In this episode of Backstage Money, Jason K Powers sits down with Jack McCarthy, entrepreneur, touring veteran, and co-founder of IndieX at Indepreneur, the agency helping artists build sustainable, direct-to-fan revenue.

Jack shares his journey from touring guitarist and guitar tech to building one of the leading artist-focused e-commerce and marketing teams in the industry. He breaks down why so many musicians stay stuck in feast-or-famine income cycles and how treating your music like a real business can change everything.

The conversation dives deep into direct-to-fan sales, owning your data, e-commerce strategy, touring versus streaming income, and why artists need systems they can control. Jack explains how artists of all sizes can stabilize revenue, better serve their fans, and build long-term sustainability instead of relying solely on platforms and algorithms they do not own.

This episode is a must-listen for independent musicians, touring artists, managers, and anyone serious about building a music career that lasts.

Backstage Money is real-world finance for musicians, where music and money collide through honest conversations with artists and industry professionals who are living it.

Connect with Jack McCarthy

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indepreneur

Indepreneur Site: https://indepreneur.io

IndieX Site: https://indepreneur.io/about-indiex

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Welcome to Backstage Money, Real World Finance for Musicians.

I'm your host, Jason K Powers, and this is where music and money collide

with honest stories and practical lessons from people who make it work.

So let's get to it.

Today I am joined by Jack McCarthy, entrepreneur and co-founder of Indie

X at Indepreneuer, the agency that helps Grammy winners, multi-platinum

acts and indies alike, generate direct to fan e-commerce revenue.

His path runs from the Philadelphia scene to the road as a guitar tech turned

to touring guitarist to leading a team that builds and monetizes fan bases.

Artists actually own.

Under Jack's Leadership IndieX has driven millions in direct to consumer sales.

By filling the revenue gap, the industry often exor ignores, and I'm excited

to have that conversation today.

Today we're gonna dig into the baseline philosophy for treating your

act like a business, why owning your data matters and practical ways to

get off the revenue rollercoaster.

Jack, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Excited to be here.

Man, I've, I've seen your guys' stuff around and, and I was looking to

reach out to you and then you reached out to me and we start talking and I

was like, this will work out great.

I'm, I'm excited for it.

So yeah, I'm excited.

love it.

Yeah, I'm excited to have these conversations and, and I love

what you guys are doing out there.

Oh, thanks so much man.

I'm excited to be here.

Definitely stoked to get into the weeds of all of it with you.

Yes.

So let's, let's dive in.

I want to talk about a little bit of a, a, one of the main conversations

that comes up is this feast or famine cycle The artists go through, and that's

sort of how you guys started, right?

It was off this idea of how can we help curb this a little bit, right?

For sure.

Yeah.

That was one of the big areas that started Indepreneuer as a whole.

But certainly the agency side of our company IndieX is really founded based

on, and a lot of our strategy is really built around helping artists pick up

revenue that is often left on the table.

Mm-hmm.

and really to help them stabilize a lot of the monetization rollercoaster that

exists for artists and bands, which looks a lot like a record spike in revenue.

Revenue comes down.

Go on tour, spike in revenue, revenue comes down and there's these flat lines

When the revenue comes down on that rollercoaster and helping artists to

stabilize that is a lot of the focus that we put our time and effort and energy into

in addition to maximizing those spikes.

But it's really looking to build sustainability and a bit more of a

stable baseline, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So tell us a little bit about Indepreneuer itself and how that got started and,

and then the IndieX side and help us understand what we're talking about

and then, and then I have some good stuff I want us to chew on today.

For sure.

Yeah.

So Indepreneuer has been around since 2017.

We started as a company.

My business partner Kyle, started Indepreneuer back in

2017 with the early release of.

Indie Pro, some of our foundational trainings and the community that we

started building of artists that were looking to learn digital marketing.

Kyle Circa for short, his, he was getting his footing in digital marketing

or had gotten his footing in digital marketing in the tech space, specifically

like websites and app building.

And at the time he was working in a studio as a studio manager also, then

helping apply marketing to artists that he was, you know, seeing through

the studio and got into consulting, got into teaching in the fledgling

Indepreneuer was built at the same time.

I was working off the road after being on the road as a touring

guitar player, a guitar tech.

In working in the studio in Philly, I was cutting my teeth in digital marketing,

working with small businesses, nonprofits.

Online businesses.

And we met totally by chance I saw an Indepreneuer Facebook ad, actually it

was one of the first Facebook ads that Circ was running for the company to sell

the initial, one of the initial digital marketing trainings that we taught,

which was called the Fan Finder Method.

I saw that training probably within maybe the first two weeks that it

was running, bought the program.

'cause I was like, this guy seems to know what he's talking about.

I

Yeah.

I think he seems pretty cool.

We got talking, we got to becoming friendly, started

following each other's journey.

And then we partnered up about a year later when he, he and I were talking

and he was like, Hey, I'm building up the agency side of the company IndieX.

I know you have experience building agencies.

What do you think about working together on this?

And it was a match made in heaven.

We've been doing it ever since.

And so that was how Indepreneuer started kind of from the.

From the ground up and I came in and started working with the team on, well,

started working on building a team and building up the infrastructure and the

processes, the systems, and the strategies that we use at IndieX specifically.

