Michael Walker: Yeah. All right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Andrew Southworth. Andrew is the founder of Genera Studios. They offer comprehensive music marketing education and services for indie artists and record labels. He’s helped clients achieve over a hundred million Spotify streams through strategic marketing campaigns. They develop tools like music funnels and MEUs to empower artists in building sustainable careers.

And I'm excited to have him on the podcast today to connect a little bit on the current landscape of the music industry, especially for indie artists—what are some of the best tactics and strategies that actually allow artists to connect with their fans and build their communities in a way that also creates more of a relationship or more of an authentic connection with their fans, and they don't have to rely as much on a record label?

So, Andrew, it's great to have you on the podcast. Also, this is our second time connecting. He's a new father, and I think I mentioned beforehand to you—I feel like I've seen you around. I've had a lot of folks who have mentioned you, and it’s kind of surprising that we hadn’t connected until we did. But immediately when we first met, I was like, “Oh, this guy’s awesome.” I'm glad that we finally had a chance to connect, and it's great to have you on the podcast today.

Andrew Southworth: Yeah, absolutely man. Glad to be here. Also, I've seen you around for several years now and same thing—it's shocking to me that we haven't connected, 'cause we kind of instantly clicked. And also we have a lot of overlap in terms of what we talk about, right?

Some people are all about—well, some people are very against ads or something, and some people are very for ads, and that's kind of both of the camps that we're in. Then some people are all about just social media and streaming, some people are only about the other side of things, and I think we're both kind of the “both camps” side of that as well. But we can get into that as we go throughout.

Michael: I think you're right. I think the one part that I resonate with from what I've seen from you is sort of the analytic, geeky—hopefully you don't mind me saying that—because I'm a total geek.

Andrew: I went to school for engineering, so I'm a total nerd.

Michael: Awesome. I think one thing that it seems like you have a real specialty in, that’s not really a strong suit for me or something that we focus on as much, is around streaming and using these tools to actually increase your Spotify numbers and increase your metrics—which is an important part of the music industry. A lot of record labels and venues look at your streaming metrics, and it's an important way to connect with your music.

So, maybe to start with, could you share just a little bit about your background for anyone that this is their first time meeting you—what really led you to creating your studio and the resources that you offer now?

Andrew: Man. Well, I'll give a quick backstory so we don't spend three hours talking about my background. I've been making music for 19 years—since I was 12. Oh wait, no—21 years. Wow. I'm 33. I feel old now.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: 21 years. I'm 33 too, by the way.

Michael: Whoa.

Andrew: Oh yeah. Exact same age. So I've been doing music for a long time. I’ve been doing YouTube since maybe 2008. Originally, I was doing just-for-fun metal vocal lessons because I scream and do vocals in metal bands. That’s how I initially kind of grew my channel. It was very casual, but sometime around maybe 2017 I started taking it more seriously and started doing music production content instead.

Eventually, I started trying to promote my music. I graduated college in 2016 and then got my master's in 2018. I felt like I had all this free time open up, which sounds kind of silly 'cause I was working full-time, but I went from working full-time and going to grad school at night to just working full-time. I thought, let’s just basically fill that time with music—try to make music, promote it, see what happens.

Then I just started sharing what I was trying—the failures and the wins—on the internet. People seemed to dig it, so I just kept testing more stuff and trying more stuff. Then people started asking for different things like, “Hey, do you have a course?” I was like, “I could probably make a course.” “Can I buy an hour of your time?” “I could probably hop on a Zoom call.” “Can I hire you to run my ads?” “I could probably do that.”

And then over the years I just started adding these things that people wanted. As far as the studio goes, that was also kind of an organic, casual thing that's built over the last 21 years of making music. People are like, “How do you afford all that music stuff?” And it’s like, well—21 years. You buy little pieces every year. Next thing you know, you have a studio with so much music gear you don't even know what to do with it.

So everything was kind of just on the fly. Nothing was planned. As much as I would like to say that I had some master plan—building my YouTube channel and my business—it was very much just kind of sharing stuff, talking about it, people asking me for things, and then figuring it out as I go.

Michael: Awesome. That definitely makes sense. And it sounds like what your compass was is something I hear from pretty much every successful person I know who's built something fulfilling or meaningful or that’s providing value—has a similar mindset, which is: how can I serve people? Or, how can I help?

