Musicians: Generate Income with Subscriptions

Wouldn’t it be great if you could generate a predictable monthly income with your music? With a subscription-based business model where fans support you in exchange for special perks, you could do just that. Guest-blogger and musician Mirjam Sieben is here to tell you how it works.

Photo by Willem Wouterse

Save Up or Invest

As a musician, being able to do what you love the most without having to constantly worry about making enough money takes entrepreneurship. Having enough money is one thing, but what’s arguably more important is predictable income. Ideally, your income is big enough to live off and have money left over to invest into your ‘music business’ so that it can grow.

Multiple Sources of Income

Gigs are usually a musician’s biggest source of income. On top of that, there’s the money you make from selling your music, selling merchandise, and the income generated from making your music available via streaming platforms. The more sources of income that you have, the less dependent you’ll be on a single source, which mitigates risks and the stress felt when one source is temporarily unavailable.

Memberships

An extra source of income worth considering is a membership model where fans pay a fixed monthly fee to support you or your band. In return, you can offer various special perks. This business model is especially interesting if you’ve already built up a sizable fan base, since it’s usually your most loyal fans that will be happy to support you however they can.

Different Tiers

If you’re going for a subscription-based model, it’s always a good idea to offer a number of different tiers. The higher the tier, the higher the price and the more perks that fans get in return. Tip: come up with original tier names! My band, The Dirty Denims, offers three tiers that are based on clothing sizes (a pun based on the band’s name): Medium (£4 p/m), Large (£8 p/m), and Extra Large (£12 p/m). It’s often said that the middle tier is always the most popular, but so far, all thirteen subscribers have gone for the Extra Large tier. Decide on monthly rates that feel right for you and remember that you can always up the price for new subscribers later on.

No Stress

So what perks can you offer each month that won’t be a stress to get done? For a start, you can consider things that you’re already doing but that are mostly interesting for your ‘superfans’. For us, that’s monthly vlogs. You could also film your gigs and offer up the footage. For more inspiration, you can also look at what other bands and musicians offer up as part of their membership model. That’s what I did and I ended up with a big list of ideas to pick through.

Added Value

One thing we wanted to ensure was that the perks we offer didn’t take up too much time and effort to deliver but are still valuable and interesting enough for our fans — think exclusive content, early access to new songs, special discounts and free merch. Another interesting perk is giving your fans the power to decide which songs you play or allow them to have a hand in new merch designs. In terms of the social aspect, it’s a nice idea to publicly thank new members or list subscribers in the credits of your music videos.

More Examples of Subscriber Perks

The image below details the perks that we offer our subscribers. As you can see, some perks are part of every subscription plan, but the number of perks increases with every tier.

Membership Platforms

There are various ways you can set up your membership model. There are community-building platforms like Patreon and websites that enable you to manage everything yourself, like Shopify. We opted for Shopify because our website was also built using Shopify, which offers solid webshop tools and doesn’t charge extra for running a website and a webshop. We use the membership-app Bold to set up the different tiers and sort out the technical side of things behind perks like exclusive access to members-only content. We manage everything ourselves – including our data – and we don’t have to pay the platform a cut. All we pay is $9.99 per month for up to 50 members.

Promotion

Once your membership model is ready to go live, the only thing that’s left to do is letting your fans know that it’s available. We did this during a Facebook livestream, which was essentially an online release party where we played ten songs and explained the subscriptions in between songs. Once it’s live, you need to frequently remind your fans of it via social media posts and newsletters. Also, make sure to stay creative. For example: we toss in two lottery tickets for every ‘Extra Large’ subscriber. The other day, we organised a raffle where fans with tickets could win special prizes. On the ticket page, we made sure to mention that members are given two free tickets. Another example: we’ll upload a short video of a live show and mention that members gain exclusive access to the full video.

As you can see, there are more ways to make money than just playing gigs when you want to secure a steady income as a musician. A membership model is a great way to guarantee an additional, relatively predictable source of income, and the options are near endless.