Get to the MONEY!!! Winning Music Marketing tips! | No Standing Zone Ep.1

Serka, how are you?

I'm doing so good. It's great to see you, Wendy.

You are one of my favorite people, not just in the music industry, but in the world. I, first of all, I have to give you your props because I have learned so much from you and you don't even know that.

No, I didn't know.

Yeah. Yeah.

Likewise. Likewise.

I love Indiepreneur and we're going to get into like all that you do because that's really what I want to talk about. But I just really want to thank you because we're very like-minded. We really want to just help people and we want to help artists make money with their music. And there's not a lot of us out here that are doing that, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of, uh, it sucks because there's not a whole lot of money to go around in this industry in the first place. And then, so it's like, you know, if you look at like business advice, like there's a lot of charlatans, but it's fine because it's huge. But in the music industry, like, any additional charlatan is robbing from a pretty small pie.

And I gotta tell you, like, I'm not glad that there's charlatans, but that's why I do what I do. Like, I would never have started making videos on YouTube, which was my first intro to helping artists. I would have never started doing that if I didn't see false information on the internet. And there was like so much of it that I said, oh, hell no. And I started making videos and I started the Cheat Code podcast, now this one. So, you know, thank God for the charlatans because that's what brought me out to— and I give it away for free so they can't compete.

Is that meme where the wife is like, come to bed, honey, and he's like, I can't, people are wrong on the internet?

That's me.

Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely. So, Serkan, can you talk about, um, who you are and how you got started?

Yeah, I'm a big loser.

No, no, that is so not true.

I'm just kidding. Um, I'm, uh, so I run a company called Indrepreneur, and we, we basically teach digital marketing to indie artists in a basic sense. Um, we have 3 tiers of the business. So we have education, we have, which is done, you know, do-it-yourself. We have done with you where we coach, you know, those who already have a bit of knowledge but they want to fine-tune it to their situation. And then we have done for you where really our— the main goal with our agency and what we do is to close an arbitrage. The arbitrage is, you know, people are managers of artists who have millions of fans, don't know that they can make money on e-commerce, right? They don't believe that their fans will buy merch like year round, every day.

Yes, they will. And they'll do it right from the beginning. We set up with our clients immediately.

Yeah, so I recently talked to a manager of an artist. If I said their name, everyone watching this knows who they are. Everybody. And she was like, I don't, I don't know if our fans would be interested in merch. And I was like, we would love to prove you wrong.

Yeah, let us prove you wrong.

Exactly. Yeah. So like sometimes the agency takes on people who have ascended through, you know, do it yourself, done with you, and now they want it done for them.

Yeah. Because they need a team.

I think, yeah. But I think the bigger opportunity or the easier fit for us as an agency is to go to established artists and tell them, hey, e-commerce is a thing, let's get it set up for you and make it sing. So, and then I got started Um, I've been an artist since I was 12, and I've always been interested in—

5 years now?

I'm actually 34 as of, uh, as of last month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do I not look—

in your early 20s?

Oh, that rocks.

Yeah, that's awesome. Good genes, good genes.

I try to keep it youthful. Yeah, uh, but yeah, so I've always been into the music industry, and then in college I started learning about it. I read books like Hitman and Appetite for Self-Destruction. And I've always been a bit like— I was on debate team growing up, and I was very much into telling people on the internet why they're wrong. And so as I discovered this stuff in these books, I was like, wow, this makes the music industry make a whole lot more sense. And I don't think most of the executives in the industry— I don't think most of the artists in the industry are aware of any of this stuff, right? And how inept it is, right? So I start— that kind of put me in the direction that I ended up in. Then I, out of college, I managed a recording studio and I saw all these inefficiencies and learned all these things and, you know, started interacting with the industry. And then I learned digital marketing and that kind of sewed it up for me. I was like, oh, this is how you actually grow a business in most sane industries. Let's see if we can implement that in the music industry.

And I love that because you're teaching people like how it works. You're not teaching people just how it works in music. You're helping people become more professional and more businesslike. And you're bringing in concepts and ideas that are used in other businesses as well. And we don't do that a lot in music. And I love that.

Yeah, that's the goal. And I think it's like, I'm sort of sitting now at this place where I have all these experiences behind me that in the sum total of them gives me a better understanding of kind of what's going on here. So like Hitman is a component of what I I now believe, and so is all the digital marketing. And I think what I'm seeing is that the main reason our industry is so weird is because it's an intellectual property industry.

Correct.

