It doesn’t matter what genre your music falls under. If you intend to make money from your music, you will need to have a business plan. There are several reasons for this. These include…

• If you fail to plan, you are effectively planning to fail.
• The business plan is your road map to success.
• If you intend to seek funding from a bank or other ogranization, they will require a business plan if you are applying for finance.
• You will have a greater understanding of your current business and what needs to be done immediately.
• …and you will have a greater understanding of what needs to be done in the forthcoming days, weeks, months and years.

As you can now see that the business plan is a vital component to the success of your business.

In our business plan I am going to give you guidance as to what you need first, but I am also going to use Krannaken as an example. This is because Krannaken is my own music business. Therefore, it is not a fictional example, but a real-life example of a real music business.

Your Summary

In academic writing, you would summarize an essay at the end. However, in a business plan, you need to summarize your entire business in a few short paragraphs at the beginning. These sentences need to include your goals and inspirations. Furthermore, if you have already started your business, you also need to state what you have done and what your achievements have been so far.

The summary of your business plan also needs to include your mission statement. However, this should be at the end of the summary. Your mission statement needs to include your values, purpose and overall goals.

Your goals neeed to be small easy-to-reach milestones but can add up to the achievement of something far greater. When you look back on your accomplishments, you will be able to do so with pride. Therefore, your business plan allows you to do just that!

Krannaken – Summary and Mission Statement

With Krannaken, our summary and mission statement could look like this…

Our Summary

Krannaken is an electronic dance music duo from Birmingham, England. We exist to produce our own music and help other producers all over the world in the production and marketing of their music.

Our inspirations are from what we call the “trance boom” of the late 1990s. Such music includes both instrumental tracks and songs, although the former is what we aspire to the most. Such inspiration comes from tracks like Cafe Del Mar by Energy 52 and William Orbit’s version of Adagio For Strings.

We have already released a lot of our music. This can be found on all good music streaming and retail sites.

Achievements so far have included three number one’s on the Hypeddit psytrance charts. They were all achieved in 2019.

Our Mission Statement

We continuously aim for better music production in our music. As firm believers in life-long learning, we see that adopting a forever student mindset, we can continue to improve our music all the time.

We also aim to serve the wider trance family. This is not only with our own music but also with the music of other producers. To a large extent, this is why we keep a blog.

Our immediate goals are to keep our track, Popcorn, at the top of the Hypeddit charts for as long as possible. At the time of writing, PopCorn has been at number one for two weeks.

Your Purpose

Your purpose, otherwise known as your “Why” is your reason for doing what you do. Everyone has a burning desire for something. Many people want to earn more money, but money in itself is not a sufficient purpose. If money is your reason, what do you want to do with money. What will it allow you to do? If you had $1 million, what would you do with it?

How to Find Your “Why”

To find your “why” you need to do the following…

1. Draw up a list of things you want to accomplish in your life. Remember these are business goals, so may not be personal accomplishments. However, they can work towards your personal life as a consequence.
2. Write all your personal goals like paying off debts and more enjoyable things such as holidays, your dream lifestyle, or buying your own studio.
3. What are the indirect consequences of the things in your list? What will they allow you to accomplish? For instance, the consequences of the things in our list would be that working as artists from home would allow us to spend more time with our families.

Example Business Plan For An EDM Artist Click To Tweet

What is Our Why For Krannaken?

A list of the business goals that we need to accomplish for Krannaken, would be….

• Our biggest goal for Krannaken is to make a profit in the first year
• Other business aims are more email subscribers and website visitors
• We will accomplish this by producing one good business plan per week and promoting it the other four days of the week.
• I will use Tailwind and purchase an annual subscription to Tailwind as soon as possible.
• We will grow our Facebook page and have more engagement in the content we share there.