And so it sounds like you had a compass for what people needed help with or what they were asking you for. That started with you sharing what was working for you and the discoveries you were making. People are like, “Oh, I need help with this.” You're like, “I guess I could help with that.” And then they’re like, “I need help with this.” “Okay, I could help with that.”

It is interesting how just that focus on providing value—and answering the needs of... well, just kind of like a business-y way of saying it, the needs of the market—seems like a powerful compass.

Andrew: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to look at it, but originally everything I was doing was just for myself. I was trying to help myself. Since I've always been the type of person that likes making YouTube videos and sharing stuff online, I’ve always enjoyed teaching. Anytime I learn something, I kind of just make content about it. In some ways, that helps me learn it better, but it also scratches an itch.

Then you have people commenting and pushing back on certain things you're doing. They’re like, “Maybe try this,” or “I did this instead.” You start thinking, “Oh, maybe I should try that.”

It’s worked well. It’s never felt like I had to really try to come up with some big plan or anything. Obviously there's planning and things that happen behind the scenes now, but everything’s felt very organic. I’ve been happy that I haven't had to make it this big business-y vibe.

Michael: Awesome. So yeah, having built a successful YouTube channel and having worked with a lot of artists now—both for yourself and for the artists you run ads for—I’m curious: at the time of recording this, what do you see as the biggest challenges that artists are struggling with when they first come to you that you’ve been able to help them with?

Andrew: Yeah. The number one is definitely that they make great music, they're releasing it regularly, maybe they're even making great content, but they're just not getting anyone to listen to it. Sometimes they're even having success on social media, but nothing's translating to anything else—whether that's streaming or touring or merch or Patreon, etc.

They're just feeling kind of stuck. And sometimes it's partially their fault, right? Sometimes there is something inherently wrong that they're doing. Sometimes their music isn't ready or whatever. But a lot of the time, by the time someone gets to me, they usually have pretty great music. They usually have tried a bunch of things and they're just wanting help.

And a lot of times when people come to me—just because it's kind of what I'm known for—it's, “How can I run ads to help this whole process that I'm running?” And sometimes they've tried it already and they've had no results. And so they're either looking for me to help them learn how to do it themselves, or they're looking to just get it off their plate because they hate doing it—for whatever reason, right? Running ads aren't for everyone. Marketing's not for everyone. That's why labels exist. That's why managers exist. So, definitely that's the most common reason: nothing's working, and/or they never knew how to do it in the first place, or they're looking to just not have to handle it themselves.

Michael: Got it. Yeah, so usually they're at a point where they have this music they've invested a lot of time and energy into, and now the music isn't necessarily the biggest problem anymore—just knowing how to promote it and get it in front of the right people.

I'm curious, when it comes to ads—like we mentioned at the beginning—I feel like we have a lot in common in terms of our appreciation and love for the tools that are available. I'm curious what your favorite part is about ads. Obviously, there's a lot of different ways that people can generate traffic, but what is it about ads that makes you think this is something that at least is one of the tools artists should have in their arsenal?

Andrew: Yeah. That's a key part—it’s definitely one of the tools everyone should have. It should never be the case where you make music and you just run ads. That pretty much never works, right? If people come into your world and you're not posting on social media, they're not really going to stick around your social media. So social media's going to die, and that's going to hurt everything else you do. And if you don't have a brand, then that's not going to help. So you have to have everything.

The nice thing I like about ads is they're a way to accelerate things in a predictable way. You can't guarantee that you're going to go viral on social media. You can't guarantee that you're going to really do anything with social media. I've seen people post videos every single day and never get a thousand monthly listeners—and they do it for like a year straight.

And sometimes, again, that's partially their fault. The content's not that good and they never went through the trials and tribulations to figure it out. But the nice thing about ads is that it is predictable. You can spend a little bit of money, get a little bit of results, and kind of see what's working, what's not. And you can test different parameters, test different audiences, test different videos, and just get numbers that tell you what's doing better and what's not.

Social media gives you some numbers about what's doing better and what's not in some ways, but it's all so much more neatly laid out and trackable inside of something like Facebook Ads.