And intellectual property is very weird.

It is weird.

It's super weird. And so I was having a podcast with Jack the other day where I made the analogy that—

I love Jack.

He's so good. I made the analogy that I was like, where do you think George Lucas made all his money? Because the, you know, people might assume that it was from the end user buying movie tickets and that flows up to George Lucas, right?

No.

And no, it's because they— the movie industry didn't believe that a bulk of the revenue would come from action figures, so they gave him the merchandising rights for Star Wars stupidly. And that's where the Lucasfilm's fortune comes from. Yeah, yeah. So it's a similar story in the music industry. They don't actually believe that there's money there.

And the money that is there, it's a pennies game, especially with the major labels. As long as they're making a couple extra pennies in your contract, they're happy because those pennies add up when you're multiplying it by hundreds or thousands of artists that are signed to their labels. So it's not a transparent industry. The fact that we're not on blockchain just floors me to this day because there are ways that we could make it very transparent and make it fair. And the fact that it's not really says a lot about the powers that be in the music industry.

Yeah. I'm starting to see a lot more. It's really becoming clear to me that if you look at the Spotify label artist trilemma, the question there, the only person who's making any money is the label. Spotify is unprofitable. The artists are having trouble turning a profit from the actual streaming, but the majors are good. Majors are good. And, and it is the case in the music industry that he or she who accumulates all of the IP is the only one who actually wins in the recorded music revenue chain, right? And so then you start to look at what are the incentives because like the incentives of all these actors drove how this industry evolved. And so what are the incentives of publishers, labels, uh, uh, distributors? They're all based around let's get all the IP. And so do the, the degree to which they care about the success of any individual artist goes to zero, and the degree to which they care about owning the whole total because that's safer. It's safer to bet on, you know, 10,000, you know, artists making a little bit of money than it is to bet on 10 artists making exactly the money. You spread out the risk, and that causes them to really not give an F about the success of any one individual artist. Yeah, they don't care. Um, and so, yeah, it really explains a lot. The IP equation explains a lot how this industry evolved and why it's so confusing when you look at it from the outside, I think.

Exactly. And, and for anybody out there that doesn't know, IP stands for intellectual property. It's the ownership of the underlying, um, art form, whether it's a drawing, whether it is a book, whether it is a song or a beat. That, that reminds me, um, in doing the research for this, I found a YouTube channel that you guys have for all creators. I didn't know you had that. And I went down the rabbit hole and lost like 10 hours of time. Thank you very much. But it's really amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because my interest at the time was filmmaking and I was like, well, we need a YouTube channel for Indepreneur. How can I marry these two? And so we kind of broadened that scope and it's kind of narrowed back down to indie musicians over time. But yeah, it is kind of for all creators. There's some content on there for, for everybody.

Yeah. And it's applicable, applicable to everybody. And that's awesome. I'll put the link, um, below this and wherever this appears, I'll make sure that, that everything that you're doing is linked so people can see all that you're doing.

Um, thank you so much.

Happy to do it. I, I believe in you 1,000%. I love what you're doing. I think you guys are great. So, um, when an artist is just starting out, What is the first thing that they should do in terms of marketing and promoting? I know what they should do to protect their IP, and we're going to cover that with folks that can speak to copyright and publishing. But in terms of marketing, what should an artist do? And do they even need to market their music, or should they just put it out?

Yeah, so I think— and we're gearing up to sort of revisit this sort of chapter one stage and really provide a step-by-step, very linear path of, of education on it. But good. There's a couple of key theories or principles. One is I think artists should not be releasing collections until they have momentum.

Agree. It's a single—

I mean, right. And it's like, you know, we could say it's a singles market, we could say singles perform better. But I, you know, Even if you don't believe that, you just say singles give you the most at-bats. They give you the most opportunities to hit a home run. An album is one opportunity to hit a home run, and you just wasted all that effort of making the album in one go, right? So since you don't know a whole lot about promoting, let's give you the most exposure to promotional runs we can and just say release a single at a time. At what cadence? Whatever cadence you can maximally devote effort to promoting it.

