Meet & Greets (& Bundling) :: 20/20 Vision

Hi guys, okay, let's talk about, um, meet and greets and bundling. Um, meet and greets are where either when you're out on promo tour or you're actually doing paid shows, actually any kind of show, um, a meet and greet is where you have the ability to gather your fans together so that you can interact with them. It gives you the opportunity to shake hands, kiss babies, take pictures with fat girls. But it also gives them the opportunity to give you feedback. So you'll be able to find firsthand what songs people like the most of yours, or, um, where, where they feel your image is strongest. It gives you the opportunity to get direct feedback from people. And if you've got a distributor that's working with you closely, you can also have them reach out to Spotify, and if you do this like 6 weeks in advance, you can get a list from Spotify of the top fans that stream your music. So you can have direct access to the fans in the area. For example, if you're going into Columbia, South Carolina, and you're doing a show or you're doing a promo tour, you can get a list— provided you do this 6 weeks ahead— you can get a list of the top 10 or 20 people, or 25 or 30, or however many you feel, um, you can handle, you can invite them to some sort of a VIP event. And a lot of artists do this surrounding their soundcheck. It's something you're doing in the afternoon, you're inviting your closest fans, it's giving them an opportunity to interact with you, take pictures with you, post it on their social media. And then you're— it gives you the opportunity to repost them to your Facebook, your Twitter, your, um, Instagram, etc., so that as you're in this marketplace, you're just showing love to your fan base. And these are the people that you know really give a shit about you because they're streaming you the most out of everybody out there. And you can target that very finitely into the smaller and the bigger markets that you're going to. You know, I remember, um, when I first started started in the music industry, we used to do giveaway, like, contests at radio stations, and we would say, you know, we're gonna give away a fan pack or a pair of tickets to the 10th caller. And you never really knew if the 10th caller was your fan or not, because really they were just the person that was the 10th caller who was able to get through. Well, in today's music industry you can really target and, and give away something of value to the people that are your actual fans. They're proven to be your fans, so you can invite them to a sound check. You can invite them out to the show like an hour early and do some sort of a VIP backstage event for them, you know, something very specialized. You can also, once you get big enough, you can give away VIP packages on your website or through your social media. You can sell them even. So if you can't do this with the, with the Spotify folks, because Spotify is not going to let you pimp their, um, their, uh, members, but you can— or their subscribers. But if you are, um, if you have a website or you doing a, a some sort of opportunity on your social media. You could sell VIP packages. So let's say it's $25 to come see you perform. For $50 or $100, you could give away a VIP pack that includes, um, some sort of autographed item. You know, um, for people that still listen to CDs, you could give away a CD, you could autograph it, you could give away a t-shirt and invite these people to an event, again, either at soundcheck, like 4 in the afternoon, or to come early to the show, like an hour early, gain access to the venue and meet and greet with you. You can spend some time with them and interact with them and just, you know, give them the opportunity to turn just going in, just going to one of your shows into an experience that they're going to remember for the rest of their lives. There's also a thing called bundling, and you've probably heard quite a bit about it because Billboard just changed the rules about bundling and how it affects your charting on their charts. And I have to be really honest with you guys, I don't really care about charting. I care about my artists making money. And while charting is wonderful because you can use the numbers to sort of, um, get everybody on your team excited, it's very motivating, especially when you're in the top 10. But for my artists, I really focus more on monetizing them and their opportunities than I do really on charting. But having said that, bundling is where you announce before release date, like, like let's say your release date is June 1st, right? So you can start selling bundles of your release, you know, starting a couple months early where for anybody that pays a special price you're gonna include a shirt, some sort of autographed poster. Maybe you're going to put together a bundle for them. It's, it's going to cost them a little bit more, but it's a way to get them to pre-order your project before it comes out. And a lot of artists do that so that they have a really big first week. It can be the difference between having 50,000, um, uh, uh, um, CDs sold prior to the first week or 100,000. And it's also a great way to sell CDs because people don't really buy CDs anymore, they stream. So the CD becomes a giveaway, it becomes an opportunity for you to give somebody something with an autograph on it. Now you can't charge excessive prices for this, like you don't want to extort your fans. You want it to be a bundle of stuff that they may really care about, you know. And it really depends on the type of artist that you are. Like if you're an artist that talks about smoking weed, maybe you give away you know, some sort of package of blunt wraps along with your music and an autographed poster. Or, you know, you want to do something special. Maybe you invite them to, um, to a YouTube, uh, viewing, like a private screening of your video, so that they get to see the video before anybody else. Maybe you give them an extra song so that if somebody is, um, investing in spending a little bit more money on a bundle, maybe they get an extra 3 songs to listen, or, you know, MP3s, or, um, they get a special access code to your website where they can stream it. Or, you know, you just want to give them a little something extra so that it entices them to purchase your release before it actually releases. Okay guys, I hope this was helpful. It's just another extra thing that you can do to help market and promote yourself and stand out from the other 40,000 daily uploads that go on to Spotify, you know, or the other 2 million rappers out there that are dropping projects. It's just, you know, the one thing you guys see me say all the time on Instagram is, how are you going to stand out? Like, what makes somebody want to support you over somebody that's better known or more established or that has, you know, different music, even better music maybe? You know, you just got to get your hustle up and you've got to figure out a way to stand out amongst your audience. And I just feel like meet and greets and bundling and other special marketing things that you can do, you know, maybe you have a comic book made and you give away the comic book to people in the bundle and then you sell it on your website to everybody else. There's just a bevy of things— I said bevy— there's just a bevy of things that you can do to, to stand out. And you've got to, you've got to do something different, um, from all the other artists that are out here trying to get attention. Okay, guys.