Although I could guess at what Everhald would want for his personal life, I cannot stay for sure. Therefore, I will only answer this for myself. What would I want to be able to do in my personal life? Well, there is quite a lot that I would like to be able to do. This would include…

• Move back to my childhood town and purchase my own detached house there.
• Purchase a self-drive Google car so that I can get around more easily.
• Employ my unemployed family and friends to do whatever jobs I can find for them.
• Purchase my own Endless Swimming Pool.
• Purchase a home for my mum

The indirect consequences of my personal goals would be…

• There could be more time to spend with childhood friends
• I wouldn’t have to rely on public transport whenever I wanted to travel anywhere.
• My family and friends could be happier.
• I could keep fit and feel like a much younger and more physically able person.
• My mum could be happy in her own home.

Goals

The idea here is to think BIG. What is your dream life? It also helps to keep milestone markers for your goals. Each of these milestones should add up to something big. Let’s have a look at our goal over the different time markers below…

Krannaken’s Goals

6 Months

In six months time, our goals are to…

• Have a profit of at least £2,500 per month
• David has to be off the welfare state and earning a full-time income from his music.
• David and Everhald will be able to invest all the profit back into the business.

1 Year

In one year, we will have accomplished

• Both David and Everhald will have their own property
• We will hire out a bedsit in Halesowen, West Midlands that will be used as a recording studio
• David, Catherine and Connor will have had a lovely holiday in Norway.
• Everhald will do what Everhald wants to do. He will have more money now.
• Both David and Everhald will have an income from music of £2,500 per month.
• David will have an income from property of an additional £1,500 per month.

5 Years

In five years, we will have achieved the following…

• We will own our own studio and it will be full of various music production technology.
• Catherine and David will have monthly date nights out to concerts every month.
• David and his family will be living in Kenilworth, Warwickshire in a five-bedroom mansion.
• There will be an will have an endless pool fitted in the house
• David and Catherine will have their own en-suite, walk-in shower room.
• Connor will be going to a private school in Kenilworth.
• David and his family will enjoy international holidays to wherever they want 4 times per year.
• David and his family will own a lodge on the shores of a fjord in Norway.
• Everhald will do whatever Everhald wants to do. He will be wealthy enough.

Why Did We Just Look at Our Goals?

It is widely believe that you can materialise whatever you want in your life. This can be wealth, health, happiness. It could be as simple as a week in the Maldives or as long-lasting as an entire lifetime of doing anything you choose. The following video gives you more information on the power of positive thinking…

Competitive Analysis

Until this point, our plan has been fairly straightforward. However, our competitive analysis forces us to look at our competitors, see what their strengths and weaknesses they have. We also look at opportunities we have available to us and the threats our competitors pose to our success.

These four components: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats are drawn up in a four-part table with four boxes in a square shape. It is known as the SWOT Analysis.

In order to find your key competitors, you need to Google the type of business you hope to run. In our case it is EDM artists. However, this does not cover everything about us. For instance, are we touring artists, production music library artists, etc? You need to Google terms like, “EDM production music artists” and other such terms.

This will help you determine what you’re up against and what area’s your competitors may not be taking advantage of.

Krannaken – Competitive Analysis

I have put together a SWOT Analysis of Bedroom Producers Blog here…

Unique Selling Point or Unique Selling Proposition

Our USP could be our visual disabilities. Not having full eyesight, you tend to focus more on what you can hear. Therefore, our music is of a higher quality.

There are some great alternative blogs in music marketing that we could look to for ideas. Here is a list of 8 great music marketing blogs.

Example Business Plan For An EDM Artist Click To Tweet

What is our niche and who are our target customers?

Your niche is your area of the market. What products or services do you intend to provide? Are you also a touring artist? Do you sell sample packs, presets or library music? Furthermore, how far afield do you travel to put on your shows? Do you travel all over the world or just to your local area?

Now, describe your typical customer. Are your fans of any particular age group? Are they male or female? What else do they like to do? Which other artists do they listen to? What is their financial situation?

Krannaken’s Niche and Target Customer

Our niche is the music marketing niche. Therefore, we are targeting music artists who have some experience of creating or producing their own music and are now looking for ways to market and promote the finished product.

Our average customers would be men between the ages of 18 and 40. They may be music students, music industry professionals or just aspiring musicians with some skills and understanding of music production.