Effort and budget. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's one, is let's pump the brakes on any albums for a second. Let's try to release a single at a time and really focus on it. Two is let's make sure that throughout the year you are— you're not going to have dry spells. So this is just all related to releasing music consistently. Let's put, put a bow on that, put it away. Now, when you do release, how are people going to hear it? How are you going to get in front of people? Well, an earlier version of myself might have told you just go run Facebook ads, but I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that. And now, because TikTok entered the scenario and they did something— there was an unspoken agreement among all of the content platforms, social media platforms up until TikTok. The unspoken agreement was we're going to charge people for inflated reach, we're not going to give it away, right? So there wasn't a place you could go to get crazy reach because it was all tamped down, dampened. TikTok came out and said, well, I have no allegiance to any of this hegemony, so I'm just going to juice the reach. We're going to even— I think intentionally they created a— TikTok had a strategy early on, which is if there's not celebrities on the platform, people don't use the platform, so let's create some celebrities here— Charlie D'Amelio's or whatever, you know. So they were actually intentionally creating some celebrities on the platform, but it also created a regime in which Instagram had to compete, so they did Reels, and Reels have inflated reach. YouTube had to compete, they did Shorts. Shorts have inflated reach compared to the feed. And so there's an opportunity right now to get inflated organic reach And so we should use it. If you're new, yes, use it. And so I'm going to try to not make this too long and wrap it up neatly. Um, what kind of content should you make? That's one question. How much of it should you make? How often should you release it?

Great.

What kind of content you should make? So, uh, because these, these social media recommendation engines that populate your feed are all based on watch time now and they're very rapid cycles. It's like disposable content. You can very quickly take a new account on TikTok and train it to only show you videos that are in your genre and style that are doing well. Doesn't take long at all. So just do that. Go on, create a new TikTok account or IG Reels. Go use search terms to find videos that are in your genre and style. Watch the ones that do well, save them. If there's something you could pull off, if they're your type of music, soon enough your feed will only be mostly those videos. And then here now you have an endless well of ideas for how to model your content. Take ideas from what people are already doing that already works. Yes. Create a lot of it. And I would start by first figuring out there's probably a 30-second snippet of a song in all the songs you have that's going to just do outsize well. So we need to find that first.

Let's—

don't make different types of videos. Take one video type, an idea, do all your songs in it, chop it up, put it out, figure out which clip does best. Then take that clip and do all the video ideas on it and release that organically. After a month or two of doing that, you can look back and see which videos stand out, what stuff did really well, and start to constrain your idea well to more stuff like that.

Do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And until you can— until you can put out content on like a near-daily basis and it doesn't suck for you, and you can put out music on a monthly or bimonthly basis and that doesn't suck for you, you run the risk of burning out and going through a big dry spell. So let's just make sure that before we do anything else, that doesn't suck. Figure out if you need a video editor or you need to edit videos yourself. You need it to take less time, you need to cost less money. Let's figure all that out. And then once you're there and you have some videos that have performed very well, by the time you're done with this process, you should be doing really well compared to where you were, right? Um, and you've got a great foundation. And that's when I would say let's take those winner videos and test it out on the ad platform, because the ad platform is the organic platform. It's the same engine, and the only difference is, is that in the organic platform, if your content's not that great, people don't like seeing it that much, you just won't get any more reach. In the ad platform, if they don't like seeing it that much, your costs will just rise, but you'll still get the reach. And so we want to make sure that it does well organic before we go to ads. Then we want to verify that it works in ads, and then you can use ads to direct traffic to probably Spotify, and you can start to see the numbers go up there, and that's going to feel nice. And there will be some algorithmic windfall once you start doing that, because basically what you're doing is you're sending people who really like your song to a platform where if it finds out who really likes your song, it will show it to more of them, right? People like— yeah. And so that's gonna give your, your recommendation engine on Spotify a really great data stream of exactly who likes your song. Because who's— what's doing the work? Your organic content process is already filtering down to what people like. Your ads are only being shown to people who like it. And then Spotify is getting all that data about who likes your song. So it's a triple whammy. And that's, that's probably your whole first year that I just described. Right, um, if you're going to do it really well. And if you do it just like how I just described, you'll be unstoppable in all the future things to come— selling products, you know, getting booked, all those things. It'll be really easy compared to if you didn't do that, right?

I love that. That was so incredible, and thank you for sharing this. Um, I just love you so much.

Well, I hope it didn't take—

I should rename this to A Million Dollars Worth of Game, but I think that name's already taken. Um, so how big are you size of community? Because in our company, we're really focusing on community for the artists. We're really building each artist to have their own standalone community. What do you guys think of that at Indiepreneur?

How does that— can you explain more how that sort of manifests?

