Grow An Audience

I don’t think I have to convince you that growing an audience is a good thing; it opens so many doors. Without an audience however, your options are limited. A quote I’ve heard recently is, “Without an audience nothing is possible. With an audience, anything is possible.” Let’s get into how that is.

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Without An Audience

Things aren’t just hard when you have no audience, they’re impossible. Making money without an audience is hard, and some venues are impossible to perform at without an audience. You’ll be spending most of your time trying to convert people into loyal fans just to get the gig, when a lot of your brain power could be routed towards doing what you love.

You’ll have to work twice as hard multiple times over compared to if you had an audience. Instead of creating products (albums, singles, etc) that can exponentially increase your income the more followers you have without doing any work after the fact, you’ll have to find other ways to make income.

This could mean playing certain venues every night, going freelance and playing on other people’s music, or in most cases, getting another job to support yourself and your band.

If you created and sold a product for $10 with 10 fans following your band, and one fan bought your product, you’d have $10.

If you made the same product, but you had 10,000 followers and 1,000 fans bought your product, you’d have made $10,000 for the same amount of work you put in at 10 followers for $10.

Now, 10% of your followers buying your product may be extremely high, but the math is the same; if you scale your followers, the more you can grow on multiple fronts.

With An Audience

Once you have an audience, so many doors open. You can sell merch, get more gigs, create more content, create more music videos, invest in more gear, create more songs, hire outside musicians, grow your audience faster, collaborate with more people, the list goes on.

This is why it is so important to focus on audience growth and maintenance as number one top priority. If there’s anything to cut what you’re doing to make more business sense, it’s not content and marketing! These are the things that allow you to stay afloat.

You’ll even want to prioritize this over money. If you try to sell to a super small audience, you’ll not only get a small return, if anything, but you’ll also be taking when you should be giving.

Giving is the key to growth and maintaining relationships. In order to ensure that you keep your fans happy and with you, you’ll want to give give give. You are after all, in the business of giving! Who wants to do business with a person/place that is only looking to take? The give to take ratio should be leaning WAY on the side of giving, and if you feel like you gave enough, give more!

Since a small amount of value can go a long way if there’s a lot of people to give the value to, you really don’t need to ask much; if you give, people will also be more willing to give back, and in some cases even feel bad that you are giving them so much value, they feel like it isn’t balanced and they’ll want to give you money in exchange for all of the free value you’ve given them. So, once more, give them an opportunity to do so!

I can’t emphasize enough that this needs to come from a place of good intentions. People will be able to sniff out selfish/ego driven endeavors from a mile away! You’re only hurting yourself [[extremely]] if you are doing “benevolent” actions only for your own benefit!

There’s a photo going around that I think applies heavily here, that says “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people”

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So in conclusion, if you focus on giving, you’ll grow and maintain an audience, and in general, you’ll just be a nice person. With this trait alone, you can make it far. :) What are you giving your audience? Maybe we can learn a thing or two :)

I'd like to give you a free guide I've made called the Top-Down Songwriting Pyramid that will help you start writing your songs and help you focus on what's important when writing them! All you need to do is sign up to receive email notifications for when a new blog post is published; you can unsubscribe at any time if you'd like, so no pressure! Personally I think it's a good deal, go ahead and get free stuff!! :)

See you in the next one!

-Michael