Who do you buy from? How do you choose from the wide range of products and services available? Is there a specific way we should be conducting ourselves and interfacing with businesses we choose to work with?

In this episode of The New Music Industry, I look at doing business in the music business, and offer some tips on how to get the best results possible from those you buy from.

Podcast Highlights:

00:18 – What’s to come for the podcast

00:58 – The music business is a handshake business

02:13 – Doing business in the music business

03:05 – Trust, but verify

04:33 – Two sides to the equation: The business and the customer

05:55 – You’re not paying for products or services, you’re paying for value and results

10:02 – The challenges that come with pricing

10:47 – Guilty until proven innocent

11:59 – Mistakes will be made (it’s human)

12:58 – Don’t ask a business to work on performance (unless that’s their model)

16:45 – Don’t tell someone how to do their job (unless you’re willing to pay more)

23:53 – Do your homework

25:51 – Final thoughts

Transcription:

So, I have a couple of great interviews in the can already and I'm really looking forward to sharing them with you. The reason I'm doing another solo episode here today is that tomorrow I'm headed back to Calgary for a few weeks. And as you know, I spent the last… let's say five and a half months or so in Abbotsford, BC, and it's been incredible and I do plan to come back and spend a little bit more time out here, but I'm headed back to Calgary to visit with friends and family and do my taxes and maybe just get a little bit of a change of pace, change of environment. Always a good thing for us business owners to have.

Lessons from Episode 183

Right. So, I have another open-ended rant prepared for you. Just as with the last episode in which I talked about whether social media is the answer. Used the right way, there's a lot we can accomplish. We can build amazing relationships.

And I think, you know, this is still very much a handshaking industry. You’ve got to get out there and meet people, otherwise, your business just isn't going to grow. And I think we get sucked into this idea that if we just spend all our time and energy learning about digital marketing and implementing these tactics we’re somehow going to get ahead.

But the thing is, it's really a full-time job. And you as a musician would be better served in making more music while you hire an expert who's great at what they do and is knowledgeable and has a ton of experience optimizing your website and social media presence and so forth to do it for you.

Because doing it by yourself, there's a good chance you're just not going to be as effective. You're going to have to become a digital marketing expert to be effective at this. So, no, I don't think social media is the answer. I do feel it has its place and I do feel it plays an important role in the music business, but it certainly isn’t everything.

Who to Trust

Now today's topic, it's doing business in the music business. I feel this is getting to be an increasingly important topic in the music business right now because there are more service providers and there are more product providers out there than ever. There are more experts, there are more consultants, and there are more managers that you could potentially hire to help you grow your career, and this is great.

I mean, it's awesome that we have so much choice and that there is so much great information and there are so many amazing podcasts that we can listen to, blogs we can read, and videos that we can watch. It's absolutely astounding, but we still need to be very discerning as we begin to sift through the options and consider whom we'd like to work with and who's the right pick for us, and who's going to be the right choice for delivering what we've requested of them.

Be discerning in whom you choose to work with.Share on X

I think Derek Sivers really said it well. He summed it up by saying to “trust but verify.” In other words, trust the people and what they're saying, but also go and check. See if they have testimonials or ratings or social proof, as in maybe a big following, a larger email list, and traffic to their website.

There are so many ways that you can go out and verify the facts for yourself these days, that it's just lazy to not do that. And I see a lot of musicians doing that. I even got someone saying, “Who are you to teach a free music marketing webinar?” And I just thought to myself, “Ah, that is so funny.”

You could come to the webinar for five minutes and if you felt it was a waste of time, you could just leave. But what if it turned out to be the best opportunity of your life to learn how to market your music and get it out there?

I don't think any of us are really entitled to complain about the free content. We shouldn't be going looking for more support on the things that people like me provide on a weekly basis.

This takes effort. This takes time. It's not a huge sales engine or money-making machine. It's just a way to build a relationship that lets you know that I'm still at it and I'm still out there.

Yes, content marketing is incredibly valuable, and it generates a lot of value for businesses when done correctly. But at the front end, this is just a ton of man-hours, as Brian Poillucci said so well in an earlier podcast episode.

2 Sides of the Equation

So, as I get into some of the meat of today's topic, I think it's important to acknowledge that there are two sides to the equation.

And anybody saying any less is just short-changing you because they're often talking about themselves and how the money benefits them, and that's wonderful. And I do think business owners should be treated well, and I do think we should be paid what we're worth. At the same time, that can't happen if we don't value our customers and see this discussion really from both sides.

So, I'm acknowledging that in every business it really is quid pro quo. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. I am the business owner; you are the customer. There's a certain amount of value that I provide, and I do my best to establish what those terms are with exacting clarity so that we both understand what it is that we're getting in the end, what it is that I'm providing and what you're ending up with.

This episode is focused more on the service or product provider. But with that in mind, still felt important that I acknowledge both sides because a business is not a business without customers.

So, there are just three points that I want to cover today, although I'm aware that we're already basically five, or six minutes into this podcast episode, so I sure can ramble.

What You’re Paying for

But the first thing that I want to touch on is, you’ve got to realize we're in the information age and you're not paying for a product or service, really. You're paying for the value and potential results that that product can provide.

Let's talk about the example of a book. I've written four books. I have a fifth book coming out.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but it takes a ton of man-hours to put together a book. It's really on par with writing, recording, and publishing an album and all the marketing work that goes into it. I feel that a book takes even more work than recording an album does. Although you can take that with a grain of salt.

Now, it's interesting because a book probably takes more man hours in some cases than it does to create a course or an eBook, or an audio program, or a newsletter, and yet it is the cheapest of any of those products I've just named when really it should be the most expensive based on the value it provides if somebody has taken the time and effort to comb over.

Every sentence and every word that's in that book, the author hasn't just puked it out on paper without thinking about what they're saying or thinking about what the table of contents was, or what they wanted under each subheading, and what points they needed to be making.

If someone put a lot of thought and effort into this, if they put a lot of research into this, if they put a lot of their own experience and man hours into it, then truly it is worth way more than the average cost of what a book costs.

What's interesting about a low-cost offer like a book is, is that basically there's massive upside potential, but almost no risk for the customer. Because if you learn one, two, maybe three things that you can take away from that book for 15 to $35, that is massive value. That is an incredible value.

If you get absolutely nothing out of the book, then yeah, you could say maybe it wasn't worth it, and the author perhaps should have put a little bit more time and effort into thinking about the points they wanted to make in that book.

So, one of the things that's important to think about is to not make snap judgments based on the price of something.

An eBook may cost $35, but again, that eBook could have been poured over for a very long time, and the author may have taken a lot of trouble and a lot of time to break it all down into just the core topics, just the core techniques or essentials that needed to be covered in that book and cut away all the excess.

Editing takes time, too. It takes a lot of time. And you know what? Editors get paid very good money for their work. Oftentimes, I've used editors before, they get paid very well for their work.

So, today, it’s important to understand that it's so easy to look at like a $2,000 course and go, “Well, that's way too much. I would never spend that amount on a course. I'm just going to go find the information for free on the internet.”

And by the way, here's a tip. You're going to be spending the next 10, 20, 30, and 40 years of your life searching for the same information because again, someone painstakingly, curated, synthesized,