Like, absolutely. Um, we're using platforms like, uh, Discord, like Group, like Lalo. Um, I just read an article that WhatsApp is getting into that whole community, uh, game, if you will. But it's a place where we're We're putting exclusive content, extra content than what's on social media. We're bringing in fans by promising them something extra, either access to a video early or access to a song that nobody else has access to. And we're building it through text messaging, SMS, and email addresses. And then the artist can pop in there, you know, once a week or whatever, you know, whatever works for your team. They can pop in and they have access to all all of these people that are there, that are, are there for that artist. They really like that artist. But the thing that has so much value for us is the fact that we're owning that, we're in control of that. So I'm not just on TikTok using their fan base, I'm not just on Instagram or Facebook using their fan base, or YouTube. My fans are also on my own platform, and we're able to interact directly. We're able to offer special deals to the, to those folks. We, on platforms like Discord, for example, I can break it into— let's just say the artist is also a filmmaker and a producer. I can break subgenres out on Discord and have community of the people that just like the filmmaking side, or the community of people that are beatmakers that just care about the beatmaking side, don't care about the artist rapping or singing, you know, but it gives me direct access to people that I already know are pre-qualified to really like the artist stuff. And they're the people that I know are gonna buy VIP packages and want to come to shows and maybe even do a meet and greet during, you know, during, before the show or whatever, you know, where we can feed them pizza and chicken wings or whatever. It's where I can test merch because my fan base is there. Me meaning an artist, not me meaning Wendy Day. But the artist can ask those people, okay, which of my songs do you like better? Do you like the the ballads or the uptempo stuff. It's a place, it's like their own little city in their own haven. And our plan for that is once Web3 really starts to become more popular, like right now to me Web3 has an educational glitch in it that we're not explaining to people what, you know, the masses, what Web3 is. So they're hearing about it, but they're not embracing it as quickly as they are other forms of tech. But once Web3 is really more mainstream I've already got my community and we can not necessarily move them over there, but anybody that's part of my community that wants to come there so that I can build out a community, you know, both visually and orally, they're there.

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of our thing. So I could talk like a lot about Web3, but I'm going to not take the bait. So, so what you're referring to is community. Exists because there's community. And then it's like, what if I have a Patreon membership? Right, exactly. Yeah. What if I have a Patreon membership? Is that a community? Yeah, there's a bit of— you know what I mean? So there's overlap here.

Yeah.

And I would say we can draw a circle around all of these circles and we'll call it owned media.

Okay, I love this. Owned media.

In that, in that circle, traditionally from a marketing standpoint, exists email lists, mailing lists, you know, um, SMS, basically. Yeah, anything that can't be taken away from you by a third party, you actually own it. So my email list, it's on Drip, but I can take it in a spreadsheet, I can put it anywhere. Facebook's not like that, TikTok's not like that, Instagram's not like that. So that's owned media. Discord is technically not owned media, but if they got there because you sent them an email with the link to join the Discord and you have their email, now it's like a downstream function, right? And, you know, from day one we've been kind of saying— because like, same, uh, artist manager I was talking to who didn't believe that, you know, their huge artists would be able to ship, like, you know, sell merch, um, was talking to us about communities in the music industry. When you're a manager of a big artist, you don't— first of all, like, the email marketing game in the music industry is abhorrent. It's gross. Like, and I could to go into that, but, um, they just don't have the emails of the fans. They don't, and they don't offer anything to get the emails. Sometimes the label will put an email opt-in on the artist's website and then keep the emails and not give them to the artist and email them about things coming out on the label that people didn't sign up to hear.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, it's gross. And so, you know, this person was talking about how like, okay, we're about to do this single rollout or this album rollout, so we have to reach out to all of the fan And so really they rely on fan clubs to self-organize and then be the ones who own the media. Um, they don't own the media themselves. And from, from day one we've been saying like every other business in the world has an email list or a direct mail list. And, and they know how much they, they have a column in that email list for lifetime value. And it tells you exactly how much money that person has spent with you. They have tags on each email contact to tell you what products they bought so they can offer you products they haven't bought. They know when you're ripe for an ascension. They know how long it's been since you last bought. They know everything. They know your birthday, everything. And it's incredibly useful. And, you know, it's the highest ROI marketing channel that's ever existed. Yeah, exactly. And it continues to be, even though people who've never been indoctrinated into marketing like they don't think that email marketing works, which is crazy. But it's, you know, um, people are lucky to get a 5x return on ad spend in Facebook. Uh, Google Search is a bit better if you're doing branded search. TikTok, same thing. Emails, 42 to 1. It's way different. So dollars to dollars, it's way more efficient. So Yeah, owned media is such a huge component of marketing. It's like, it's like the middle of the journey. It's like you need to be able to create presence on front end, right, on paid media or content, which is, I guess, a form of earned media. And then you need to, you need to have offers that transition people from those platforms into owned media. And that's where all the money's made. So yeah, um, you just made a funnel without us calling it that. Yeah, exactly. So most funnels, the middle of the funnel is opt-in. It's, you know, get on this, become an email subscriber. Um, and so now we have derivations of that where it's like, well, Patreon just opened up a free membership tier that you can use, so I can give people free access to paywalled content and I get all my email addresses and then I can ascend them into a paid tier. So that's a form of owned media because I am getting the contact.

