Building Your Team Episode 1: Lawyer

Hello Everyone!  It's Sweet Deat! 

If it's your first time here, thank you so much for coming. I do appreciate your click and you making it this far into the blog. We talk about all kinds of good things here for the musician and the general creative music, business, finance strategy, and, uh, everything to do with current events. As the title indicates, today we're going to talk about how to make money during COVID-19, and I'm really looking forward to sharing all this stuff with you. But before we do that, everybody knows when you come here, you always learn about an artist that you need to check out, and today is no different. So let's get to the artist of the day.

Today's artist of the day is not Taylor Swift.

It's actually a band from right here in Atlanta, where I'm based (they play at The Earl all the time.) The name of the band is Slow Parade. This year, Slow Parade released a new record called Hi-Fi LowLife. And it's, uh, led by my friend, Matthew Hendrick. I first got to know Matthew in a singer songwriter sort of get together that I was holding at my own home at one point, where I would invite all sorts of different writers over and we would all share a song and then kind of critique what everybody was doing and talk about what the song meant or felt to them. His song was so deep and impactful that I think several people in the room were almost moved to tears, we were dumbfounded at how much of a poet he was. So if you like really clever lyrics mixed with some indie rock and roll, Slow Parade is definitely a band for you ready to make some money.

How to make money during a pandemic.

It's really hard because all the gigs are gone and you can only teach online if you're a working musician and some of us had teaching jobs and some of us didn't. So the people who didn't have teaching jobs just don't have a job anymore. How in the world are you going to make money? Well, I'm going to preface this entire conversation with this might mean you have to get out of your comfort zone just a little bit. So with that piece, let's get on to number one.

Merch.

Yes. I'm talking about t-shirts, coffee, mugs, bags, all kinds of things. So check out - it's not crazy. If you've got a logo for your brand already, just go to teespring.com and set up a free account. teespring.com is what they call a “print-to-order-store” - so they don't actually ship you anything that you have to then reship and sell. They actually just print it and then send it directly to the person that wants to buy it. Their margins end up coming up close to 50%, but it's literally money that you didn't have to spend to set up something about yourself that you could then sell to people that like you and want to support you during this pandemic. And I know what you're saying, you may be just a side man, musician like myself, that nobody really knows.

And maybe you don't write music primarily and you just show up and play the gig and go home. Right? Well, it doesn't matter whether you have a brand or not. I'm sure that if you sat down with a pen and paper for like 15 minutes, you could think of something that would be cool to put on a tee shirt that would represent you as a human being, whether you know it or not, there's lots of people out there that are a fan of you and what you do on your instrument. So don't be afraid. Take the step out of the comfort zone and just write down some funny, stupid sayings and put them on a tee shirt. You'll be surprised who might buy it and the money you might make. But remember, there's more than just t-shirts at teespring.com. There's things like coffee mugs, there's tote bags, leggings, even face masks. Iin the description below, I'm going to leave a link to my own personal story that has some of my branding and also just stupid things that I thought of that I thought would be cool on a tee shirt. Check it out, give it a look and just kind of see how you might fit into that equation and start your free account like, yesterday. On to number two...

Online courses.

Now you play music, right? You've probably even taught a lesson at some point about what you do. As you know, there are thousands and thousands of guitar teachers online, but they always seem to make money, right? Human connection is what seals the deal between the consumer and the product. You creating a product such as learning how to play guitar online, and then giving that away for people to check out is a way for people to connect with you. And if they feel through your introduction video that you would be a good fit for them, they're going to buy your course. So take time either with a nice camera or just an iPhone camera and make a course, show people what you do and what you like to do and make it really personal. You'll be surprised who might buy it and support you.

Live streams.

Now, before you get crazy about live streams, let me just say, I know there was a rise for live streams in the very beginning of this pandemic, and everybody was throwing out crazy money for people. And since then, it's kind of tapered off.The reason why it's tapered off is not because people don't have interest in giving money, it's that people are not willing to pay money for an average product anymore. What do I mean by average product? I mean, just like a thrown together in your bedroom, not produced, not well lit, not good sound type of live stream. People want production value and they also want a theme or something they can get excited about. Not just you sitting on your bed, playing your favorite song.

There was a time in the beginning where people were new to this and they were willing to give that money, but now that time is over. And if you want to make livestream money, you've got to step it up in the link below. I'm going to provide some platforms that provide this sort of presentation that you need such as like a waiting room, like as if you're waiting for a zoom call to be led into a call, but it looks nice. It feels good. Even maybe has some countdowns, et cetera. You want to put on a concert, put on a show for these people and you can do that with not really a lot of money with just some good creative lighting and some good creative audio. And honestly, even if you don't have like a big budget to go out and blow out on those kinds of things, it's actually really easy just to create that sort of mystery and also presentation in just taking a couple short steps.

The biggest step is just not giving it away for free. If you tell people, if they buy a ticket and you sign up online and you present this concert to someone it's going to make them feel like it's, they're a little bit more special and you're not just openly broadcast into the world, you'll be surprised how many people might want to buy a ticket from you just to show their appreciation for your art and what you do. And for my instrumentalists out there, I'm talking to you to put on a concert. If you're a drummer, put on a concert, get some light beats and some loops and stuff like that and show them what you've got. There's no shame in not having all the pieces of the puzzle. If you're a rhythm section instrument to put on some kind of creative concert when putting it on, maybe think about having tiered systems.

So maybe a VIP ticket gets you into the platform, 30 minutes early, where you can hang out with them exclusively as if they were at a show early, maybe print some flyers of the show. Maybe just like you had a real show like in person somewhere and sign it and mail it to them for costs. Now I say all this, and it's not because I don't like the casual livestream. I'm actually a really big fan of it. And here's why if you do casual livestreams and you make it more about just getting to know the audience and sort of pulling them as to what they might want to hear from you, or just checking in on people and seeing how they're doing, they feel that engagement and they want to then go and buy your ticketed concert live stream. So I'm not just dogging the casual ones because I think they serve a lot of purpose too.

To recap: merch sales, online courses, and live streams. There's no excuse you can't figure out a way to make a little bit scratch in this pandemic. And while we all hope that it goes away really soon, these are things that you can do right now and start making a little bit of money! I hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!