And so we've been doing that ever since.

It's been a very interesting twisting and turning kind of journey.

Lots of changes, lots of challenges certainly after 2020, how that changed

the music industry landscape for sure.

But it's been a lot of fun.

That's how Indepreneuer has gotten its start and, and what's

brought us to where we are today.

So give the rundown of, you have kind of different, I would say,

divisions if you will, right.

A Indepreneuer

Sure.

Yep.

and IndieX is a specific side of it.

And so talk a little bit about what IndieX specifically does in

contrast to the collective, I guess.

Sure, Yeah.

absolutely.

Yeah,

is what I always refer to as the agency arm of Indepreneuer.

This is where we specifically are working with artists spans and

their teams on helping them pick up missing e-commerce revenue.

And we're typically working with larger artists, you know, say North.

North of 500,000 fans across social media is usually a kind

of like a baseline metric.

So we're working with established artists that have an audience

that the monetization, the active monetization side of their business

really hasn't been tapped into, or they're looking to scale it further.

And we do that through digital marketing.

so things like paid traffic, paid social media advertising, email

marketing, text marketing, and all of the e-commerce infrastructure

that goes along with those things.

That's really where we build our focus and our strategy.

And then our team executes all of that work for our clients.

So we get to do that at IndieX.

And then the larger additional parts of entrepreneur are on the consulting and

music marketing education side of things.

have Indie Founder, which is a consulting and coaching program where we work

with artists who are, they're getting their footing, maybe not in a position

where agency services make sense for them yet as far as their size, but

they need some help and some strategy.

So our strategists from the agency will come down and work with artists

one-on-one and their teams one-on-one to provide them with, you know, a

direction and a strategy to go after.

And then on the fledgling artist side of things, for artists who are looking

to learn this stuff, maybe build a fan base for the very first time or start to

monetize a fan base that's slowly growing.

We have Indie Pro, which is a community, and it's a training

library as well, where we teach a lot of the same processes that we.

advise on and build for clients at IndieX and Indie Founder, we

teach those same, same processes to artists, same strategies to artists

in a format that makes sense to them.

So we have video trainings, we have workshops and a community

where we do all of that.

So those are kind of like the three divisions of, of Indepreneuer as a whole.

I spend a lot of my time at IndieX and that's kind of what

we've been building all along.

Yeah, so we talk about kind of your size of preference for onboarding.

You know, half a million, let's say, followers across the board and, and I

think to some of us, that sounds like a boatload of people and, and a lot

of listeners, I'm sure going well.

I mean, I don't know what it'd be like to have half a million followers.

I mean,

Yeah.

hard do you think it is for people to build up half a million followers?

And you're talking across all platforms, not just like Facebook has

to have a half a million followers.

TikTok has to have a half.

Right?

Yep.

Yeah.

typically across the board.

How hard is it?

That's a great question.

I don't know if anyone's ever specifically asked it that way.

To me, it's definitely not easy.

I mean by no, by no stretch of the imagination, is it easy to build

up listeners followers, fans?

The biggest, I'll say this, the biggest challenge I think that artists face

right now is when it comes to building up an audience, the first thing that

you need to learn how to do is to create content around your music.

to leverage your music.

The thing that you make in a way that captures pe people's

attention, that stops their scroll, that creates virality, really.

And I don't mean it in like, kind of the trite way of being like, well, you

just need to figure out how to go viral.

What I really mean is you need to

Do that special dance in front of the video.

Right, right.

What I really mean is like you need to go and you need to analyze

what's out there in the wild that are resonating with online.

What's capturing people's attention?

What's stopping the scroll?

What's getting people to pay attention to an artist that might look similar to you?

then take what you see and apply it to your own creative taste and brand find a

way to emulate in, again, a tasteful way.

Mm-hmm.

That same sort of viral appeal and then apply that to your content.

If you can start to learn how to do that consistently, that's how

over time you'll make more stuff consistently that attracts an audience.

And once you do that, once you know how to do that, the cool thing

is, is like you can turn to things like paid advertising online.

You can pour gasoline on the fire to start building up that audience.

And that can happen slowly with viral, uh, slowly without viral moments

or very quickly with viral moments.

And some of that is luck.

Some of that is, you know, perfect timing, lightning in a bottle kind of moments.

And some of it is just like consistency and strategy.

So that's kind of a roundabout way of answering maybe the how hard with

Yeah.

what I would recommend you do.

Mm-hmm.

There's probably a level of

thought process for musicians that I think everybody wants to get that

stuff out there and go viral, right?

Because that's the big thing.

How do we go viral when we're talking specifically social media,

but the research?

Okay, well, how can I create content that will catch on?

I think there's, in my humble opinion, is there's a maybe some disconnect for

artists that are trying to post stuff that, this is what I would like to stop.

This is what I would like, and so therefore everyone

will like it, kind of thing.

Right.

There's a little bit of a, a misinterpretation that

can happen there, I think,

it's really true.

One of the key things I think, is to take yourself out of your own

shoes and try to put yourself.

By way of research into the shoes of your potential fans.

And the reality is, is oftentimes we as artists don't look like our fans.