Let's say, streaming specifically—you’re testing five different audiences and you have four different videos in each audience that you're testing. You have lip-sync videos in different parts of the song that you're testing. You can pretty clearly see: this is the cost per conversion for this video for this audience, for that video for this audience.

And it kind of gives you information on how to proceed forward. You can break that down by age, you can break that down by gender, break it down by country and placement and a million other variables. And then you kind of see like, okay, I'm spending five bucks a day and I'm getting this. Well, that’s going pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that, and I could afford to do more. So my next release that's coming out—now maybe I'm going to allocate a thousand dollars to promoting it. And then maybe it does really well. And then you get this growth, and now you have this—maybe you started at zero and you have 10,000 monthly listeners.

Now that can open up the door for a lot of things. For some people, it's just: keep releasing music and that’s that. For some people, it's: let's try to hit up some other bands and do some collabs. Let's try to hit some other bands and get an opening slot. Let's try to contact some venues and see if we can play. Because if you hit up a venue and show them your Spotify with 32 monthly listeners—like, there are some venues that will just take it by your show history.

Well, show history pretty much always matters. If you can show you've sold out something, that's king. But if you have no show history, that can be your ticket into actually getting opportunities. Or maybe all your show opportunities that you've had in the past have been insignificant compared to what you're trying to get now. It's hard for people to take you seriously if you have like 17 or 32 or even 500 monthly listeners.

As unfortunate as that might be—because I'm sure you know that a Spotify streamer isn't necessarily a show-goer or a merch buyer or whatever—it can be a little... industry—I call some of that stuff like industry bullshit. But the reality is that industry bullshit exists. So even if you don't care about the streaming per se, it can help you out with other aspects of your music career in a predictable manner. You control the spend, and you control the variables.

Michael: That 100% makes sense. And it sounds like what you're saying is that these tools help you accelerate your path. You could post every day for a year and you may or may not have traction from that. With ads, you actually can see scientifically what's working, what's not. You can get real variables, kind of know and learn a lot more quickly.

And one of the best parts about having this type of strategy is it does help you get an initial foundation on platforms like Spotify. The truth is, even if not every Spotify stream is equal, people pay attention to Spotify streams. It's one of the fastest ways to have an idea of how big an artist is, and that helps when getting opportunities like booking shows.

And I 100% agree in terms of Spotify streams—I think they're an incomplete equation. Because Spotify, like one Spotify stream, might not necessarily be the same as another one. You don't really know—is this a bot, necessarily? Obviously they're kind of cracking down on that a lot, but...

Andrew: Well, once you get into the playlisting world, that's when it gets even more nefarious. Like with the ad world, if you're showing an ad on Facebook or Instagram, it's not like a bot on Instagram would have an account on Spotify. So it's not like a bot—because they're all custom-coded.

Could someone code a bot that clicks on ads for musicians, lands on a landing page, knows how to navigate the page, and then also has a Spotify account? It is theoretically possible, but it is absurd to think that that's what's happening.

I've seen some people—there's a lot of hoops. “Oh, that bot's clicking and streaming.” It's like—you don't—go learn some stuff about how people code these bots, and you'll see how silly that is.

But I've heard some people say that. And yeah, you're right—all streams aren't equal. And on Spotify, there's a huge problem with artificial streaming. There are scams that are around that, and it's a freaking nightmare. You've probably seen artists in your community that are added to a random playlist when they never even submitted to a playlist, and they get a massive spike for one day. Next thing you know, their whole album's pulled off Spotify and DistroKid is accusing them of artificial streaming.

And the artist is pissed because they're like, “I didn't even do anything.” And I've seen so many people just quit streaming altogether because of that. They just stop releasing their music online, which is a damn shame. And it's not their fault. It's really Spotify's fault.

Michael: A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think that in a lot of cases, unfortunately, artists might stumble across the wrong marketing service. So like, you're not like—because you're teaching people how to do this the right way and how to actually connect to real people. But there are some services where it's like, “Pay a hundred dollars and you'll get a hundred thousand streams,” or something like that. And those are the ones that you're at serious risk of getting shut down for.

But I think the issue that I'm thinking of, like as a wider problem—and it's not just Spotify—I would say it's like social media in general. There's two variables that really matter. It's the amount of people in your audience, but then the second one is the depth of your connection.

