How We’re Running our Band as a Startup
Our band, Blue Shift, started back in the early ’90s when it was a very different world. Our concerns at the time were a typical laundry list for an indie band: getting a record deal, getting distribution, radio play and so forth. While we seemed to understand the path forward, we were unable to get anywhere from where we were.
Then, at the end of the 90s, I moved away. I left Toronto to follow the Internet boom, first moving to Montreal and then onwards to New York City. I spent the next 20 years working in tech, either at startups or digital agencies. At various points I ran these kinds of companies myself, and so issues like customer acquisition became very top-of-mind.
Last year, I came back to Toronto, and the band decided to get back together. We decided we wanted to not rehash our old catalogue, but instead, focus on new material, and re-examine all of our assumptions about how a band was supposed to work. We all understood that the world of music had changed immensely since 1991, and all of the things that we believed were important to our career back then needed to be re-examined. Additionally, everything I knew about marketing and running organizations, in general, came from startups, and I wondered if I could apply that knowledge to a band.
Startups, especially in more recent years, have become very methodical about their go-to-market strategy: how they bring their product or service to the market, find customers, make money and grow. Two books of particular note on this early-stage startup focus are Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, and Weinberg and Mares’ Traction. From product development and go-to-market perspectives, respectively, they lay down concrete methodologies for getting established as a startup.
Could we do something like that with a band?
Make a Plan
We needed to start by deciding what it is we were trying to accomplish. And so I found myself doing what I had done so many times in the startup world, making a deck. The point of this was to establish our goals, and make a plan to achieve them.
First off, we decided that our main goal was to acquire an audience (not maximize revenue or growth–the typical objectives of a startup). The ultimate metric for us would be engagement–we’d rather have a small, highly engaged fanbase than an enormous casual one. Also, we weren’t going to be overly concerned about turning a profit. Bands are a terrible business, and if making money is your main concern, there are many better ways to do it than having a band. We decided our financial goal was to lose money more slowly.
The Audience Cycle
We needed to make an audience-building engine: a way to find people who were likely to appreciate our style of music, win them over, and make them our fans. We knew we weren’t for everyone, we just needed to find the people who would appreciate us. Our concept is called the Audience Cycle.
It is intended to be a virtuous cycle. The first thing to do is to acquire an audience. We would go out, test various channels and see where audiences that were interested in our music hang out. The promotional channels open to us were the same as what would be open to most startups or digital companies and very different from the traditional music business. We’d be looking at social media, and the gatekeepers of musical taste, such as popular music blogs, podcasts, Spotify lists and so forth.
The second step would be to engage whatever audience we acquired. Essentially, we wanted to talk with them, answer their questions, and interact with them on social media. We’d offer our fans the opportunity to directly speak with us, something that was rare in the old-school music business.
Our hope for this engagement would be to encourage our fans to tell others about the band. No ad or promotion is ever as strong as a personal recommendation from a fan. We would enable fans to proselytize, or spread the word, about us.
We also wanted to create champions for the band–fans that had enough enthusiasm about us to anchor and grow the fanbase on their own. We would recognize and reward these champions.
Finally, we would lightly monetize this virtuous cycle, primarily to cover costs enough so that it wouldn’t be a burden on us to keep it going. Besides earnings from platforms such as iTunes, Spotify and so forth, we’d have a Patreon where fans could subscribe.
Keep the Content Coming
The plan was to create four Content Streams, through which we would engage with our fans. Our job as a band would not only make music but to keep these channels active.
The Music Stream is the most important. Once our focus was on making albums, but we recognized that albums have little to do with how people consume music now. So instead we thought of our music as a continuous stream. We would seek to release a track every month, available just about anywhere people can find music.
The Meta Stream is all the non-music content we make. This article is part of the Meta Stream. We make YouTube videos, Instagram stories and Facebook posts, all about the weird and varied interests we have as a band: rebuilding obscure old amplifiers, grilling meat and driving cars too fast. If you want to get to know the band, the Meta Stream is for you.
The Merch Stream is full of, well, merch. It’s where we offer Blue Shift branded stuff. Tied to monetization, our merchandise also offers an opportunity for fans to endorse (ie proselytize for) the band. Because merchandise costs us money to produce, we need to be careful about what we spend here.
Finally the Merci Stream (I just wanted everything to start with an ‘M’) is about offering thanks to our fans. We wanted to reward loyalty in various ways, such as putting fans on guest lists for shows, and personal thanks on social media.
Being Awesome
The other, critical ingredient to this was quality. None of this would work if we sucked. To that end, we needed to be the best version of ourselves.
In the past we had worried too much about fitting in with an existing scene or trend. We’ve never fit in particularly well with what was popular at the moment, and if anything we’re even more out of sync with mainstream trends now. For us, chasing trends was a losing proposition.
Instead, we knew we just had to be the best Blue Shift we could be. How far could we push ourselves on songwriting, arranging, performance, production and so forth? Where could we challenge our existing assumptions and find new ways to communicate musically? How could we be…better?
In software this is referred to as continuous improvement, and it’s something we embraced as a band. Whether through our songwriting, our recording practices or our go-to-market approach, we would constantly examine what worked, what didn’t, and how we could improve.
We felt that if we could knock it out of the park as a band, the fans would come.
Next Time: Finding an Audience
We start down the path of Audience Acquisition, testing different markets to see who might like us.
