How To Make Money With Your Music Website

Hey, what's up gigging pros! It's Jared Judge. Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Okay, I want to answer a question that I've been getting, that I feel would be helpful to everybody, which is how to make money from your musician website. So if you're listening to this podcast, I have to assume you are a gigging musician. That's the title of the podcast. And I also have to assume that at some point, you've taken a stab at building the website. In fact, I think they're going to do some podcasts about building a website optimized for bookings, at some point in the future. But if you've got a website, you probably have had the thought of how do I make money off of my musician, website? Anyone else have that question? Well, there are many ways. And first off, I want you to imagine what does that look like when you're making money off of your music website? How much are you making? What does that mean for you? Does that mean for that you can pay off some of your student loans? Does that mean that you could buy some new gear to a new instrument that you've been holding off on that purchase? Does it mean that you can comfortably afford rent? Does it mean that you could upgrade to a bigger house. So there are many ways to make money off of your website. But they all have very common things about the way that you could do this. And I can speak about this, because my music website is making me a lot of money. It's also making a lot of money for the musicians that play for me, hold on one sec. Okay, so my favorite way of making money from your music website, is actually by offering wealth, let's, let's back up one sec, the way to make money in anything is to provide value to somebody that is equal, or more valuable than the money that they will pay for it. So for example, if you are, say, you're a doctor, and you, I don't know, let's say that you're a sports medicine person, and Michael Jordan just gets injured. And he could no longer play basketball back in, you know, 1987, or whatever. And he comes to you saying, Hey, doctor, I've got this injury, and my foot helped me fix it. And you're the doctor, you charge Michael Jordan $10,000. For treatment. So $10,000 might seem like a lot for some people might not seem like a lot for others, to Michael Jordan, is having his body fixed, and able to play basketball worth at least $10,000. Well, if you've ever watched the Netflix series, The Last Dance, which is about Michael Jordan, you will know that he makes or at the time when he was playing basketball, made, you know, millions, 10s of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars off of basketball. So $10,000, the value of what the doctor provided to him is disproportionate to the amount that he charged, Michael. So that's how it works. If you provide a service that is disproportionately valuable to the person who's paying for it, and you charge them a fraction of what it's actually worth. That's easy, easy sale. I talked about this really early in the podcast, the concept of selling $1 Bill and just charging a dime, I'll give you this dollar bill. All they ask is you pay me 10 cents. Is that worth it to you? And the logical answer is yes, I'm gaining 90 cents, if I buy this from you. So we have to think about what you sell. And how can you make that disproportionately valuable compared to what you're charging. So my favorite way of making money from a musician website, is by offering my services as a live musician to perform live at their private events. And this is disproportionately valuable because the atmosphere, the ambience, the memories that I helped create a way worth, you know, multiples of what I'm charging. And so to make this happen, you have to gear your website to get the people who are interested in booking live music for one of those events. And then you have to have a sales process. Meaning how do you email them? How do you talk to them on the phone or on Zoom? To get them to sign a contract and pay your deposit and that is through your website? At least the website plays a significant role in that process. So that's my favorite way. There are many other ways. Others that I've seen work is you can actually sell recordings of your music on your website, going around Spotify and streaming services. But you have to put it on your website, you also in this case, since if it's original music, you have to have people who are interested in your original music. So that, you know, you could put your music on your website, put$1 sign on it, and then have some sort of cart checkout system, like WooCommerce, or, you know, even Bandzoogle has that, although I don't recommend Bandzoogle sorry, Bandzoogle. And I'm not really covering that on this podcast, I'm just And then you send your fans and followers to your website to If you're listening to this, even if you put that on your covering ways you can make money on the music website. Perhaps in website, you're probably not going to make any money unless you already have done the hard work of attracting fans and followers. the future, we could talk about that. check out your music and make a purchase. So that's kind of the caveat of putting your your music on there's, you have to have an audience already built in. Other ways you can make money on the music website is by selling merch, similar to putting your music up for sale. You know, put it on your website, use one of those Cart Checkout systems and put some nice, really good pictures of the merch. People don't want, you know, phone pictures of merch they want professionally done pictures. And oftentimes, when you get custom shirts done, you can get a really high quality mock up of them. I've used a couple online services to do that. And the mock ups are amazing. So you could put that on your website. But again, that also requires fans and followers who would care enough about you and your band, and the stuff you're putting on your merch to actually buy it. So that's a big old asterisk must have fans and followers. Alright, other ways to make money off of your music website is by selling a fan club subscription. This is a very popular model today with you know, sites like Patreon, and even twitch, if you live stream, you can offer. Again, your fans and followers. A monthly subscription, five bucks a month gets you the following perks and then you decide what perks you give to people. And that model works great because every month, if they're on a subscription, then it gets auto build. And that's essentially income you can rely on every single month. And one of my biggest recommendations to that is having three tiers of your subscription, a low, medium and high. Because you never know what kind of fans and followers you'll attract and be able to monetize at higher levels, some of them want to get really close to you. Not in a creepy way. But in a I want to consume as much of your music and learn as much about you as possible, because I'm that big of a fan. So that's what your highest tier fans are saying. And