And the amount is so easy to access. You can go to anyone's profile and see you have a thousand or a million followers. And so just because it's so measurable and easy to see, we end up optimizing a lot of our mental space around how to have the biggest number there possible. And often, because we don't have the visibility of the depth of those connections—it's not like you can see an artist's email list or you can go to their website and see, “This artist has generated $10 million from their fan base of 25,000 fans”—it seems like it does kind of lead to this prioritization of those kinds of metrics.

Which are important, as long as they're legitimate numbers. But it's just a missing equation because you don't have that depth of connection.

Andrew: A hundred percent. I do a lot of consulting with artists, and the amount of artists I've met that I look at their Spotify and assume they're just a casual indie band just getting started or whatever—and then I talk to them, they've been full-time musicians for five years. They're touring around the country, and they're selling thousands of dollars of merch a week. Or they have a Patreon with a hundred people in it, paying them ten bucks a month or whatever.

All that stuff adds up to the point where you can have nothing online and be making a killing from your music. I remember this one guy—he spent several years playing shows and also selling merch and vinyls and doing these livestreams on Facebook. He ended up being a full-time musician from that. He had almost no streaming, but he would do a livestream every week on Facebook and sell vinyls and make a killing every single time.

He did one of those streams on Facebook—not even a very good organic social media platform—but because of his genre and the type of community that he had, it was actually a perfect fit.

I typically describe a lot of the music industry in two kinds of paths. It's the industry path and the indie path. The industry path is streaming, social media, big numbers—but shallow pond. Kind of like, wide ocean, shallow pond.

And then the indie game is the opposite. Smaller social media focus, smaller streaming focus, mostly caring about selling stuff, making money, touring. And that's the opposite, right? It's a very deep cylinder. You have a small fan base, but they're diehard. They're willing to support you.

There's a gradient in the middle. Of course you can do both. But this guy started very basically in the indie path, so to speak, and then he was using the funds he developed from that to go back and promote his streaming. And that helped him out in a myriad of ways that also supported the indie path.

Obviously, plenty of artists try to chase just the industry path, where they want the streaming and the social media numbers. But at some point, you have to pay the bills. That either means getting signed to a record label or getting some big breaks on the streaming.

I know plenty of people who do make a living from streaming and stuff like that. But a lot of times that means implementing some of that indie stuff—like selling physical merch or developing a membership program or whatever. And that's kind of where you start getting in the middle.

I think most people don't want to have a tiny audience. Obviously, everyone wants to make good money, but they'd rather make good money and have a fan base and feel like a lot of people are hearing their music and checking it out. Because as artists, we want people to check out our music. So I think that middle area is where most people would like to live. Absolutely.

Michael: I think anyone that tries to pretend like they don't care at all about the quote-unquote vanity metrics—feels like there's usually a little bit of... like it's all of us. It's almost human. It's just part of being recognized. And for many of us, becoming a musician is the case because we had this need to be recognized and to be seen and be appreciated and heard.

So it does feel good. There's literally a scientific dopamine release that happens if we make a post and a bunch of people like it, and people have gotten value. It feels good.

So it seems like what you're saying is that it's okay to prioritize that, but you can have both. You don't want to necessarily have one without the other, but you want to have the ability to grow and reach more people, and also make sure that you're maintaining an authentic relationship with those people.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. A lot of artists would share music with other people for free before they started taking it seriously. And that's because they love that feeling of having other people listening and enjoying their music.

In some ways, it can be vanity metrics, but in other ways, it's just that natural thing about—you made a thing, and you want people to see it.

Sometimes that means focusing on streaming, and sometimes that means focusing on other things. I know a lot of what you guys talk about at Modern Musician—you are big fans of people owning their audience and collecting their fan data: email lists, SMS lists, Messenger automations, and sales funnels and stuff like that.

And that is kind of defined in that indie scale that I use. The amount of artists that do that and are also big on the streaming side is surprisingly a lot. In fact, those people who are big on the streaming and start implementing that stuff are the ones who actually cash out the most from it. Because they have this base they've built, and they have all these fans, but they're not fully utilizing their fan base.