In some cases we do, but not always.

There's plenty of artists who their fans think, act and like things that

are vastly different from us, you know, and the ability to look at other artists

who might be similar to us is oftentimes like a, a great first starting point

for digging into like, well, okay, what do, what are the fans of these

other artists that have a hunch that their fans might like what I'm about?

Mm-hmm.

What are they digging?

What are they into?

What's capturing their attention?

If you start there, kind of naturally, gently moves you away

from the wondering of like, well, I, I think I would like this.

It's like.

Like anything in marketing, you want to take yourself out of your own

head and try to put yourself in the head of your pot potential customers.

All right, so we mentioned earlier about.

Kind of the feast or famine cycles that people go through and, and

that can be triggered through, like you mentioned, through touring.

We spike and then drop, uh, record sales, record launch, spike, and then drop.

Let's talk about for a minute, how do we level that out a

little bit in our careers?

In IndieX got started a little bit out of this idea to balance

that out a little bit, right?

Help people figure out how do we, how do we level this feast or famine cycle

out a little bit and, and address that

so

I. love this question because it's one of the.

Like founding principles of IndieX as an agency.

And where this idea really came from for us was looking at other businesses

outside of music and seeing specifically like e-commerce businesses and looking

to see like what's going on under the hood of a successful e-commerce business.

And when you look at it, it's always on marketing.

It is consistency in promoting offers and products.

And when we look at that and then compare that to what you often see in

this feast or famine roller coaster of revenue in music for artists,

there are some stark differences to the practices that are done.

And just taking some of those strategies that are deployed by.

Online brands, e-commerce companies, and really lots of, lots of

other kind of businesses as well.

But let's just pick on them and and use their examples.

you take those and you bring them over to music, can do a lot.

Some of the ways that we like to do it is through creating consistent

sales promotion calendars.

So what we're looking at is we're looking at the milestones

throughout an artist year.

It might look like.

Just regular holiday scheduling.

You know, the major holidays that every online business that is successful is

making sure that they hit looking at things as simple as Black Friday, but also

looking at the other holidays throughout the calendar year, looking at holidays

that might be made up to the artist.

The anniversary dates of certain records, the, the band's birthday, the

member's birthdays fan created holidays.

These are all sort of milestones that you can tap into.

Certainly things like pre tour sales promotions, post tour sales promotions.

We love running things like tour blowout sales and things like that.

These are all things that you build into the marketing

calendar for an artist to create.

A bit of stability in revenue because it's active, it's work that you're

actually doing to create that revenue.

You're bringing it into the business as opposed to the more passive

revenue that comes from things like streaming or might come through brand

partnerships or, licensing deals.

are the, these are like active monetization efforts, and when you build

them into a, into a promotional cycle throughout a year or you know, beyond

a year, then that's where you start to smooth out the revenue spikes that happen

with things like album launches or tours.

Mm-hmm.

And, and this is in relation to things like merch, I mean, right.

Get your online store going.

Have plenty of merch options.

Have your supplemental stuff, your, your tour blowout.

I love that.

I love that one.

That's a good one.

definitely the, I mean, the two biggest product categories that I look

towards when it comes to e-commerce for artists really is like physical music

products, CDs, vinyls, you know, even cassettes in some markets, fans are

kind of like ravenous for that sort of

Mm-hmm.

Music memorabilia you might even think of it as well.

And then soft goods, shirts, hoodies, and then there's kind of the intangibles

that can go along with that kind of stuff, where you're adding on value

to your offers by signing things, by making it personalized, by bundling

it with bonus items that might be exclusive to a special offer.

Think about, you know, more of the.

Unscalable sort of personalized merch.

That might be things like set lists from your most recent tour that you're

ripping from the stage, and just keeping off to the side for fans.

That's the kind of stuff that can really create awesome monetization events for an

artist if they choose to utilize it well.

Yeah,

the big two, then that third one is kind of overlaid over them.

there's been a big boost, obviously in vinyls, you know, the vinyl.

Record business has, has boomed man and outsold CDs for the last,

I think three years in a row now.

Yeah.

And that's a big one for people.

If you can, if you can get that done, you know, and, and, and

stock it so you can sell it.

Right.

Obviously, I I, I, I love how this approach is more than I, I think

artists know it, but we don't act on it.

Is, is this is more of a. An afterthought in general, right?

Yep.

I think the primary focus becomes, when it comes to sales, like let's

just call it all merch sales, when it comes to merch sales, it's usually,

oh, at the show, what are we gonna do

Yeah.

and what's that table gonna look like?

And what are we selling at the show, et cetera.

And then go home and that's it,

Yep.

you know?

And I think a lot can be said about having that online store.

And having ways for fans to access that throughout the year.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And there's so much revenue generated through touring for sure.

It's just that there's so much opportunity to be making money

when you are not on tour.

Mm-hmm.

e-commerce that's just left off to the side, like the bare minimum

is often what you see in music.

It's like, oh, I have an online store with maybe a few products

in it, and that's about it.

Sometimes.

Not even that.

I'll tell you an interesting story of about a year and a half

or two years ago, we did a. Study on the billboard, hot 100 Charts.

We did it for about a quarter.