Exactly. And that value is having access to your people.

Totally. Like there's artists with millions of fans and they don't even have 1,000 email addresses. They don't think it matters.

They don't know who it is. They don't know who their fans are.

They have no idea. Um, so yeah, it's pretty crazy. Um, it's the biggest opportunity that exists in the music industry, I think, period. Period. Like, dollars-wise, it's the hugest arbitrage. Exactly.

Um, but so few artists have control of their own fan club, but the fans get it.

Yeah, well, you go to an artist's website because like one of the big things in digital marketing is this owned media portion of the funnel. How do we get people on our email lists? We got to offer them something of value. Of course, that solves a bit of their problem for free, and in exchange they'll give us direct contact. And it's the same as in a human relationship. It's like, have I— have we had enough interactions whereby I can say, give me your number I'm going, I've got tickets to this game and, you know, you can come, right? You know what I mean? So there's an offer of value, contact exchange. And so that's a huge thing in digital marketing. Uh, Alex Hormozi just came out with this book, right? $100 Million Leads. Leads are subscribers. They opted in to receive something of value. This is a lead magnet. It's a free thing you give away to, to get subscribers. And so Well, you know, artists can give away exclusive content to get people on their email list, but when you go to, go to, you know, go to Post Malone's website, go to Bruno Mars's website, go to anyone, Ed Sheeran, uh, buried in the bottom of the website is like one— it's just an email field that says sign up to get updates, updates, and it's like No, I'm not going to. There's nothing being offered of value here. And certainly what updates actually means is one email per year, and it's probably not even about the—

I was just going to say that because I have opted in, in, in doing the research for my clients, I opted into a shit ton of email lists just to see like, okay, what are they receiving? How often are they receiving it? And got nothing. Yeah, Jack, just the less I got in return.

Yeah, the bigger the artist, the more of a chance you're going to get an email from Universal about. Yeah, yeah. Jack just, just did a research round where he took the entire Billboard Hot 100 and then audited like we would at the agency for a new client, audited their whole marketing stack, and not a single one of them had like what we would consider to be good email marketing in place.

Not one out of 100?

Not one, no. It's just not a thing people think about. And why? Again, again, the people who are really in control in this industry, who end up in control of things like that, they don't care about selling a t-shirt to a fan. They care about owning all of the history of recorded music.

Correct.

So their incentives are not aligned to care about email marketing. And thereby downstream of that, artists and managers don't care about it, even though it's probably the only way they're going to make make money.

It's probably the only way that they're going to know who their fans are.

Yeah, it's nuts.

So major label is going to control all that.

Yeah, exactly. So you— the way that you can prevent yourself from ending up as one of these artists who 99% of their revenue goes to someone else and they don't know who their fans are is you can just start today. You can start early right now. Start, start making it a process like pretty much like all roads should point to opt-in. All roads should point to become a part of this owned media community. It could be on Discord, it could be anywhere.

Anywhere.

Ideally get an email address because it's the unique identifier for the whole internet. Exactly.

And even if you, even if you're not ready to build a community, at least get MailChimp and, and start collecting email addresses from people. At least make an effort to begin.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Literally, like, you could set up, you know, you could take a song that you were going to release and you could not release it. And then you could say, I have a song that I literally only give to people who sign up for my email list. And then you could just let that live as your sign-up offer for years.

Yes.

Because anyone who's not on the email list, they've never heard the song. Curiosity will naturally drive them through that form. And, and then you can be gathering email. And like, in terms of visual real estate, make it the first thing on your website and make the copy, the headline text, tell them exactly what they're going to get. Don't say updates. And if you can do that, you're gonna outperform like almost every artist. Yeah, true.

