JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Why Free Music?

Let's take a quick look at that article (note, ezine is not necessarily the best source for quality business advice).

In part 1 of 4 it says: "Do a favor to your business; start thinking how you can better serve your customers by selling more products." <-- selling more product. And this I'll agree with.

In part 2 of 4: "Your existing customers are more inclined to do more business with you than some complete strangers. They know you and have used your products or services before. This is why you should consider giving them more products, rather than to some people that you don't know. Your conversion rate will be better." <-- give stuff to current customers rather than new ones. Interesting, DRS wants to give stuff to people he doesn't know, then sell to the ones he does.

In part 3 of 4: "Offering more backend products to your existing customers will build trust with them, which enable you to provide more products to them in the future, once they have experienced success with your offering. Being a successful marketer, it is all about serving your customers better with more tailor-made products or services in a form of solution, but then it's outside of the scope of this article." <-- What are your "more backend products" if you've given your main product away? But then this is outside the scope of the author of the article.

In part 4 of 4: "Offering huge discounts via your backend products provides you a good opportunity which re-engages your previous customers. You may not realize, but inactive customers are your best prospects. Though they might not be buying from you recently, but if they purchase from you before, they are just an email or phone call away from purchasing from you again." <-- actually I agree with this, I do run specials with fans in case they don't have back catalog and want to buy. However the key word in that statement from the article is "purchase".

Unless you have huge capital to work with, giving away the product is just bad business if you don't stop and actually start charging for it. No one stays in business doing it.

I never wrote that I know everything. I'm writing that free business isn't a business at all - that's a hobby. Making money as a profit off Intellectual Property, i.e. music, is business. I will agree that many songwriters/artists are adverse to business. But when they're not familiar with a business plan and start pontificating about how a business should be run, having never done any research about it, well yeah, I'm gonna shoot holes in the theories.

Show me one musician that gave their music away for free being able to be living off it, and I'll show you a plethora musicians that have a different day job away from music because of doing that.