Promotion and Marketing

How do you promote your music? What distribution channels do you use? Are you an independent artist or are you signed to a record label? Furthermore, how do you plan to promote your business to new and existing fans? What marketing and promotion channels do you use?

Krannaken’s Promotion and Marketing Strategy

This post will show you how we promote and market our business. As you can see, we obviously blog too. When we release new music we will also pay for a promotion campaign through Spotify. The last time we did this, we paid something like $25 and generated 1,500 streams. This is not too bad. Plus, a lot of those people also stuck around and still listen to our music today. It has meant the difference between 10 monthly listeners and 80 monthly listeners who regularly listen.

We promote our blog mainly through social media such as Facebook and Pinterest. However, we are always looking for new ways to market our music to a wider audience.

Funding and Finance

Another consideration you need to include is also how you intend to fund and finance your music? How do you intend to fund your music business? Where will you get capital from. You may be looking for ways in which to raise extra needed funds to buy new hardware, software or just to furnish your home studio.

How do you intend to make money? Will you be gigging? Do you also think merchandising may be a good way to raise capital? Have you got a wide circle of friends who can share your business with others? Or, will you be selling sample packs, stems, templates or presets?

Krannaken’s Funding and Finance

A lot of our initial funding came in from student funding. I have bought both guitars and keyboards from my student funding. My PC and machines like my samplers, AKAI Fire and that sort of thing came from student funding too. I pay a lot of our marketing funds from my general living expenses pot. However, as Everhald and I are both registered as self-employed, we can generate some funding back from the government.

Example Business Plan For An EDM Artist Click To Tweet

Monetisation Plan

There are several ways that you need to consider monetizing your music. Some of these are not even directly as a result of your music. Some are a result of your blogging and also what you intend to do with your blog? Different ways of monetising your entire business include…

• Affiliate marketing
• Fan Club membership
• Patreon support
• Selling samples, presets, templates, etc.
• Gigging on Stageit.com
• Gigging at private functions
• Writing production music library material
• Merchandising
• Fiverr gigs
• Producing online video courses

…the list goes on.

Create an Action Plan to Reach Your Goals

How do you intend to achieve your goals? What do you intend to do today to start the ball rolling? Furthermore, how much time do you have to work towards your goals? What is your time frame?

Krannaken’s Action Plan

I intend to produce one track each week that will be added to our music library. This will be non-exclusive libraries. Non-exclusive means that I am free to share the same track with different libraries and also be paid time and again for the same piece of work.

Once I have built up six years worth of production music library content, I will be able to retire – but I probably won’t want to.

I also intend to blog about subjects relating to music marketing and produce one blog post each week. I have been a little slow over this, this week as I am right now fighting off gastroenteritis.

Create a Schedule and Stick to it

Ok, so as I just said, I am currently fighting off gastroenteritis. I have been in too much pain and sickness to keep up with my plan. The original plan was to publish this post yesterday. However, there will be times when you need to take a back seat. There will be times when you need to rest. Therefore, take those times. You can write a little sentence to explain yourself later. However, the beautiful thing about working for yourself is that you are not forced to quit your job if you can’t get to work. You can simply start up where you left off.

One good thing to do is also to time block all your time. State what you are going to be doing at 10am tomorrow or 5pm next Tuesday. Then you should try to stick to it. Remember, you need rest time as well as work time. Don’t work all the hours or you will just experience burnout. If you like to read or watch the soccer, you should block time off to do that.

Try Not to Procrastinate

At one point or another we are all guilty of procrastination. This is because we all check our email, our Facebook, the latest scores in the soccer. Furthermore, we all eagerly wait for something at some time and refresh the browser if we don’t get it. This process of refreshing your browser constantly can take a long time. This process if just another way to procrastinate.

Example Business Plan For An EDM Artist Click To Tweet

Make Time For Continued Professional Development

In other words, make time for your own learning. It is a vital step to spend time and money on your own learning so that you are increasing your self value. When you do increase your self value, you are not only more valuable for yourself. You are also more valuable for everyone around you in both your business and your personal life.

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