We signed up for the email list of all the artists on the Hot 100.

We visited their stores.

We checked out the advertising that they were running.

We hung out on their mailing list and analyzed our inboxes when emails

were coming through for the things that they were promoting for, the

offers that they were making to their fans, what they were selling.

We looked at their stores to see how well stocked they were,

and some of the data that we got from that was just fascinating.

There were so many artists that you would go to their store and

there was no products on it at all.

Everything was sold out, so the opportunity for them to sell anything

wasn't even there because the most recent products were from their last

album launch six months ago, and there was nothing else for fans to

browse and buy even if they wanted to.

So many artists were not making any efforts to sell anything.

You would sign up to their email list and nothing would happen.

Mm-hmm.

a single email.

And during that time.

Actually, it was really fascinating.

Memorial Day fell during that time here in the States and the, of all the artists

that we signed up for the email list on the hot 100 charts at the time, only

three ran a sales promotion during what is typically a pretty big retail holiday.

And only three of them ran a sales promotion of any kind.

And only one of those three sent more than one email.

when that

Interesting.

my jaw kind of dropped and I was like, man, and these are huge artists, right?

These are massive artists that have big teams behind them spending lots

of money, their money on marketing and not really doing a very good job.

So

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

like that happen, it's, it's kind of validating that this is the,

this has been the pattern in the music industry for a very long time.

And the standard practices that are, that make online businesses strong still.

Aren't being followed, adhered to or even looked at closely at all.

It's really, it's, it's fascinating in some ways.

It, it gives us the principle of feeling like we're, we've

got a mission at Indie X to help

Yeah.

really do the things that they should be doing that can benefit them.

So

Yeah, yeah.

That feels good.

on the flip side, on the other hand of that, like, it

still stings when you see it.

'cause it's like, oh man, like how is this still happening?

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, I think it too, it's important to note for people that.

Having merch, this kind of having an opportunity for fans to purchase things

from you actually might be step two.

Step one is at least get something out there that you're capturing information

Yes.

at least unlike if, if you're doing nothing, at least start capturing that

information so you could utilize it, you know, and then letting people know.

It's so true.

Especially for artists that are starting to grow, right?

Maybe.

Maybe you're someone who, you don't have that 500,000 person audience, right?

And the, and the idea of getting there is daunting.

And it's like, how do I even do that?

That seems really difficult and I don't know.

if I'll ever get there.

Well, let me clue you in on something.

There is plenty of opportunity to build revenue in your music business,

in your career with smaller audiences, but you have to owning the data sooner.

You have to start collecting contact information, having a direct one-to-one

channel where you can communicate with your fans who are potential

customers and your fans that are customers and repeat customers.

Because if you can't do that and you're relying on the social media algorithms to

be able to reach your fans, then you're gonna constantly be at a disadvantage

because that's going to just, the reach is going to keep getting smaller.

Advertising to an audience online is

Okay.

to get more expensive, and the best way to be able to in touch with

your fans to make them offers is through channels like email and text.

It's, that's only going to become more true.

So the sooner that you can start doing that, the better.

Mm-hmm.

You, when we talked before we started recording, you have a good

philosophy, maybe we would call it around growing and growing artists.

How to look at yourself the same way as you would look at any business and

maybe talk about that for a minute.

You know, especially, we've kind of touched on it, but just this idea

of you're, yes, you're doing music.

Yes, that's all you want to do.

If you could help it, just, just focus on the music.

Let somebody else handle the peripherals, you know, that would be ideal.

That's where you wanna get to maybe.

Even some of the best musicians in the world have some business sense.

Yeah.

You have to.

yeah, absolutely.

I think there's two.

Big things that come to my mind these days when I think about

talking with artists about treating, looking at yourself like a business.

There's two facets here that I think are really important, especially for

artists that are getting into getting into the music industry for the first time.

Maybe.

Maybe you're starting to build that audience, or maybe you've got a big

audience and maybe it just happened and you're starting to get attention

from players in the industry.

Managers record labels, people are courting you.

you know about business, going into those kinds of conversations, you are far less

likely to be able to be taken advantage

Mm-hmm.

that's really important.

That's just like any other business.

You don't go into business ventures, partnerships, or

joint ventures or anything.

You don't strike up business deals without knowing about your business,

about what you are doing, knowing your numbers, what's happening,

and trying to have some leverage.

So that's point number one is like.

at yourself like a business and having some business sense and

starting to educate yourself on the business of music is certainly

really important for not getting a bad deal or getting taken advantage

Yeah.

or finding yourself in a position where you have a team and you don't

really know what they're doing, so you don't know if they're doing it well.

And

Hmm.

really important too.

And the second thing, and this is more actually into the building of

business in your music career, is the shift from thinking of your fans.

as fans and starting to think of them as customers because when you make

that transition, suddenly it becomes less about faceless numbers on the

internet and people in a crowd and about customers that you can serve and

figure out ways to provide value to them in the things that you offer and the

experiences that you create in the way that their, that your music and everything

associated with it impacts them.

If you can do that, if you can make that shift, all of a sudden

you're now thinking, what can I be doing next for my fans?

Mm-hmm.

the exchange of value in that?

It's not about transaction being transactional really, but certainly

transactions are inherent in it.