Yeah. And then actually follow up. You know, I'm guilty of this. I've got a wonderful community on Community Phone. And during COVID I was texting people, you know, about all of the free webinars that popped up for artists. And I have probably 1,000 phone numbers in there in community. And as the free webinars kind of went away and we started coming back outside, I just kind of left my list there. And I pay for it every month because I don't want to lose them, but I haven't done what I'm supposed to do, which is follow up with them and offer them something at least once a month. So if you're going to collect email addresses. Don't do what I do. Do what you're supposed to do and actually email people. Give them, I, you know, an update. And I, I don't mean to put this as the lead, as the lead, but give them an update of what you're doing. Tell them where you're performing. Tell them what you're working on. Talk about your life, you know, share some of your content on there that you've already posted on, on social media because they may have missed it. It might be the person that you're emailing might be a TikTok person, so they haven't seen what you're doing on Instagram. At least bring them into your life a little bit and talk about yourself and who you are and where you're from. Share with them, be vulnerable, create that connection, because the connection is what creates fans, and that's what keeps people there even when they don't necessarily love one song or two songs. The connection is going to keep them there because they're going to wait for something to come back out from you that they do love.

Yeah, yeah. If you can just commit to like doing a monthly— like, I'm gonna sit down at the computer, I'm gonna write what's happened since I last spoke.

Yeah.

And then at the bottom of that, I'm gonna put links to relevant next steps. If you want to like buy something, support the artist, whatever, I'm gonna put up those links at the bottom. You will be outperforming, I think, literally 100% of every artist you've ever heard That's not even a joke. Like, if, if there's a— if there's like— if it's less than 100, it's like 0.00001% less, right?

So I'm laughing because I don't even do this for myself. Like, I'm telling artists to do this and I don't even do this for Wendy Day, and that's just so pathetic.

It's so hard. It's almost— it's nigh impossible for an independent artist.

It's just—

sorry, what I meant was It's if you want to outperform the music industry regime in the field of independent radio promotion, you're not gonna, right? You're not gonna. Labels own it. If you want to outperform them in the field of high-cap venue booking, like, you're not going to. Live Nation owns that.

Yeah.

In digital marketing, you sneeze and you outperform every single artist that's out there. You know what I mean? It doesn't take much effort. Yeah.

Right. So the, the one thing I want to ask you before I let you go, and thank you, you've been so wonderful with your time. Thank you so much for sharing all this. Um, you talked about merch and I also think merch is really important. Could you give a little bit of detail of how a new artist could really set up their, the merch side of what they do? Cause there's ways to do it that really aren't expensive.

Yeah, I think, I think I'm going to try to organize my thoughts here. You need a first product. Typically it's easiest if that chapter 1 sort of phase 1 we talked about earlier in the episode.

Yeah.

If you've already, if you've already done that, okay, well now you're good at— you have a content machine and you're actually good at this stuff and your fan base has probably grown a fair amount since you started and and they're growing every day. Okay, great. Now let's think about an album or an EP. And it doesn't— you can make 2 new songs, couple them with 3 songs you've already released. There's your EP.

There's your EP.

Doesn't take much. And then get it printed. Get CDs printed. I know people, uh, it's usually a shock when I say to people who buy CDs, why would they buy them? I don't have a lot of great answers for you, man. I can tell you they do. We sold millions of dollars in CDs in just the last year. Um, and so yeah, like get a product printed and ideally a CD, could be a vinyl, but like not everyone buys vinyls. Um, people will not buy a vinyl because they don't have a record player, but people, most people who buy CDs don't have a CD player. It's kind of weird. So, um, so create your first product.

It's like tangible things they can touch. And if you're signing it as an artist, you're was a million times ahead of the game.