they're saying that with their credit cards, which is pretty awesome. I also again recommend, you know, don't rely on Patreon, or these other platforms, figure out how to do this on your own website platform. Because Patreon and other services charge a very high fee, so that you're not taking home 100% of your income. If you could figure it out how to do this on your own, you keep all of your income. So I've helped several musicians that have subscription services, one of them being Tracy Silverman, electric violinist. And then this is kind of a subset of that is that you can also offer information. This is one of the biggest, untapped monetization opportunities for musicians is information products. You know, it's essentially like creating courses based on what you know what your expertise is, and then charging people for those courses. So this is probably one of my favorite ways to monetize aside from live performances. Because I believe that all musicians have expertise in different areas. For example, if you're a jazz piano player, like my buddy Anthony, who I'm trying to get to put up a subscription service, he is a fantastic jazz pianist, very much rooted in music theory. And his playing is so emotional, that it's such a unique style, that if he could teach others and people want to learn this, if he could turn it into a course, and then charge people either a flat fee for the course or a subscription for continued access to the course and coaching. That is how you monetize the musician website by offering something valuable Remember this has to be this proportionately valuable compared to the price that you're charging. And so information is a fantastic way especially because it gives you something that not many of these other ways, give you in terms of leverage. Like when you create a course, and especially a digital course, you're not teaching the person physically using your body, your voice, your words, every single time, you've created a digital version of you, a clone of you, that can teach this, even when you're sleeping, right, it's like creating a YouTube video, it lives on YouTube, no matter if you're sleeping, or eating, or in the shower, people can still watch the video. The same is true for courses, and other information type products like ebooks, and, etc. Because you're, you're basically able to make money while you're sleeping, which is pretty awesome. And if you combine that with the subscription model, then you make consistent money every single month, even if you're sleeping, but you do have to follow through your course has to be good, your coaching has to be very good. And if you do that people will stay and continue to pay. So that is another way to monetize your musician website. Another way, and this might be the final way, just because we're running out of time on this podcast, is by selling other people's products. Right? If you're a musician, and if you've got fans and followers, you've got a list of emails. And then basically, you've got a list of potential customers. But if you don't have your own products, like say you never made a course or you don't sell music, you don't have merch. Well, that list of customers, they still could be in the market for products that other people self. Trying to think of a good example of this, actually, I was just working with one of my Fulltime Music Academy members, Theo, he has been very successful at generating a nice list of emails, and he adds about five to 10 people to his email list every single day. And he does sell live music services. But in addition, the people he's adding to his list are all future newlyweds. You know, he's marketing to the wedding market, because he wants to sell his live music services to weddings. But you know, this list of emails, they are in a very specific place in their life right now they're about to get married, which they knew weddings, and future marriages, all have very specific needs, that other people's products solve. For example, if they're getting married, the first thing they need is a venue. So what if he took his email list, many of whom are still in such early stages of planning their wedding. And he emailed them featuring a venue. And, you know, if he works out a deal with the venue that if they book, he gets 10%, of the dollar amount that they spend on the venue, then he has essentially become what's called an affiliate for that venue. The same could be true for you know, if he wants to send them to a bridal shop. And if they buy a dress, he gets 10% He becomes an affiliate for the bridal shop. And so this doesn't just work in the wedding market. This could be for anything, like if you are a jazz piano player, and you have a list of interested jazz musicians. You could work up a partnership with I don't know like a music store or Sweetwater and become an affiliate for gear. So if one of those jazz musicians needs a new PA system, they buy it from Sweetwater spend a couple grand and you're an affiliate with them. Sweetwater gives you 10%, that's an extra 100 bucks in your pocket 200 bucks if it was two grand. And all you had to do was make the recommendation. So those are several ways to monetize your musician website. I hope you found them interesting. I hope that it opened up your eyes to the possibilities. All of these have been tried by musicians and even myself at some point. And they all work. I will make the caveat that none of them are easy money. There's no such thing as easy money in this world. If you want some money, you got to work for it. You're not just entitled to money because you're a musician. And I think you know that by now because you are one of my gigging musicians, one of my listeners, and that is the way this game works. So if you found this valuable, let me know. And if you are interested in selling your live performing services, on your website, I will show you exactly how that is definitely my area of expertise. In addition to creating courses and subscriptions, I can help you out with that too. And I do help some of my musicians out with that too. But if you're interested in learning how I'd love to show you how. But it all starts with YouTube taking some action. It all starts with you getting a free copy of The Gig Vault. The Gig Vault is the entry point into the world of selling your live performing services, both through your website and offline AMS with a treasure trove of over 24,665 high end venue and event planner contacts, plus my course. You see what I did there. Its Inception as selling my course to you. But it's great. It helps you with all the stuff that I'm doing. Musicians once they get it, a majority of them stick around for years because they get so much value out of it. We have members who've been with me since the beginning. It's awesome. So if you want a piece of that, and you want to try it out, go to OpenTheGigVault.com and give it a shot and then we'll help you personally. Sound good. Very cool. Well, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "Your music will not market itself!".