So then you can think about if I wanna make something really cool for my

fans, go back to the vinyl example.

I wanna make really cool vinyl pressings for an anniversary of my first record,

and I wanna limit it to only a certain number and do some really cool exclusive

stuff for a select few of my fans because I know that they will love

it, I can charge money for that and my fans will happily pay money for that.

And I know that about them because they support me.

When you start to think of your fans like customers and not

just like an amorphous audience,

Mm-hmm.

the kind of thinking that that unlocks.

And I think that's a really big shift for artists to make.

Mm-hmm.

Well, I think there's some perspective of maybe perceived disrespect,

for lack of better words, to perceive your fans as customers.

Right, because they're like, oh, but they, they love me and they support me.

And so that's my fan base.

But then to in your head, say, if I start treating them like customers,

I think there's some disconnect that happens that goes well.

I don't feel, I feel, I feel like I'm taking advantage

of now them now in some way.

Right?

Because there's this, now I'm, like you said, making it transactional in a way.

But I think, like you said, it's a good perspective.

Shift that just a little bit, tweak that just a little bit.

And now, instead of not just your customers, how can I serve my customers?

How can I create value, more value for my customers so that they, they

want to keep coming back, right?

And so I'm doing good for my customers.

You're not just treating them like a transactional you know,

peace faceless thing that you're just trying to sell something to

and you don't care about them.

Yeah.

exactly, exactly.

If you truly believe in what you're making and what you're bringing into

the world as a creator, which I think.

Every artist, musician, band does.

They love what they're doing.

Every artist that I've ever consulted with from day one that I've been doing

this, and been a musician my whole life, so I've been talking to musicians

forever about all sorts of things.

From recording to writing songs, to music and playing shows together to marketing.

Every artist that I've ever known or met believes so strongly in the thing

that they're doing and that they think it is not only impacting them, but is

impacting the people that listen to it.

And if you truly believe that, think that when considering the shift from

fan thinking to fan and customer thinking, the worst thing that you

can do for your fans is not to them.

And think to them as a customer, if you really think that what you're making is

impactful and real and valuable to the world, like you're doing a disservice

by not telling your fans about it in as many ways as you can, like you're

holding something back from them, then.

Yeah.

Let's talk for a minute about, you mentioned it sort of in past

the phrase, owning your data and owning your data and fan base.

Let's, let's talk about that for a minute.

What do you mean by that?

What I mean by that is twofold.

One, and I think I mentioned this, like you don't want to be slave to

the social media algorithms, right?

As you build up an audience on Instagram, let's say, right?

You have, you have a million followers, fans on Instagram, that's great.

Instagram could go away tomorrow.

If you have 400,000 listeners on Spotify, that's great.

Can you contact them?

Not easily.

Right, right.

about owning your data, owning your audience, I mean is do you

have ways to reach those people that have become your fans?

And if you don't.

You need to start building up that, that list a, an email list,

a text list, a customer list.

And that goes a little bit further.

There's so many artists out there, especially larger artists who have

had, you know, label deals and managers, and especially throughout

long careers where their data is just segmented all over the place.

Mm-hmm.

party merch company might own their store and they just are licensing it.

And they don't actually own the customer list, so they

can't have it and contact it.

And that becomes really challenging over time.

So that's what I refer to when I'm referring to, like,

owning your and owning your.

Audience is, do you have the ability to retain that information?

If, if all social media went away tomorrow,

Mm-hmm.

a way to get in touch with your fans?

That's like the first question, the simplest way

that I like to think about it.

Certainly it goes way deeper than that about like actually owning,

you know, owning your e-commerce platform, owning the tech that's

built for you, your infrastructure.

Is it actually yours or is it a third party that owns it or something like that.

These are the things that I like to think about and it benefits you

in a number of ways than just the direct to fan side of things as well.

If you have a big email list, I was just talking with one of our clients

recently, one of their managers who was working on a partnership

deal with a big streaming company.

Actually it was like an entertainment streaming company, and he was asking

me, Hey, how big is our email list?

How big is our customer list right now?

need to know because I'm writing this into the deal because it's leverage for us and.

These are also the kinds of things that it's worth considering is like when

you own that data, you have leverage.

When it comes to partnerships, again, this goes back to like not being

taken advantage of in an industry that takes advantage of creators,

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

It's just being, it's being smart about it

for sure.

and, and planning, planning ahead.

Even if you're just starting out.

I think if you can position yourself in a way that you

control your data, so to speak.

As you grow, because everybody wants to be big, right?

So let's just say when you become big, you're already in a position

to control a lot of that data, and like you said, leverage it.

I love that.

Yeah.

I mean, remember the scare when TikTok was getting taken down

Oh my gosh.

and the absolute panic that people were going through because their

livelihoods were going away all of a sudden, and, and it was quite

a thing to see for a little bit.

So I had so many conversations around that time, and it happened twice.

You know, it happened twice that there was the TikTok going

away scare, and it's like, okay.

The second time around, we still haven't learned.

We're still freaking out over here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's get the, get the data

Yeah.

hand, in hand.

Well, let's take that to now streaming a little bit.

Obviously the indu industry has shifted and it's a very heated topic right now.