100%. Yeah. And then when you get your inventory, like if it's a run of 100 or 1,000 or whatever, um, when you get your inventory, you should first go and like hand-to-hand combat is what we call it. It's like no automation, no email campaign blasts, no ads. Go talk to people in your comments and your DMs. And tell them you got this and ask them if they want to buy it. And, and like, try to actually just sell it to the fans who have been starting to follow you from that Phase 1 effort. And you'll probably sell a fair amount of them at full price. And what's full price, guys? It's not $10, it's not $7, it's like $20. If you're gonna sign it, it's like minimum $25. Like, so don't don't, uh, price yourself like Dollar Tree. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you put all this effort into it, so price what you're worth. And then once you've, you've done that, then you can start to look into more automated promotions. Like, maybe by now you got a website with an email signup, you've got content coming out all the time. So now in the copy of your content and in the comments you're going to put the link to go buy this in your, you know, third email when they sign up. If there's like an automation, they automatically get like 7 days of pre-planned emails. Maybe now you're sneaking that offer into your onboarding flow. You're putting it on your website, you're doing all these other things. So we're eking towards automation. And then, and then I run the risk of introducing a can of worms late in the episode, but Right now, Dukes, who, um, is a longtime friend of mine and a member of our team, he's running what we call a free plus shipping and handling funnel. I'm just using it as an example. There's more people on our team and many more in our community who are doing this, and some people frown upon it in the music marketing space in which we exist, but I don't know why. And so basically what it is is you're offering inventory that you have, like CDs, for free if they just pay the shipping and handling. The CD usually— yeah, usually you can cover the dollar it took to print the CD in that shipping and handling. And now you can actually go out to people who have never heard of you before, take your best performing piece of content from the first phase, and you can put it in front of them and say, hey, I want to give you a CD. And all you gotta do is pay shipping and handling. And then we use checkout funnels, so when they go to checkout, they're putting in their credit card information to pay for the shipping and handling. That's the hardest thing to do in online sales, is to get someone to take it out, enter in the numbers. So if they're doing it for a free item, the friction is lowered considerably. And then if you wanna offer other things, like the t-shirt that goes with the album, or any other products on the backend, once they've already gotten through that payment, then it's a lot less friction psychologically to add something to the cart. And so that's why all the upselling is best done where? At the counter. When you get upsold in a, in a Foot Locker, you're getting upsold at the counter.

Yeah, checkout.

Yep, exactly. Yeah, so it happens naturally everywhere. And through that, Dukes is able to get his best content in front of, I think, over a million people in the last, like, 6 months, sell a bunch of products, which creates customers. And customers are 5 times more likely to buy another product in the future than— or it's 5 times easier to sell a product to an existing customer than it is to sell one to a new customer.

To a new one, right.

So you're creating customers at scale, and then on top of that, if you do really well at it, he made a profit. He made a bunch of boatload of money, you know, doing this with the, the upsells. Not only paid for the ads, but they made him a healthy profit. And that's after cost of goods sold, that's after paying someone else to fulfill it for him, to ship it out. So it's a great way to get exposure at scale while growing email subscribers, customers, and if you do it really well, making a profit.

I love that.

It's a bit more advanced, but just to say that you can't do that until you have inventory. And you've already, you know, tried all the things to sell it at full price, right? And then you say, okay, now I'm going to use this as bait, right? So other things at full price.

I love that. At our company, we do, um, we're big fans of Shopify and we attach Printful inside of Shopify and we set up merch stores, which is print on demand. So you don't actually have to print t-shirts or hats or water bottles. Um, it's done for you and shipped for you. So for example, you might be paying $12 for a t-shirt, but you're selling it for $30 and you're keeping that split. But you've got fans that will, you know, hear one or two songs and really like it. Maybe they like the artwork and they're willing to buy a t-shirt. So we offer t-shirts very quickly and it's not, it's not like we're selling 1,000 t-shirts in the first week. It's not that at all. But what it does is it gets the artist in the mindset of focusing on merch, figuring out what's going to sell, what's not, figuring out what products sell. You know, do baby tees sell better than men's t-shirts? Do dad hats sell better than, um, you know, caps, winter caps? So do water bottles sell? Are women buying them? So by the time they're ready to go out on tour, we've got an inventory idea of what we need, and we're not just just spending money to print up everything. We know exactly what we're printing up. We know exactly, yeah, exactly what style is selling well. We know if, you know, this product is selling better than that product. And our money is just better targeted now because we've already been selling merch for 6 to 9 months.

Yeah, yeah. And you're creating customers without going through the pain of setting up infrastructure, right? I will say that there are artists who should not be doing print on demand who are still doing it. And I mean, big up their artists and they could be making like the number of monthly, like the, the monthly revenue is in the tens of thousands that they're missing out on.

They've outgrown it, but they're still using it is what you're saying.

Exactly. And so I'll say like print on demand is like a market research tool.

It is.

That's exactly how you're using it.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the downsides of it are that your margins get squeezed. So, you know, you could, you could have paid maybe $6 to print a t-shirt, right, instead of 12, right? And then the fulfillment process is such a huge marketing opportunity that you sacrifice when you do print on demand. You can't make the package special. Normally print on demand comes in separate packages, so if you buy multiple things You're going to get different packaging. It's very clearly from a company that's not you. And the shirts always smell like vinegar. I don't know why that is, but they always smell like vinegar. Um, so yeah, like, just don't, don't, don't stay there longer than you need to.

