Wendy Day of Rep Coalition breaks down how to build a realistic marketing budget for music releases. Most campaigns start at $150,000 and can exceed $300,000, covering digital ads, influencers, merch, and physical assets. If you can't afford the full plan, trim activities or find investors and sponsors.
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Hi guys, Wendy Day from Rep Coalition here, and today we're going to talk about budgets. And man, this is an expensive industry. This is not a free industry. So if you don't have any money at all, I don't know how to advise you. You need to have some sort of a budget. I know that I really depress people when I tell them the budgets that I work with and what my clients have. Because I can't do it under a certain amount of money. I've tried. I'm in year 28, and every year I try to maximize budgets and work in this industry to build a buzz for a client and help them make money with their music, and there's just no way to break even spending small amounts of money. But having said that, um, and you notice I didn't give you the amount because I don't want to depress you, But having said that, we're going to talk about budgets. So yesterday you put a marketing plan together, you put— drew a 5-hour circle. And if, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, go watch yesterday's video. It's on my YouTube page, for Christ's sake. Um, you're gonna, you're gonna choose your starting point. It's usually the place where you live. If you make music that sounds not like where you're from, then I suggest that you start in an area that fits your music. So if you're in Detroit but you make music that sounds like it's Cali-based, then you need to start in Los Angeles, right? Okay, so you're gonna— you have that 5-hour driving radius, you've made a list of all the cities and towns, so now you know how much you need of everything that you're going to use to market and promote to those cities and towns, right? You figured out You want to do a digital campaign, you want to buy Facebook ads, you want to buy Google ads, you want to buy YouTube ads, you want to do a Facebook— excuse me, you want to do a SoundCloud campaign, you want to do influencer marketing. So you're making a list of all the stuff that you want to do both online and in the real world. You're making a list of the t-shirts, the amount that you're going to need, you're visiting, um, 30 different cities. You're probably going to give away 10 t-shirts in each city, roughly. Um, of course, in smaller cities you'll give away less, in bigger cities you'll give away more. You're giving them to the DJs and the industry in those cities, the people that— the tastemakers. So you now know you need 300 t-shirts. So you've already priced them out. You've learned that it costs you roughly, you know, depending on where you are and who you use, between $5 and $10 per shirt. So you've made a list of everything you need, you've put an amount to it. If you're going to hang posters, um, in nightclubs and give out, um, postcards to people on college campuses, you have figured out how many you need because you've done the research to find out how many colleges are in each town that you're going to hit, right? So once you figure out everything you want to do, you just go through and price it all out. It's really that easy. It's just work. So, and this is great if you have a team to help you. If you don't, you can do this yourself. Figure out what it's going to cost to do everything you want to do. Put the price down on paper next to, you know, in your marketing plan. Add it all up. See what that total is. And now that's what it costs to market and promote yourself for the amount of time that's going to take you to work whatever you're working. It might be a single. It might be an EP. It might be a mixtape. It might be an album. I'm not a big fan of the word mixtape. Tape because it implies lesser quality and it implies that it's free. So it's really hard to get people to buy a mixtape, um, like to stream it on, on Spotify or Apple or Deezer or Amazon. So I like to call everything a project. I like to call it a release, an EP, an album, whatever you want to refer to it as. Even if you're just dropping singles in a row, whether you're dropping a single a week or whether you're dropping a single a month you're putting this plan together that has the timeline, the cities, everything you're going to do online. You've priced it out, you've totaled it up, and now you know what your budget is going to be. You know what you need, so you're going to be able to figure out, can I afford to do this? If you can't, you're going to need to cross some stuff out because you're not going to be able to do it. That's not how I would do it. I would figure out everything that I want to do I'd find out what that price is, and then I would go and find somebody who believed in me that wanted to invest in me, and I would give them a percentage of the income or a percentage of the ownership of my company in order to get that money. And here's the part where I'm going to depress you. With my clients, they have budgets of at least $150,000, minimum $150,000, because when I put down the list of everything that needs to be done, That's usually what it totals up to. You know, it sometimes costs more. Like with Trouble, we spent $322,000 marketing and promoting him. I think it was over a 3.5-year period, and that included recording and everything as well. When I say I work with budgets of $150,000, it doesn't usually include the recording. That's usually just the marketing and promotion of whatever, you know, whatever the goal is. And the goal, we know, from the marketing plan. It's different for every artist. With some artists, I want to put out 3 projects in a year. With other artists, I want to put out 1 project a year. It depends on the market, how crowded it is, the type of music that I'm working. It depends on so many different things, the research that I've done. Again, that's where experience comes in handy. Um, but for me, I'm going to go and find the money if I'm an artist and I want to do this for a living and I want a successful career, I'm gonna find out what it takes to win and then I'm gonna go and find an investor or somebody that even a sponsor, you know, maybe I wrap a vehicle and I put the local, I don't know, speaker company, you know, audio company wants to give me $10,000 to put their logo on the back of my van so that as I'm driving around and this 5-hour radius, they're getting promotion. You know, you're, you're the one that has to figure this out. You're the hustler. You've got to figure out how to hustle up the money to do what you need to do. And if you're somebody that doesn't have money and, and you really want to be an artist and you really want to make money doing this, I'm not saying you can't explode on your own with no money, but it's going to take you way longer. So I hope that you're starting earlier so that you've got more time to be able to, um, work this, you know. Instead of spending $150,000 in a year, maybe you've only got $10,000 or $15,000 to spend in a year. I don't know how to do that because that's not my business model. My business model isn't to take 12 years to build a career for somebody. My goal is to build their career in, you know, a year to 3 years max. That's my goal. So Put together a marketing plan by figuring out who your audience is. Figure out how you want to reach your audience. Price everything out. That's your budget. And then either, if you don't have the money to do the proper marketing and promotion push, either cross some stuff off the list and do what you can afford to do, or find a way to make that money to make that budget to go do what you have to do. Okay guys, I hope I didn't depress you too much. Thanks for tuning in. See you tomorrow.