Then they start setting up some ManyChat automations, or they start setting up an email list and an SMS list, and they start making some sales funnels. And immediately, they're going from broke artists with a hundred thousand monthly listeners to financially viable artists with a hundred thousand monthly listeners.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really does come down to those two numbers, doesn't it? The reach—or the amount—multiplied by the depth of the connection.

So if you have a big audience, if you've built that community, but you haven't been going deep with them, and then you introduce that, now you start to multiply the actual value per person that's in there.

I'm curious to hear—as I feel like this is one of your genius zones—around focusing on that part of reaching people, getting the music heard, and growing. Some things that do matter in the music industry like growing your monthly listeners, growing your Spotify streams.

I'd love to hear what you've found working best right now as it relates to helping artists use these tools to grow those numbers. And then after, I'd also love to hear what you've found working best to bridge the gap as well—to help them both have that and be building the email list and connecting with the fans.

Andrew: Yeah, so on the, what I'll call the industry side—this is my own terminology—I’d say that the cookie-cutter strategy I would tell to the vast majority of artists would be: release songs every four to eight weeks pretty consistently. Every year or two, when you have enough tracks, you can bundle them up and release them in albums and stuff like that. So you're still releasing albums and all that, but you're mostly focusing on singles. If you have a 12-song record, that might end up having nine singles or 10 singles, or it could have 11 singles technically. And a lot of artists would do that.

Ideally, for every release you would have—let’s say you’re spacing them about six weeks apart—you would have at least like 10 pieces of social media content per release, but ideally 20, 30, 40. Right? And that just comes down to the equation of how much time you have or how many resources you have to outsource and stuff like that. You kind of can't post too much on social media. The content should be good, though. So don't make crap content at scale. Make stuff that’s at least—like, it should be entertaining. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It doesn’t have to be shot on, you know, like a RED camera or something. But phone content—easy peasy—but still entertaining and that fits the genre that you’re working in. And as much as possible, ideally at least several times a week, if you can.

Then also, for every release, if you can swing it budget-wise, allocate some type of budget to promoting the release. And the vast majority of that budget—at least for the release, right? Like, if you're doing all the other stuff, that can be separate—but if you can justify allocating a certain amount of money per song to promote the streaming/social media aspect of things... So what that could mean is $300 a release, $300 a month, like $10 a day. That could mean $500. That could mean $1,000. I've literally seen people come to me and they're like, “I have $100 per release,” and the next person might be, “I have $10,000 per release.” So it just depends on what you can swing.

The more budget you have to work with kind of can take the load off your back in terms of social media and all the more laborious aspects of that. You should never stop that stuff because organic is still great and it's going to feed into the ads, but the more budget you have, the less you have to just be grinding constantly on social media.

And then, let's say you have $1,000—just to throw out a number. If you had a music video for your song and you’re releasing on streaming, I might allocate something like $850 of that $1,000 to Meta ads—what I would call a Spotify conversion campaign, so to speak—driving people to a landing page where they choose where they want to stream, and it kind of promotes all your DSPs, most of your DSPs, in one fell swoop. But since those ads are running through your Facebook and/or Instagram—for most artists, Instagram's kind of the dominant one that you would use, unless you have an older fan base—you do also get Instagram growth roughly at the same growth you get Spotify growth. So it kind of promotes two in one at the same time.

So that's $850 out of $1,000. I would do like $50 in SubmitHub credits—just some Spotify playlists. SubmitHub vets their curators very much, and their volume’s not huge. You don’t want to have, in my opinion, more than 10–20% of your streams in a song in a month from third-party playlists. You want the vast majority of your streams to be from what I call high-intent listeners, which would be from ads or organic—or your email list if you have an email list.

And then the last $100, if you have a music video, would be for YouTube ads. This would just be to get some momentum happening on YouTube. YouTube ads can be a mixed bag. You don’t want to run them worldwide and get like dirt-cheap countries and... yeah, you don’t want to get super dirt-cheap results in countries that are like opposite side of the world that don’t matter to you—unless you live there, of course. Then that can make sense. But you kind of want to blend it up. You want high volume at a low cost, but you also want most of your views to be in places that are going to make more sense.

And that’s kind of my cookie-cutter—if you're trying to promote a song on streaming, that’s what I say.

