Music Business For Dummies
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Sponsorships and endorsements are a necessary part of the music business, so you will need to be prepared. Whether it’s a summary in your pitch letter or having links and basic information added or ready to send upon request, have your best and most professional promotional materials ready to go.

Whether they are direct website links to easy-to-understand pages or a short link with a description for that link, have all your materials easily accessible with simple links or descriptive links so that people know exactly where they’re going and what they should expect to see when they land there.

Ask your website designer about re-direct links and vanity URLs for your promotional items. With these, you can give simple links in endorsement pitches as well as booking and a number of other promotional items, song links, reviews, and other marketing materials. There are also websites like the Google URL shortener that can shorten an existing link for you and enable you to track how many people clicked through it.

Samples, footage, promo items, press, and reviews

Many of the same materials for booking, reviews, and other solicitations can be used for potential endorsers and sponsors. Never give someone a website or a social media page unless that’s all they ask for. Give them the links to the key information in the website that they want to see or a direct link to a video that showcases a great live performance rather than giving someone your YouTube channel and saying is the video’s on there.

Not every company requests it, but have the following materials prepared as well as the links to these materials readily and easily available:

  • Audio samples to your songs both from recordings and live

  • Video samples of your shows and other promo videos

  • Press kit samples including links to your promotional materials

  • Reviews and press links to stories, interviews, and articles about you

This helps a potential endorser or sponsor get a better idea about what you do and how they can benefit by aligning with you.

Testimonials, professional bullets, and achievements

The next bits of useful information are testimonials from former sponsors and other endorsers, if you have them. Testimonials from management, booking agents, venue owners, as well as festival producers and larger-scale acts that you may have worked with are also helpful. This isn’t material that you’d use online to promote to fans; this is more the type of material used specifically for potential endorsers, sponsors, and even investors.

In a sense, it’s sharing about the way you practice business over the way you practice and showcase the creative. If you don’t have these types of testimonials, start asking for and collecting them now.

Achievements can include big opening-act spots, features on TV shows, radio programs, and other larger-scale media. They can also include tours you’ve been on and even the list of students you teach, or presentations for schools or music programs. It might not seem very rock-star-like, but certain teachers, both online and in music programs, can find lower-level endorsements because companies cater to students who could in turn buy the same equipment they use in class.

Sharing your total sales of music both online and off as well as other numbers including Alexa Rankings from your website can help showcase both your sales and visibility. Your Alexa ranking can tell just how often your website is being visited and its number in popularity of all the websites out there. You can find the Alexa ranking for your website by downloading the SEO Tool from Google Chrome. This also easily allows you to see the rankings for others sites.

Backlinks for Google as well as your Google page rank can give potential partners a real sense of how many people see you on a given day. The number is more reputable than Twitter figures because you can buy followers on Twitter. You can’t buy your Alexa ranking or your Google Page ranking. Those have to be earned when people actually go to your pages.

Companies. They’ve heard it all before and they hear it every day. Stay away from coming off too arrogant and avoid claiming how you’re new, unique, different, innovative, changing the game, and other overused words and phrases. These are good ways to turn off those who want to help you.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Loren Weisman is a music business consultant, speaker, and author who has been a part of over 700 albums. He also maintains TV production credits for three major networks and has served as a media consultant for many businesses in and out of the arts and entertainment fields. Loren is an executive producer and co-creator of Leveraging Smart, a new reality business TV show airing in 2016.

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