The, the topic of streaming.

And how artists are getting paid and fair or not, et cetera.

So, but that is, I think, one example of, you know, I

understand it's a means to an end.

We, we, I mean the artists need to do that.

'cause that's where it's, that's the technology we're in right now.

You can't really get around it generally, but.

I guess my question is what are ways you've seen artists utilize.

The direct communication to curb that that cut in income for streaming sales.

Yeah, it's a great question.

I now view streaming as a revenue source, kind of as a necessary evil or a necessary

good, depending on how you look at it, because for artists, especially with

artists with growing or larger fan bases, you will have some baseline of revenue

that comes from streaming, that's good.

That's a good thing that it's there.

position that I often take with it when I. artists is that that

is not an active revenue stream.

It's

Okay.

monetization pathway.

here's an easy way to think about it.

When fans stream your music, they don't really think that they're supporting you.

They don't, there isn't a, there's, they don't know that they're transacting with

you because they're not, are Spotify's customer in this case and not yours.

And so, while I think that streaming is again, a necessary evil or a

necessary good, depending on how you look at it, it provides a

baseline of revenue for many artists.

Maybe not enough artists.

We certainly could have that conversation for sure.

I, I think there's streaming inequity for sure, and I'm, I'm

not the one who's the position to argue how that's going to change or

whether that's ever going to change.

But what I will say is, again, like looking at things like direct to fan,

the difference here is you're going from passive to active, where now

you've got fans that you can contact, whether that's contacting them via your

social media presence, because that's where you, you got 'em right now.

Mm-hmm.

things like your email list, your text list, so on and so

forth, your customer list.

what's cool about direct to direct to fan, direct to consumer is

tomorrow you could go make an offer to those fans and spike your revenue.

Mm-hmm.

can't do the same thing with streaming.

You can't.

You can't create a flood of listeners that will, you know, make you 5,000,

10,000, $20,000 tomorrow with an offer.

You're not going to do that.

And so I don't necessarily say that direct to consumer can beat streaming, but what I

often look to it as is, again, like it's, it's the difference between streaming,

having being a baseline of revenue.

And for some artists it's a lot and that's cool.

I'm glad that it's there for them.

But if it dried up, what are you gonna do about it?

Mm-hmm.

drive a lot of people to streaming to make up for streaming, drying up.

Wouldn't it be just as easy to sell some cool stuff to your fans

and start making revenue actively?

That's the way that I look at it and

Mm-hmm.

advise artists about it.

Mm-hmm.

That really makes me think of the word control.

Yeah.

know, we're constantly, artists are constantly relying on systems

they can't control that they have no control over, let's say,

For sure.

you know, so you're constantly putting yourself in a position of.

Environments you cannot control.

Now, some of it's the nature of the game, but in this context it's how,

again, how do you start pivoting into positions that you can control?

How do you start building internal systems for income and, and money management?

And that helps keep you in control, right?

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

talk about that with finances too.

You know, when, when I talk to artists about finances, since this is about

a podcast about money in the music industry, you know, when, when I

sit down with artists and have these conversations about finance, we have that

very same conversation and it's about, look, where are we placing our money?

Not, not what are we doing to produce income?

It's different, a little bit of a different conversation, but where are

we placing the money we've now made,

Yeah,

you know.

We do the same thing.

We start placing it into vehicles that we don't really have control over.

We start going, oh, let's put it in some high risk investment.

Well, you have no control over what happens, you know?

Or on the flip side, let's start leveraging debt.

Bad debt.

We start using debt.

Well, who could, who's in control of your money?

Now, the bank,

yeah, yeah.

let's see if we can position you in a, in a spot where you actually

have control over your finances.

It's

you can.

of the same sys systems coin.

Yeah,

it really is.

It really is.

Let's talk for a second about advice or stories you may have for artists

and their teams who are looking to get off the revenue rollercoaster.

Just some very, here's some very basic things.

Let's talk about the guys, let's, let's compartmentalize it a little bit.

Let's talk about the guys.

As you might put it, maybe under the half a million followers kind of thing.

They're building.

You're growing.

But I would argue also that maybe even having less followers under a

half a million isn't necessarily an indicator of how good your music is.

Right?

It's not a.

Oh no.

Not at all.

How successful you are, even per se.

No,

an indicator of your online marketing perhaps, or your online presence.

Definitely, it might just be a matter of like how far along you are.

You

Yeah.

you haven't, you're building towards a critical mass of audience, but you're

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

A few tactical things that I think worth considering for artists of all size to

think about when it comes to this feast and famine revenue roller coaster that I

would look at generally speaking is like if you're an artist or an artist manager

and you're thinking about your artist and you're wondering, okay, I've got

this baseline, I've got streaming revenue coming in, we're doing some touring.

Maybe it's starting to make a little bit of money, or it's breaking even.

What can we be doing on this level of, of active monetization efforts?

What can we start thinking about?

The first place that I would look to is first I would look at

and, and I consider like three.

Es of

audience growth and development for artists.

And those fall into three categories.

It's getting attention, capturing attention, mon monetizing attention,

and for artists that are growing and starting to get momentum, to be

thinking about and kind of auditing that I would recommend, or what are

you doing to capture the attention of the audiences that you've been getting?

