Budgeting For Business Success

This may sound self explanatory but for some of you artists and musicians it may be hard to visualize yourself as a business. So before you create a budget, define what your product is. Let's take an audio engineer for example. Define what your service is and then ask yourself how long can you go without making any money as a business without making any profit. This applicable in the music industry because of how saturated it is. Once you figure out how long you can go without making any money and only investing money, ask yourself what you can spend monthly on developing your business, your brand, and demand for what you do!

If you're an artist, there is no way you're going to make any real money without marketing your brand and building some real demand for your music. So if you're starting from the ground up, use the 90/10 rule. This is where 10% of your monthly budget is spent on your product (your songs) and 90% percent of your budget is going to be spent on your business or demand development. In the early stages, a majority of that 90% should be spent on marketing and promotion. But don't forget to spend some of that money on business education. Systems like a monthly subscription to linktree as your first landing page/website, on entry level mailchimp account to collect your fans emails, phone numbers and other info for example. 

Budgeting For Business Success means making a monthly budget, sticking to it and being disciplined. Document what you spend the money on and what sort of results you're getting from it. A simple Google sheet will do for that.  

Now as you scale, your budget allocation will change and many other things besides just marketing will have to be considered. 

If you're an artist that's already at a higher stage in your career with some money coming in, & spending heavy every month on promotion and other services, it's even more important to set a budget. Keep to that budget and use something a little more sophisticated like quickbooks so you can record your business expenses correctly and write as much of it off against your revenue as legally allowable. There are levels to everything, but at every level you need to be Budgeting For Business Success!

If you are looking for help with strategies to take your music business to the next level in the realms of marketing, contact us today to get started and hop on a strategy call with the team at Digital Science Media.

If you don't have the budget just yet for a full blown marketing campaign but want to learn about the business basics, make sure to check out our Indie Artist Accelerator where we have modules that go in depth about the very topics we discussed in this blog post, live Q&A's, a private Facebook group, & more.