Correct.

Um, but it is like a massive shortcut early on. And certainly it's a hack. You take— you incur a huge risk if your product creation is a guess. So it's a, it's a very— because people, you can do a survey, show people different designs and try to figure out what they'll like. Yeah, but them saying they would buy this thing is not them buying it, is two different things. But that said, if you do do a survey, work too well.

Yeah, yeah.

But if you end up doing a survey, it's a great way to eke out buying intent because you could email your whole list, be like, which one of these designs do you like best? And then just go sell it to exactly the people who responded.

Exactly.

And they already— there's a psychological principle called commitment and consistency where evolutionarily we as humans don't like to be flip-floppy. If we say something, we tend to stick to it.

It.

So by getting people to publicly declare, I like this design, I would buy that, the likelihood of them actually buying it shoots up. And so it's a cool little hack.

Yeah. Yes. And it gives them a feeling like they helped choose it, like they were part of it, they were part of your campaign.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that ownership, you should, you should weave in any opportunity to create ownership in the, in the hearts of your fans. With your commerce. Because, you know, whether it's giving like a special— like, because most of the margin that you can make, like the extra money you can make above costs, is in the personalization. It's not in like, you know, going from a, a t-shirt to like a, a three-piece suit, right? It's by, it's by like putting their name in the liner it's, it's by doing something special above and beyond. You can charge such a higher premium on that because there is no alternative pricing, right? So it's whatever you think. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's, it's a one-time thing. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to talk about? Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?

No, I'm just here to hang out with you. I just want you to know I reached out and I was like, I want to do a podcast with Um, so yeah, I'm, I'm an open book. Um, but I have no particular designs for, for what we were going to talk about.

So I love that. So where can people find you? Because I remember, you know, I came to you from seeing you on a podcast. I watched you on a podcast and I fell in love with your brain.

Which podcast was it?

Um, I don't remember, but what's funny is I remember exactly where I was when I was watching it. That's how much of a connection I felt. I was in a hotel room in Los Angeles, um, south of the airport. And I remember I had a meeting and I remember I started to watch this pod— this, this— it was on YouTube. And I think it was live because I actually called the person I was meeting with and said that I was having car trouble. And I hope they're not watching right now because now they're gonna think I'm a liar. But I said that I had car trouble and that I was running a little late because I didn't want to stop watching. And it was phenomenal. And, um, it may have been Bram and Sean. I don't remember who.

I was gonna ask if it was Sean.

I don't remember exactly who it was, but it's somebody that I have a relationship with. And I went to my meeting, and in the meeting I'm like, come on, come on, come on, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, so that I could get out of the meeting and call the person who interviewed you and say, I need to know this guy. So whoever it was that introduced us is actually was the podcast that you were on. And it's very rare that that happens. It's very rare that I become so infatuated with what somebody's saying that it's all I want to focus on, that, you know, I block everything else out. And thank you for that.

Of course. Very flattering. I'm super flattered.

The—

I think it's a— it's happened to me before, too. And it's like in this industry, kind of no one's speaking our language. So when you see someone else do it, you're like, oh my God, they get it. Get what I get.

Yes, yes, yes. And, and it was just so clear. And thank you, thank you for restoring my faith in humanity. And then thank you for building a relationship with me, because I just think you're wonderful. I love Indiepreneur. I'm a member. I think that we love you.

You're a ledge.

I, I, I love everybody that I've met in your team. I've hired you to work on projects before. You've never let me down. And I've learned so much from you and just thank you so much. So do you want to, do you want to tell people where they can find you so that now that I've just done that great buildup, I don't want to be like, Wendy, where do I find them?

So you can find us on at indrepreneur.io. Uh, if you don't know how to spell entrepreneur, just try and Google, it's probably going to spit us out. There's not a whole lot of competition for this very odd portmanteau. Um, And then we're Full Stack Creative on YouTube or @musicmarketing on YouTube. Feel free to find us there. And same thing on all socials.

So outstanding.

Pretty easy. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for being affordable and thank you for caring.

Of course. It's absolutely my pleasure. Anytime you want me or anyone else to come back on, or even if a guest cancels and you just need to fill a slot, like awesome. Any opportunity to talk to Wendy Day. I love it.

I love it. Thank you so much.