And then what are you doing to monetize it?

So yourself, what am I doing?

Have I been doing, and could I be doing to build up direct contact with my fans?

That might look like, do I have a strategy in place for.

Just DMing my fans, getting into the messages with them on social media.

One way to do it, going hand to hand.

What do I have happening to build up a subscriber list on email and on text?

What are you doing to make that happen?

These are the kind of things when it comes to capturing attention.

Additionally with that is like, what kind of consistency are you bringing to your

online presence beyond just getting the attention viral moments and content that

you know stops people from scrolling.

Are you a ghost town apart from that stuff online?

Are you going live?

Are you posting consistently?

Are you using stories effectively to communicate what you're doing in the day

to day so that once someone has enough interest to possibly become a fan, do

they have a reason to stick around?

That all falls into like the capturing attention, owning

your data side of things.

And then on the monetization side of things I think you bring up a really

great question there, Jason is like.

When ask yourself just this simple question like, when's the last time

that I actually went out and tried to make a sales offer to my fans?

Mm-hmm.

Ask yourself that and maybe just put on the slate.

Like, this quarter I'm going to to make three direct sales offers to my fans.

Mm-hmm.

your store, a product that you're dropping, piece of merch, a reissue

of a record reusing variants of your most recently released record.

I'll share an example with you guys, with a client about a client

that we brought on at the agency a, a number of years ago who.

Was a fairly popular artist, had a big, had a big audience and a, and a career in

like losing rock, but really didn't have too much going on on the e-commerce front.

We helped him scale that with paid traffic for his releases.

But what was really interesting how we helped him to tap into, again, getting

off the revenue rollercoaster a little bit of taking soft goods and vinyl variants

of his record that was continuing to sell for a long album cycle taking,

you know, okay, this quarter it's going to be red and blue vinyl variants.

We're gonna sell those to the fans next quarter it's gonna be black

and white vinyl variants and a new t-shirt designed to go along with it.

These are the sorts of things that you start to look at, how can I maximize

the use of my existing products?

That, which I know is something that a lot of artists that

are coming up struggle with.

It's like.

just released a record.

I don't have another one in the can, so like, what am I supposed to do?

I know this thing isn't old yet.

These are the ways that you think about your offers and slightly varying them,

making them a little bit different, then marketing them again, and you get

fans into a collector's kind of mindset.

Then this works really, really well.

These are the kinds of things that I would be thinking about.

Any, what have you seen in your career for artists?

What are their top selling kind of products out there?

Physical music, products, CDs, vinyl cassettes, CDs and vinyl.

Definitely being the leaders of that.

are strong.

Those

Mm-hmm.

want to, when music is released and when music is being toured on and fans are

discovering, want to hold tangible things.

And that is still the case to this day, and people are always

surprised when I tell them that.

But so much of the revenue that's generated by our clients is from physical

music products, which is awesome.

I'm

Yeah.

happy that that's the case.

Yeah.

and then it's followed by merch soft goods, t-shirts, hoodies, stuff that sells

on tour, sells really well online as well.

Those are like the two big categories.

Has there been any particular merch that kind of has risen

above the rest that you've seen?

Or, or maybe one that caught you off because you're like, I didn't

expect that, but this is a wildly good seller for across the board.

Man, that's a great question.

There's not one, there's not one in particular that comes to mind.

Like I, I couldn't come to you and say like, Yeah.

hoodies just blow me away.

Like, I had

Yeah.

that hoodies would sell so well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

some stories.

I'll share a specific story that I think is really interesting.

There was a band that we work with at the agency that when they were going back on

tour for the first time after the COVID Pandemic, this was around like 20, 22

ish, I wanna say like mid 20, 22 ish.

They were going back on tour for the first time and we promoted a

merch drop for a T-shirt design.

That was their back.

It was gonna be like their back on tour tee and.

weren't going to sell it on the road, and fans ate that up online

because they were gonna go out to the shows anyway and buy merch.

But the fact that there was something being withheld only being sold

exclusively this way, people just loved it and they flooded right to it.

So, I say that to say less to do with the type of merch and more to do with

the way that the offer is presented.

Hmm.

have something that you are, if you have something that you can

offer in an exclusive way, using scarcity, using exclusivity,

Mm-hmm.

uh, urgency, limiting the numbers, all of that, the, all the elements

that make up a strong offer, if you can use that online and potentially

withhold it so that it really does, so that it actually is exclusive.

These guys did not have these shirts on the road,

Mm-hmm.

were really excited about it.

When you can create great offers around your products, it doesn't really matter

whether it's a shirt or a t-shirt a shirt or a hoodie or shorts or hats.

All of it can work really, really well.

It's

Yeah.

positioning.

Have you seen much success with.

The autographed products.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Yes, 100%.

Especially autographed and personalization, kind of stuff

works really, really well.

I actually think that artists criminally under price their autographed products.

If there's any advice that I could give to artists that are autographing records or

merch, you should raise your prices on it

Mm-hmm.

99% of the time, and

Mm-hmm.

your fans off,

Mm-hmm.

espec, especially that it's actually you doing the autographing and

you're making it cool for your fans and it's not junk you should

probably raise your prices on it.

