I made this with Viddy.com .... for fun!

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30 Ways To Make Money From Your Music - this will be an action workbook to help you start planning your music business as an independent artist. 

Hope you like it!

Many months ago I did a little brainstorm of "30 ways to make money from your music" you can read the original post here. I have decided to create a mini course out of this and have been drafting it today. Hopefully I'll get it done asap!

Check it out - thoughts? (Thank you to Statista.com for this chart)

Chapter 4 extract called "What Is Fan Experience?"

"Up until this point we have discussed a few ideas to provide you with perspective and a framework for your thinking. So here we ask an important question: what is fan experience? The term “fan experience” is becoming more commonly used throughout the music business. The music business is also starting to see fan experience as a crucial factor when competing with other forms of entertainment. However, we are finding it tricky to define. Most of the times we don’t really know who the fans are, let alone what their experience of the music is. We think that fan experience is obtained through digital platforms so we build fancy experiential websites. Sometimes we look to new technologies such as the latest smart phone and attempt to leverage the experience built into these devices – with little success. Sometimes we think that fan experience is the live event or encounters at retail online or offline. The reality is the fan experience is all these things and much more. The fan experience is the entire sum of how fans engage with music. It is not a marketing campaign and the fan is not a market segment. It is the complete journey of being a fan and this can span a fan’s entire lifetime. So here we will look at what it covers a fan experience, how to think about it, how to construct it, and how to enhance it. 

Fan experience is not simply about the rational experience of dealing with a music product or service for example how quickly it takes for an mp3 to download, how gig tickets are bought or how long the queues are to a live show. Much of the fan experience is subconscious. This is about how the fan feels. The fan experience is the subjective reaction to any form of direct or indirect contact with the music in question and this includes everything from the music itself to a stray flyer on a car park floor. Direct contact with the music would be an online purchase, interaction with an artist website, watching a music video, seeing a poster, hearing the music in a TV advert, soundtrack, TV show or video game. Indirect contact is unplanned by the fan and involves the sharing of a video on a social network from a friend, the gifting of a CD, music heard in shops, bars and elevators. It is important to understand that the value of the music resides in the mind of the fan. This means that value in music is different for each fan based on their own set of emotions towards the music and what the music means to them for example music played at a wedding or christening might have more value to a listener over and above stray unrecognised music heard in a bar. The secret to good fan experience is to ensure that all these features work in harmony to provide one seamless positive experience that meets the needs of the fans in an elegant manner. If we can address this well we will ease fan acquisition, promote fan loyalty and improve retention. 

Every music business organisation whether they are an independent artist or large multinational that thinks they don’t deal with fans has a fan experience. It doesn’t matter whether you think you have deliberately put it together or not. Your fans’ experience may be good, bad or indifferent, but the fact that you interact with fans on any level directly or indirectly and provide them with music means that they have an experience with you. It is up to you whether that fan experience is good, bad or indifferent. Now we have already understood that we cannot control people and we especially cannot control the fans in this case this is because fans own their experiences. Experiences involve changeable perceptions, conflicting emotions, unpredictable behaviours and unforeseen psychological filters. We cannot control people and no matter how careful we attempt to craft an experience it will not be perceived exactly the way we intend it to be as each fan’s filter of the world as in they way they personally view the world is somewhat different to our own. There will always be some random variable; a spanner in the wheel if you will that will upset the machinery of the experience. This is exactly why fan experience is not a marketing campaign and fans are not a market segment. You plan for the best and prepare for the worst. The best fan experience is when you simply facilitate and provide the tools for the fans to create their own experiences around the points of contact for example websites, social networks, gigs, street teams - which you have with them that you can control. Fan experience will separate the men from the boys."

This is a short extract from Chapter 3 called "The Music Belongs To The Fans"

"Fans not only consume they contribute and produce. Fans create all types of media and publish it via the internet. Fans creatively respond to all kinds of material in ways that astonish their creators and they find meaning in the works that weren’t there originally. The consumer is not passive and never has been it is simply that the consumer has more opportunity now to voice their opinion and vote with their feet. The power is in their hands. The internet plays an integral part in the empowerment of this participation rather than consumer culture increasingly enabling people to collaborate, generate and disseminate news, ideas and creative words and content with similar and/or complimentary goals and interests. Participatory culture has low barriers of artistic expression and civic engagement. It has strong support for creating and sharing ones creations with others. It supports informal mentorship where the experienced share their knowledge with novices. Fans believe that their contributions matter. They feel a connection with each other or care what one another think.

We have to remember that this type of activity has precedes the internet. In the 19th Century it was not uncommon for amateur writers to write articles that would then be posted via a “social network” using the mail system. We have always experienced this activity from fan art, the passing on of mix tapes, the creation and sale of fanzines and fan newsletters. This is mirrored in blogs, ezines, podcasts and wikis. This shift from consumption to production where the fan is part of the creative process is profound and will affect the core of our music business culture and economy. Fans are developing their participatory skills and fully understand their buying power. The technology available makes it easier and easier to create content and to spread it to a global audience. Now with smart phones fans are interactive, mobile and have a strong identity. Smart phones are a technology unrestricted by time and space and fans can easily manipulate the context of any existing content even their own identities. As technology develops it becomes more user driven the technology firms seem to want to give the fans more and more control. Now more music resources are available and so there is more competition meaning more attention needs to be paid to the fans. It is no longer the case that a wealthy few own the media. The fans create the media. In fact the fans are the media.

The time of a few music giants controlling the music to our homes is fading. It is now the fans who can send music around the world. This freedom of expression stimulates the fans to take an active part in shaping ideas. There are many more fans than there are of the music business and this means a new paradigm in which fans are co producers of services of content, of taste and emotion, of goods, of contacts, of relevance, of reputation and feedback, of storage and server capacity, of connectivity and of intellect. As long as the Internet is free empowered fans will keep on innovating. Our communications technologies allow the fans to make up their own minds meaning they can decide what is quality, truth or value and reject its interpretations by corporations or power agencies.

It is important to remember the fan is not a market segment. The fact is that large groups of fans are smarter than an elite few no matter how brilliant its members. They are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and predicting the future, through their collective intelligence. The role and the obligation of the intermediary music business organisation is to empower the fans and solidify the relations between fan and artist.  We don’t know enough about the fans after all there was no need to we told them what to consume and how to consume it. Now the difference is they are telling us. This is simply the market correcting itself. We cannot control the fan nor should we be trying to. You cannot control a person’s experience. You cannot control people."