When looking to build your career in the music industry and thinking about gaining a fan base, it can be really difficult and stressful to be thinking that the sky’s the limit. Obviously, you want to attain as many fans as possible. But it’s really hard to reverse engineer a strategy for an unlimited number of them. But, what we can do is make a very specific plan to find enough fans, up to a certain number. In fact, we can literally find which places have that audience size and go get them.
There’s also another element to this that’s really important. For those of you that want to make the transition into making your living from music, you need to define a starting dollar amount goal. Then, you need to just figure out how many fans you actually need to provide you with the financial support to reach that goal.
This comes from a concept called “1,000 True Fans”, from a great thinker named Kevin Kelly. And basically what it states is this: Let’s say that I was able to charge a fan, for example, $100 over the course of a year—whether this person is coming to a couple of concerts, or buying a t-shirt of mine for $20 or $30, or maybe they support me on Patreon or Kickstarter.
Now, if I had 1,000 fans worldwide, and I was getting $100 in a year from each of them, that would be a six-figure salary. That’s a life-changing amount of money for a lot of artists that are just getting started. The really important thing there is that you’re getting that life-changing amount of money without having to have millions of fans. Instead, it’s just about your 1,000 being really true fans. And that number can be as low or as high as you want, based on where you’re at in your career.
I believe it’s good to ask yourself when you’re just starting out, how do you get those first 50 true fans? Everyone’s goals are different, and for you, they might be that you want to make one third of your regular day job salary this year from music, and maybe that means you need your first 50 fans to each spend at least $75. Once you figure that out, you start coming up with ways you can make that happen.
Looking at it this way really lowers the stakes and makes these transitions into being a professional person in music a lot more doable. This whole idea that you need millions of fans on Spotify right now is just not true, particularly if you’re giving the fans you do have an opportunity to financially support you as well.
To learn more about these concepts and other lessons for success in the music industry, think about exploring online music education. If you’re looking for a music education, you’ll find that there’s no more affordable, accessible, or convenient way to achieve it.