I see.

I like a couple years ago, we were working with a. A really awesome rapper

at the agency and a huge audience.

And I remember he said to us like, I don't really know if fans would

even care to buy a signed cd.

And we were like, dude, of course they would.

Of course

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think artists don't think enough of themselves in that way.

They really should.

It

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I think also don't be afraid to try.

You know,

Oh my gosh,

the worst that happens is, I mean, you do a small run of something and

try it out, and if it flops, it flops, or your timing sucked, or right.

There's so many variables.

There are so many variables.

And this is something that I think paralyzes artists from

doing even the word flop.

Like artists hear that and you, the, you know, the hair on their

arms goes up and they're like, flop.

That's scary.

But here's something that I think is worth considering when it comes

to your marketing and specifically selling to your fans, but really any

kind of offers that you're making, releases that you're doing, launches.

You'll learn as you go.

So when something doesn't perform to the level that you wanted it

to, you go back and you look at what, what exactly did we do?

What were we expecting?

What didn't happen, and why do we think it didn't happen?

You go through what we call a postmortem process at the agency of

unpacking what exactly happened in a marketing campaign and what could

we be doing differently next time.

This is a process that we run with all of our clients.

Whenever we run a sale, whenever we do an album launch when we market a tour,

literally anything that we do with our clients, we'll run postmortems on it to

see what could we do better next time?

Did it hit the goals?

Did it not hit the goals?

How could we change it?

What went well?

What could we do again?

And if you do that, nothing is really a failure, then it's

just a learning opportunity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And to add onto that, I mean it, it was said, but even when you see something

that happened very successfully, still it's beneficial to go back and review

what, how can we do even better?

Yeah,

Even if it went so good, great.

Don't change a thing, or could we tweak it and improve it a little bit, you know?

And it's, it's really good to catalog the wins and know what went well, so

that next time around you can remind yourself, Hey, we did this really well.

Let's use the playbook again and make it a little bit better.

This is super important because artists forget and their teams forget about what

worked, and then you do something that didn't, wouldn't quite work as well.

And you wonder why it didn't work as well.

So, yeah, it's important to, it's important to catalog and

analyze the wins and the things that did go well, just as much

Mm.

to catalog the things that didn't go well.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Well, there's so much good stuff here.

I wanna give people a way to reach out, to check out what

you guys have going on online.

So how can people see what's going on at Indepreneur at IndieX and touch base?

Yeah, thank you.

If you are an artist that has a big old fan base?

and you're hearing what Jason and I are talking about today and wondering

how can I monetize this better, how can I build these e-commerce systems?

We'd love to hear from you.

You can learn more about IndieX at indepreneur.io/about-indiex.

You can check out what we do there.

There's an application if you wanna reach out to talk to us.

We'd love to hear from you.

If you're interested in just learning about this stuff and everything else that

we do at Indepreneuer and how you might be able to learn or get some strategic help

from us, you can go to indepreneur.io, check out Indie Pro, check out Indie

Founder, which is our consulting level, and we've got a bunch of resources there.

You can also follow us on Instagram @Indepreneuer.

You can follow me on Instagram.

I'm always on there talking about this kind of stuff, and

you can feel free to DM me.

I don't bite.

It's true.

It

yeah.

I'm at @theatlasjack.

And then if you want, there's also our podcast Creative Juice, where

Circa and I are talking about music marketing topics every single week.

So there's free resources there as well.

If you want to learn more about what's going on at kind of the cutting edge of

music marketing, and those are all the places you can find us, depending on.

where you're at and what you're looking for.

Yeah, so they're pretty hard to not find.

I'll say.

We try to, we try to be out there.

We're, we're, and we're gonna put all of these links in the show

notes wherever you're listening or watching, on this podcast.

So that'll all be there for you guys as well.

Well, Jack, thanks so much for sharing a little bit of your

playbook and what you guys do.

I think there's a lot of good information in there.

I think there's so much value in what you guys offer, you know, 'cause

musicians would get, they get focused on just the music side, right.

And we need to learn to build up the business side a little bit as well.

And I think this is.

One of the backbones of building up that business, especially

in today's day and age.

So I, I love what you guys are doing out there.

Oh, thank you so much for having me, man.

This was a blast.

Thanks for the great questions and the great conversation.

Yep.

Listeners, we covered a lot today around four big problems

in the feast or famine cycle.

You know, we talked about looking at your music as a business, maybe

some of the streaming that pays slowly and how to sub that out and

relying on systems you do not control.

So if you want help building the direct to fan side, checkout Jack and his team.

We'll put links in the show notes and you will find it there.

And when it comes to what you do with the money you do make, check out my free

ebook, A Musician's Guide to Infinite Banking at 1024wealth.com/music.

You will learn how to keep money accessible, keep it growing and

compounding smooth out that feast or famine season with the money you have and

self-fund releases, tours, gears on your own timeline and we do wanna talk through,

book a call with me and we'll chat and help you navigate that way forward.

So meanwhile, subscribe on your favorite podcast app.

Share this with one musician who needs to hear it.

And until next time, keep your money working and your music moving, Jack.

Thanks again.

Thanks, Jason.