089 – How to Make Monthly Recurring Revenue as a Musician – with Brian Poillucci of EVO Band Apps

Musicians must start from scratch every single month. Streams, music sales, merch sales, and paid gigs rarely happen on autopilot, and must be actively pursued. But what if there was a way to generate a predictable monthly income without having to chase after it? In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I chat with Brian Poillucci of EVO Band Apps, who shares about the power of his new app that can help you monetize your music like never before. Download the PDF Transcription Podcast Highlights: 00:14 – Introductions 00:24 – What is EVO Band Apps? 03:58 – We’re all in the content business now 08:31 – Relationship marketing 13:35 – The recurring business model 16:40 – Building your email list 18:25 – Automating fan engagement 21:35 – What monetization opportunities are musicians missing out on? 28:07 – Affiliate marketing 31:57 – Creativity and business: are they in conflict? 33:51 – Musicians will buy what they perceive as being essential to their career 35:35 – Final thoughts Transcription: David: All right. Today, I'm chatting with founder of EVO Band Apps, Brian Poillucci. How are you today Brian? Brian: Doing really good. How are you doing, man? David: I'm doing great. Thank you for asking. Let's get right into this. What is EVO Band Apps? Brian: Oh, well, that’s kind of a long story in itself. Long story really is I am a digital marketer by trade but really, I'm just a guitar player and an audio engineer, right, at the end of the day. Recording my first album got wicked into the studio side of things. I wound up going to school for audio engineering and that's where my passion laid and was but years ago trying to make money. And we know the recording studio business has changed. I'm sure I've heard other episodes, and other people, the whole recording structure and business has changed so you don't need to come to the studio and pay me anymore basically of recording music. So, back in 2008 we tried to figure out how to keep the studio business really going and that led to a lot of online mixing and mastering, which I started dipping my toes into the online advertising world in general. That did well for a while, but it turned into me helping other friends evolve and adapt especially as a digital guy, right? We’ve as musicians, we've all lived through the analog to digital change, right? We all went from the tape to the decks and hard drives we’re on now. It's the same thing in business that's evolved. Helping other bands and friends and people with their online marketing. I was doing my business to try to keep going. I started making more money helping them as a freelancer really going and that's really where it took off into training and I educated myself and dove in really heavy into the digital marketing world. Fast forward, probably about six years now we've got a lot of small business clients. We've built websites, Facebook ads. We do over $4.7 million a year in other people's ads. Facebook, which is the place where fans need to be. But that all evolved into how do we take the same strategies, the same models, the same things that are working for all my other clients, righ?. The podcasters with the membership groups, the Twitch video game guys with their subscriptions, the vloggers in YouTube where every day at work it seemed like I was going, "Damn. If only a band was following these same strategies, the whole industry would change." Luckily now, there's a lot more of these guys like you. There's a lot of great resources, including even the other guy Indiepreneur, with that guy Kyle and how he's teaching people really great complex sales funnels for their finding fans with Facebook ads. You're starting to see more guys like you guys come out and you're starting to see more real case studies and proof of people leveraging these same tools and strategies. Even the Patreon model for example of charging memberships. Basically, it comes down to selling your music just like every other product is sold online. The new music business like you say, it's not really a music business, it's a content business. We're all in the content game now. David: Yeah, exactly. The sooner you can wrap your head around that idea that we're all content creators and publishers. We need to get that out to our fans. We need to distribute it. We need to market it. Then, we need to attract an audience and build an audience through that – not just an audience but a list more concretely. We need an email list or some kind of list that allows us to continually market to those people. Brian: And We've learned that the email list is becoming more and more important as people say, "Oh, email’s dying." Look at what the changes on Facebook recently, the changes on any platform. Anything could be gone and dead tomorrow either way. It's same thing. If you're thinking of your band as a business, number one rule is business. Build your business on your own platform not someone else's. You can't rely on a third-party platform to build your own business. So, having that list is number one. If we want to break it down, right, for what this really means, it all comes down to the difference between hope marketing which is, “I'm going to make an album and hope people find it. I'm going to play a show and I hope that the people I tell to go visit my websites, I hope some of them turn into actual fans that will buy something.” That's all hope marketing. So many bands saying, "Oh well, my marketing plan is crushing it. I've got all these plays. I'm on these lists. I'm on this and that." But that's all still hope marketing. Without a plan in place to turn somebody from cold to warm to hot, which is in the marketing world if anyone's familiar, that's the "will you marry me" marketing model, right? In a lot of bands, I think this helps them to break it down, right? So, will you marry me marketing is a simple way to understand that selling any product whether it be a service or product, your band, getting that super fan to pay you, it's just like trying to find a husband or wife. You cannot walk up to a random person and say, "This is me. I'm awesome. I want to marry you right now. Let's make it happen." Trust me. It's the same thing when you hope someone sees you at a live show and buys your music. You're just going for the close. You're going for the end game. Nobody makes purchasing decisions, relationship decisions, any type of decision that way. You need, as a band, as an artist, the same type of sales funnel, marketing funnel, call it what you want but the process to move them between the cold audience, who are people who have no idea who you are and you're going to engage with them for the first time. Your warm audience, you're going to talk to her different after you introduce yourself, right? Let's go from that, from cold – “Hi! This is my name. This is us. Here's a peak.” All right. I'm here and I'm still here. All right. Well, let me warn you up and give you some goodies and show you why our band is more than just these songs. That this is what we stand for. These are things we believe in. That really pushed into that hot audience. Then she's ready for the close. Then you can go in and say… The same idea works with bands as it does any other product. It's understanding that so much hustle that so many great independent musicians put in – and it feels… It drives me crazy when I look at them – the guys who are really hustling to connect and engage with their fans. And on the backend, they don't have a lead magnet or that tripwire product to turn them in. I know you've gone over a lot of this in your books and a lot of your stuff, but it's the break it down fundamentally – I think those are the barriers to understand the difference between hope marketing to understand what the basic sales funnel, what your plan is, what is your strategy to move that person between cold to warm to hot. And then, if you can get that that empowers everybody on the band like everyone in my office on the same goal. We have a team. There's a goal. We need to introduce ourselves to these cold people. Warm them up. Turn them into buying paying fans and ultimately the real game is the monthly recurring revenue, right? That's the ultimate game for anyone. It happens way more than people really think, I think. David: And by the way, I did meet a girl once who wanted to be married and it didn't really seem to matter to whom. She would post these articles on Facebook and then send them to me. I would go "That's really weird." These articles would talk about love at first sight and people who got married upon first meeting each other and things like that. Brian: Or how arranged marriages really work. David: Yeah. As the story goes, I did eventually ask this girl to go to lunch with me. Not because I was thinking "Oh, I hope she marries me." That's not the thought process at all. I was just like, "Let's try to put an end to this, one way or another." And she said, "No." Can you believe that? Brian: Burn. David: Yeah, it's crazy. Brian: People have their own interpretations of what a meaningful relationship is either way when they push through. Just like that guy. There was a recent viral video of that guy that was being kind of a dick. He posted this Facebook Live video like, "Look. If you want to go out with me, let's just do it. If you don't think it's on, then screw you. Go away." But it's the same. It's the same thing we do in real life we need to translate online. The relationship building strategies that we do in real life has to translate online. Really at the of the day that's what the business model, you could say, that you could take that we wrapped around the mobile app platform as in itself. So, the idea is to... Originally, our app platform was built for businesses....