Now on the opposite side of things... I guess... what was the second part of it?

Michael: So that’s super helpful. First of all, thanks for sharing that. And the second part of it was—I was kind of curious just to hear your perspective on—for that kind of indie/industry model, if you have any—what’s your perspective on if someone is listening to this right now and maybe they're not signed to a record label. And maybe they’d be open to it at some point if the offer is right or if it was like a good fit—but it's not really their biggest goal.

If they want to have a sustainable career that just pays the bills, and maybe a humble goal of like $5,000 to $10,000 a month and they could be a full-time musician—and hypothetically, $2,500 budget for like an ad campaign for releasing a new project—maybe they have like a three-song EP. Would you... how would you allocate that budget in terms of their Spotify growth and their social growth and potentially like a music funnel type of campaign as well?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how they might allocate a budget like that.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. So, as you know, it depends on the artist and their goals a lot. So sometimes, a lot of times, in fact, unfortunately, the artist is gonna be like, "I only care about Spotify streams." They're like, "Are you sure?" Like, maybe you should do some of this stuff too. It'll be good for you. And they're like, "Eat some broccoli." And I'm like, "Oh no."

Some people ask me, "Why do you mostly talk about streaming on your YouTube channel?" And the answer is, for a big part of it, that's what people want to watch the most. That's what performs the most. And on YouTube, that's the mission. That's the game you're playing, right? It's a balance of: how can I make content that's going to help the most amount of people, that people want to watch? But you can't forget that "people want to watch" portion of it, otherwise you're not gonna be able to keep doing it.

People are like, "Why do you never talk about free plus shipping and handling?" Well, I did a three-part video series on a free plus shipping and handling funnel I run. The reason why you've never heard of it is because nobody watched it. Right?

So, I guess if you're curious about that, search my channel—you’ll find it, anyone watching.

But, for a three-song EP artist, the split’s gonna depend on their exact goals. If they told me that they were planning on getting into playing or playing shows in the next few months, and the money side of things is very important to them, then I would probably have them—if they're still early on—I would have them do a big chunk of the budget, like just to throw out a number, let’s say 50%, to that streaming/social media stuff. Because they have zero social media, they have zero streaming, and so if they’re trying to play shows, they're kind of gonna look like a joke for a little bit.

So, like, let’s get the music heard by promoting it, and let’s get some feedback, and let’s get some fans checking it out, and let’s get some algorithmic activity happening. But let’s break off a chunk of that streaming budget and run it in some local markets around where the artist is playing so we can start developing some type of local fanbase.

It’s not gonna be a ton of people. It’s gonna be way more expensive than the more—not global but semi-global—approach that a lot of artists would take. Depending on how close they are to actually playing shows and touring, etc., they might want to run a lead acquisition campaign in those areas too, so they can start growing their list of people who live in those regions.

There's a bunch of ways to do that. You can do it with a form on a website, like a funnel-type thing. Give away a free download or a free behind-the-scenes video or a video series, or like an email sequence with all this extra content. You could do a starter pack type thing, right? Like a digital starter pack of different goodies.

I've seen people do physical stuff to incentivize people on the list, like "I'll send you a postcard." And it's super cheap and it's not too much work. So you could do that as a sales funnel type thing, or a lead funnel type thing. Or you could do an instant form on Facebook ads. Or you could do a Messenger/Instagram DM automation tactic—however you want—to grow that local list.

In terms of selling stuff with the three-song EP, it's a little difficult and it depends on the genre. I think one of the best ways for people to get into selling stuff, especially to a cold audience, is the classic kind of free plus shipping and handling thing.

And the reality is a CD is the cheapest way to do that. It’s not the sexiest thing, it's not gonna work for every genre, but it works for a lot. I did it with an electronic rock pop project and it actually profited in the ad. Took a while. It didn’t profit by the time the ad was done, but in the year following the ad, there were so many recurring sales and customers and stuff that it ended up passing the break-even point and being very, very slightly in the black, so to speak.

And that’s with a genre I would consider not very good for CDs.

But recently I’ve been working with an artist that has a couple different projects—like a Pink Floyd project. He has an AC/DC kind—not like a cover band, but the vibes kinda like Pink Floyd, the vibes kinda like AC/DC, the vibes like ELO. He has all these projects. The CDs and vinyl sales are crushing, which makes sense—it’s an older demographic.

