Music Creator Roadmap - Part 3 - The Creative Artist

Welcome to part 3 of the Music Creator Roadmap breakdown. If you have not read parts 1 & 2, be sure to check them out here. 

Now let’s dive into the second path on the roadmap - the ‘Creative Artist’. 

Here’s the flowchart again so that we can reference it as we go along:

I’ll start by restating this simple way to understand the three paths that you can choose on the Music Creator Roadmap:

• The Touring Performer makes their living on the stage.

• The Creative Artist makes their living online.

• The Writer Producer makes their living in the studio.

Each of the three paths represents a different business model. By identifying and understanding the best business model for you, you are able to prioritize growing the revenue streams that are most important to your path.

In other words, this is how you identify a path to making money in a way that is uniquely suited to your strengths and interests.

Here are a few reasons why you might choose the path of the Creative Artist:

• You are excited when presenting newly finished works of art (ie. records & content) to the world.

• You have a knack for social media and content creation.

• You don’t want your income to be dependent on touring all the time.

• You have a lot of creative ideas for ‘brand extensions’ and potential products you would like to sell to your audience.

In case you are not familiar with the idea of brand extensions, here is a definition for you:

The key strategy with this business model is to get really good at growing your brand online, which, as a music creator, will generate predictable passive income from music streaming DSPs, YouTube videos, and other platforms that help you monetize your audience.

Here’s a goal for indie artists who want to make a living from their streaming income:

The math here is based on the payouts of Spotify ($0.003-0.005 per stream), plus the payouts you will get from all of the other streaming platforms combined (including YouTube if you are releasing videos regularly).

If you want to learn more about how to generate significant money from streaming, be sure to read ‘Scaling Your Music Money Machine’.

After you have grown your social and streaming audience to a significant level, you can begin leveraging ‘brand extensions’ to make money in other ways.

To demonstrate how powerful and lucrative brand extensions can be, let’s look at one of the masters, the 24 year old Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson).

Here’s an excerpt from a recent article by Forbes:

Not only is Mr. Beast making millions just from Youtube, his brand extensions are making tens of millions more on top of that.

But it must be hard right?

Yes. Everything worth having is hard to get. The point here is not to give you a shortcut, but to give you a glimpse of how huge an online creator business model can get.

In the music industry we often hear things like:

That is an old-school music industry mindset.

If you are creative, good at marketing, and play the long game, there is no limit to how big you can get or how much money you can make from the Creative Artist business model.

Let’s unpack that last statement and list out the top three characteristics you need to succeed with this business model:

1. You MUST be CREATIVE.

This probably goes without saying, but let’s break it down a little bit. To be a great Creative Artist, you must create high quality work frequently. Your career as a Creative Artist will be driven by your ‘Productive Quality Output’ or ‘PQO’.

Productive Quality Output (PQO), as popularized by Brendan Burchard, refers to the concept of consistently delivering high-quality work that is both efficient and effective. PQO emphasizes the importance of focusing on tasks that truly matter and produce meaningful results, rather than getting caught up in busywork or low-value activities. Burchard encourages individuals to prioritize their time and energy on tasks that align with their goals and values, ensuring that their output is not only productive but also of the highest quality. By adopting PQO principles, individuals can optimize their performance and achieve greater success in their personal and professional lives.

Your calendar should reflect your commitment to PQO. You must schedule big blocks of creative time so that you can consistently deliver new works.

2. You MUST become a GREAT MARKETER.

If you choose the Creative Artist path, marketing will be your number one business skill. Just embrace it. The Music Creator Roadmap devotes a huge section to marketing, which I will cover in future posts. But if you need a place to get started, check out the ‘Top Music Marketing Hacks’ that I posted on the HOME website.

3. You MUST play the LONG GAME.

This is really a theme for all three paths, because it is a theme for entrepreneurship in general. When you envision major achievements, you often think on a 10-20 year timeline. So, let’s go back to Mr. Beast and check out a graphic that shows how long it took him to really blow up:

As you can see from the graph, it took him 7 years to get to about 30K subscribers on YouTube, but the next year he hit a million!

It took him 5 years to even get a thousand subscribers. The vast majority of people would have just given up at that point (or earlier).

The key takeaway here, is that your audience (and streaming money) hits a point where you get compounding growth effects.

Compounding growth in the context of online audience growth and streaming revenue refers to the phenomenon where the growth of these two factors creates a feedback loop or ‘virtuous cycle’, resulting in exponential growth over time.

As an online audience grows, more people are exposed to the content being streamed, leading to increased viewership and engagement. This, in turn, attracts more advertisers and sponsors, generating higher streaming revenue. With the additional revenue, content creators can invest in improving the quality of their content and expanding their reach, which further attracts a larger audience. This cycle continues, creating a compounding effect where audience growth and streaming revenue reinforce each other, ultimately leading to significant and sustained growth in both areas.

For more thoughts on how to grow your music career with long term strategic thinking, be sure to check out ‘The Number One Reason Most Artists Fail’.

Here’s a final thought:

There are more tools and platforms than ever before that you can use to make music, content, and products that you can monetize online. And the platforms (like FB, IG, TikTok, Spotify, YT) all want to make it as easy as possible for you to find your audience. They create lots of tutorials to help you learn the ad engines and current growth techniques.

There are no gatekeepers on this path, but there are allies that you should be looking for. HINT: This is why the arrow points from the Creative Artist to the Distributor. But lots of these types of creators are building big careers without any sort of traditional music industry team.

There is nothing stopping you from building a HUGE career as a Creative Artist, other than your own creativity ;)