Guest Post: Sell Fans Access to Your Band

We’re starting the week off with a guest post from one of our twitter followers, Will Kriski or @learnleadguitar. He has an interesting proposition that a lot of musicians could (should) be utilizing (though everyone will have to customize this idea to make it their own and something that will work for what they do). Really, this is one very realistic way to act on the idea of selling attention, not copies. As Will says, you’ll have to reach a certain critical mass of fans before you can really implement offering “exclusive” access, but once you have developed your core community this is one place where you can both delight them and create an income stream to support your craft.

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Many bands make their living from concerts, which is sometimes referred to as ‘selling the experience’. Concerts still have a high perceived value because things that are unique, hard to find, exclusive or that give fans immediate access have a higher perceived value. To mimic this in the online world we need to create something of high perceived value, restrict access to it and charge a fee for fans to access. One example of this is called a ‘membership site’ - you could call it an ‘Insider’s Club’ or ‘Backstage VIP Access’. Your restricted content could be live monthly webcasts, unreleased songs, songwriting sessions, behind the scenes videos, song demos, and so on. This is somewhere for your 1,000 true fans to hang out.

No matter what music services pop up on in the Internet these days, you need to have your own website and build your own email list of fans. So a membership site is a great addition to this and can become an additional revenue stream. Most successful bands rely on fans buying from them again and again, so a membership site is a perfect fit for that since fans will be charged a recurring monthly fee. Of course you have to make sure there is continued value in the fan remaining a member.

Okay, so you’ve decided you want to restrict access to some of your content and charge fans to access it. Great! Now what? Well, my advice is that you start simple. I’ve met way too many people who decide to build a huge membership site, spending tons of money and time building something before knowing if anyone will buy. So start small and go from there.

I’ve spent a lot of time investigating the various options when starting a membership site so hopefully I can save you some time and money. The simplest and cheapest way to get started is to use Wordpress, Paypal and an email autoresponder. You do NOT want to go down the road of installing, integrating and upgrading multiple pieces of software.

Wordpress

Wordpress is a a free, open source program that is hugely popular, and allows you to create a website almost instantly and with no coding skills required. Even though it started out being used by bloggers it can be used to create full blown websites with ease. If you buy a hosting plan with GoDaddy for example, you can tell them to install Wordpress for you so it’s a snap. You can protect pages in Wordpress using one or more passwords. If you already use Wordpress for your site, then creating a members area will be even easier. Every band should be able to edit their own webpages with this type of easy-to-use software.

Paypal

A very popular online payment system. You just tell Paypal what you want to charge for your subscription, and how often and they give you a little snippet of html to paste into your web page. They handle the entire financial transaction for you.  Paypal is free but they charge a small percentage per transaction.

Email Autoresponder

This is vital no matter what you sell to your fans. You need to be building your own community of fans. I use Get Response, but AWeber is another one. This costs around $10/month and is a must-have.

Once you have all three products ready to go, the basic process of a fan signing up will be:

• Someone clicks the ‘Join Now’ Paypal button
• The Paypal button takes them to Paypal site where they pay for the subscription
• Paypal returns the customer to your ‘thank you’ page
• On the thank you page, you have a email sign up form with name and email address fields
• Once the customer fills this out, you can automatically send them the link and password to the protected content, or attach the content to the email (if it’s not too big)

As you can see this is probably the most basic of membership sites, but it’s important you don’t spend too much money on this before knowing if you can get fans to sign up. Once you start getting sales you can expand your site from there. For larger, more involved sites I use Extreme Member (http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/membershipsoftware) which provides multiple membership levels, forums, email and affiliate marketing and is also based on Wordpress. Good luck!


Bio
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Will Kriski is an instrumental rock guitarist, guitar teacher and internet entrepreneur. To learn step by step how to sell access to your band, check out http://membershipschool.com

Editor’s Note: Will has written a brief followup on his blog with some examples of membership sites that work. Again, I think the takeaway here is that how this could potentially be set up and what you ‘sell’ are very specific to what you do and who your audience is.