We're doing a free plus shipping and handling funnel, and in that funnel we have a bump offer, which temporarily is just a "Donate $5" button. Literally just says, “Do you want to support the artist and give an extra $5?” 25% of people click that button. 25%.

Michael: Oh my gosh.

Andrew: They get nothing in return. In reality, what he does is he throws a few extra stickers in when they click that button, but they are not guaranteed anything.

So then after that, depending on the funnel, we have a vinyl bundle in one of them. The other one is just one vinyl. Another one is a three-CD bundle. Each product has a different take rate. But the vinyls—we have a two-vinyl bundle for 40 bucks. So it's 20 bucks a vinyl. And the other one, we have a vinyl for 25 bucks.

$25 vinyl by itself: selling horribly. But the vinyl bundle—two vinyls for $40—is selling, I think, at like 15–20% take rate. So you can imagine, anyone that just takes the CD, you're losing money. Because you might be technically breaking even when you look at the shipping you're charging with the cost of the CD and the shipping you're paying, but then with the cost of the ad, you're in the red.

Add that $5 bump and it's like, "Okay, we're almost kind of breaking even." But if someone gets that vinyl—massively positive.

So overall, the goal is: do we have enough of the right products in the sequence funnel that on average, once people get through the whole thing—like let’s say 100 people go through it—that we are going to be break-even or positive? 

Because even if you're a little bit less than break-even, you're growing this email list, this contact list that you can sell to and market to in the future.

And the example guy I'm giving you, he has a huge collection of music that he’s just been making. I don’t know how he ended up with so much music without doing anything about it, but that’s the reality. So for us, it’s like, we're losing money on this one, but we have seven more records for this particular project.

So every single one of those records, we can send an email. I forget if we're collecting phone numbers too, but we have all this data and contact information. It's going to be profitable.

Going back to the three-song EP case, I don't think I would focus on—especially if you're starting from scratch—I wouldn’t focus on anything to sell at that upfront point. I would focus on gaining a list of people you can contact.

Then, when you get to the point where you have a full album, you could either try a free plus shipping and handling funnel if you want. You could do CD, vinyl. If your genre doesn't play well with that—like if you're doing hip-hop—some people do USB keys.

One way to do that too is, let’s say you—actually another guy I’m talking to is doing this—he has a 20-song album done, and we’re going to release every song every four to eight weeks. Starting from song one, you can go on his website and buy the full CD, digital download, USB key, etc. So it's like, each single it’s like, “Do you want to wait two years for this album to come out? No? Okay, go buy it.”

Michael: Hmm. Cool.

Andrew: Right? We get a little thumbs-up from Apple there.

So those are the bunch of different ways to do it. Depends on every case, but those are the things I would consider when thinking: how can I start to develop an actual deep fanbase of people that love me?

And actually, membership platforms are a fantastic way. Like if you see people that do Patreon and you're like, “I could make behind-the-scenes content. I could engage with a fanbase, do a livestream every week.”

One of the artists I work with makes $15,000 a month on Patreon.

Michael: Wow.

Andrew: They crush it. And they only do one livestream every Sunday for like 30 minutes, and they post their music videos early, they post songs a couple weeks early, and they give them discount codes. And it doesn’t require more than maybe like an hour a week of their time, and they make $15,000 a month.

So it didn’t happen overnight, but those are some example paths that you can take if you're trying to get into actually making money in music.

Michael: Awesome. So what I'm hearing you say is—and by the way, Andrew, just like a week ago, we just launched a software as a service called Street Team. It is our first software as a service that isn't a white-labeled service, but one that we built.

Yeah, but it's sort of meant to fill—here's my elevator pitch for it. It's like if Patreon and Discord and Facebook Groups had a baby. Instead of Mark Zuckerberg owning your baby, the artist owns their baby. They own their fan data so they can build journeys, and it’s sort of like a CRM platform meets social media.

So I just want to give a quick shout, 'cause I know last time we talked, that front didn’t even exist yet, so it's kind of new. But for anyone that’s listening to us right now, they should definitely check out Street Team as well, as it relates to what you're describing about building a membership or building a community that they own.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, hearing you describe it, I can already start thinking of ways I would try to get fans into an ecosystem like that and either use it to promote stuff or make money from stuff. I haven't even checked it out, but just hearing you describe it, it's like, oh, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this.

