Unsprung Media

REASON 3
SPINS ARE MORE VALUABLE

If you are an unsprung artist (unsigned, unknown, undiscovered, emerging) and your wondering how to make money from music, you should not plan your future around selling CDs or digital downloads. In fact, holding out for your portion of a $.99 cent download may be hurting your career. There are 4,000,000 bands/solo artists in the English-speaking world and many will come to the conclusion that exposure is more valuable than download revenue.

If you are one of these enlightened artists, then you are on the right track. Not only are you going to climb the mountain faster than those waiting for digital download revenue, you are one of the primary reasons why paid downloads will cease to exist as a business.

Forgetting CD sales all together, let’s look at costs and the paid download numbers. In my world, it costs about $3,000 dollars to make a radio-ready song in a quality studio with a reputable producer. So, let’s say for sake of discussion, that it costs around $50,000 to make the album of your dreams, and it costs another $50,000 to fund the promotion budget of your daydreams.

In the hypothetical example above, when the songs start selling, 30% goes to the download platform and then 100% of every dollar goes to whoever backed you until you have recouped the $100,000 dollars spent on your album and promotion. Under this scenario, you will need to sell about 142,000 digital singles before you earn a portion of a single dollar.

Now, just doing simple napkin math, if the total paid download market hits $2 billion in annual revenue, and it may someday, and if this revenue were theoretically divided evenly between the top 20,000 artists (0.5% out of 4 million artists), each artist would receive $70,000 each after the download platform takes 30%. Realistically, because revenue is not divided evenly, you will probably need to be one of the top 2,000 artists in the English-speaking world just to break even on a $100,000 investment – if the only product you sold were digital music singles.

Because nobody completely appeals to 100% of the population, your music needs to be in 200,000 to 300,000 iPods now, to convince and convert 5,000 fans (2 to 2.5% conversion rate) to pay to attend your show, to buy a shirt, buy a hat and/or visit your website numerous times over the next year.

I believe you should put your music on every site/system, legal and not, in the world. You should turn on the download option and deploy download buttons everywhere you can. You need spins to get to the point where you can sell shit that has a higher margin than .69 cents. The CD is dead, digital music is here to stay, illegal file sharing will live on, and the sun will shine tomorrow. Go for exposure and get to a point where you can make money; if you hold out for digital music download revenue, that business may not be around in three years.