. The only problem is to get attention. Once you have the attention, it’s easy to experiment and find the right business model that will make you money. But standing out and breaking the clutter is a major issue — and curse of the digital era. This is why it’s priceless to develop “your own thing” that will steadily gain traction and attention by people that trust you.

A music brand is more important than ever. Because a brand gets and maintains attention more easily.

How do you think the musicpreneur will develop in the future? What might be his tasks, roles and requirements by then?

The future belongs to educated musicians who understand the media world and strive to make a dent in the landscape and change it.

This is what the polypragmon artist should be — going for the vision and the experience, not some dry notes on a paper. Music — and art consequently — revolve around emotions.

Tommy Darker

So do other forms of art, from video to origami making: they create conversations, they change the day of a person, they make you look at things from a different perspective. It’s emotions, not logic.

The lines between art and business are blurring. In order for a musician to make proper decisions on how to evolve their creations and manage their business, they need bodies of knowledge outside the music business. Education is the key. The Musicpreneur is yet to come, but in the near future we’ll see that phenomenon burst, once the first successful examples start showing up and becoming mainstream. Mainstream stories always affect people’s perception on a newly-bred subject, such as musicpreneurship.

For more information on the musicpreneur, you can refer to my related essay on the subject: http://www.tommydarker.com/musicpreneur.

# # #

Download Tommy’s latest whitepaper, “Smart Decisions – What Artists Need To Know”.

# # #

I’m Tommy Darker, the writing alter ego of an imaginative independent musician. I started “Think Beyond The Band” because I feel proud of what I’ve accomplished so far and I like helping other fellow musicians that struggle with the same problems.

I love starting conversations. If you share the same mindset, find me on Facebook and Twitter and let’s talk!