Michael: We should definitely sync up. And I'm sure we'll have a chance to when you interview me on your podcast—which, also, everyone that's listening to this right now, you should go check out Andrew's podcast. We're doing a podcast swap as well, so if you want to listen to that as well, then you'll have an opportunity.

But we should definitely connect on that. And what I'm hearing you say in terms of the wider strategy is that often, with streaming and with Spotify, one of the most valuable things you get is this audience that you start to build.

And it is a bit like a snowball going down the hill. It might take some time for the snowball to start to build, but it starts building momentum. Some people are able to get to a point where they have $15,000 a month in income that's coming in from a membership group.

And often, as you grow your community and you get more monthly listeners, that opens up opportunities for touring and playing live shows, monetizing in those ways.

If you have a short term—like you want to generate revenue with a campaign—a few ways to do that are by having offers on the front end, like a free plus shipping offer with a CD so that, if you do it well, then that might be a faster way to recoup some of the initial ad spend.

But often, as you build your community—as the rain starts to fall and you capture it in your rain barrel—that grows over time. And so if you have seven albums' worth, then it does continue. That snowball gets bigger and bigger as you continue to grow. But it does take consistency and continuing to show up and put music out.

Andrew Southworth: A hundred percent. Yeah. And that free plus shipping offer—that could just as easily be like the starter pack that I've heard you guys talk about before.

One of my clients, I don’t know what program he was in with you, but he showed me something he built where he had like a signed poster, all these digital goodies, and he also had—I think there were keychains and some stickers and stuff—and he was selling it for like $10, free plus shipping and handling. I think it was $10 because he was in Australia, so it had to be a lot higher.

But, you know, then he had a funnel in the backend where he was selling CDs, vinyls—I think he was an author too, so he had this book that went along with the music.

But anyways, that funnel worked for him too, right? So it’s just a matter of what products do you think make sense for you.

One thing I've heard you talk about is selling private parties for a couple thousand bucks. And I see some people talk about that and they're like, "F*** yeah"—I don't know if I'm allowed to swear—but "F*** yeah, that's awesome. I would love to do that."

And then I see other people where they're like, "There's no way in hell. That's not me. I'm not doing that." Or, "I don't want to hop on Zoom calls with people." Other people are like, "Hell yeah, I'll hop on Zoom calls with people."

So, in my opinion, it's all a matter of looking at all the different things that you could do and then thinking about what’s the most you. Some people look at social media—nope. Look at shipping out CDs and stuff—nope. But they would love to tour. And other people have no interest in touring.

So there's a lot of ways to skin the cat of being a music artist, or being a music industry person. There are some things you have to do, right? You have to make good music. That's a given no matter what—you have to make good music. And you have to interface with other humans.

But aside from that, you can kind of pick your own adventure, you know?

Michael: Mm-hmm. A hundred percent. Well, Andrew, man, it's been fun having you on the podcast. Thank you for coming on here and sharing some of your experience and what's working right now—for both the industry and for those two different paths that you took. Both equally valuable for artists that are looking to do music full time.

So, for anyone that's listening to us right now who is interested in connecting more and diving into your videos or the services that you offer, what's the best place for them to go to learn more?

Andrew: Yeah, I'd say best is probably just go to my YouTube channel. Look up Andrew Southworth on YouTube—you’ll find me. I don't know if YouTube links get too long, but either way, you'll find me. And andrewsouthworth.com has all my links.

My ad agency is called Southworth Media—that's what the squid is. That's our logo.

And yeah, we have—like, a lot of people are like, "How do you have a million little things?" So I'm not gonna just dump them all right here. Just go to andrewsouthworth.com or go to my YouTube channel. You'll see everything down below.

The nice thing about YouTube, the nice thing about the website is it's free. So you can see if you like what I have to say, see what you can learn from me for free, and then see if any of my products or services make sense for you. And if not, I'd still love to have you hang out.

Michael: That’s awesome. Well, like always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access. And Andrew, it's been too long. Glad to have you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time.

Andrew: Heck yeah, man.