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How To Sell HUNDREDS of CD’s Per Month feat. Jesse Gillenwalters from Indepreneur

Jesse Gillenwalters sells hundreds of CD’s per month for his project Basic Printer and works at Indepreneur doing coaching and Facebook ad management for music artists. In this video we talk about how he got started at Indepreneur, what the most common pitfalls are for students working through their ‘Buddy System’, and what are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to music marketing from Facebook ads to email to product creation.

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Important Points:

  • Physical records like CDs or Vinyl are still in demand in pretty much any genre. When you manage to build a strong bond with your fans and encourage them to buy your physical products you can earn, for example, the equivalent of 10,000 Spotify streams (which is $35) from a single Vinyl sale without having to invest in any Facebook ads or any playlist promotions.
  • No one is ever really ready when it comes to music marketing. The most important part is to just get started and fully commit to what you already have and make improvements to your music marketing structure along the way.
  • When it come to marketing your music on social media, a lot of creatives freeze up and switch into pure marketing mode. But telling stories that your fans can relate to is a way more powerful tactic than any slick marketing texts.
  • When you build your artist image don’t be afraid to test out different things. With every new release, you get another chance to redefine your brand by slightly tweaking your story and your image and seeing what resonates with your audience.

Podcast Outline:

[03:07] How Jesse got started in music marketing. – Jesse

[08:43] The most common misunderstandings of music marketing. – Jesse

[13:13] What people are most struggling with in their music marketing. – Jesse

[13:39] The mindset change many creatives have when approaching their marketing. – Jesse

[16:49] The permission phase when you are making the offer – Jesse

[17:15] How to tell compelling stories in a digital world that your fans can connect with  . – Jesse

[19:33] How to build an artist image thats relatable. – Jesse

[21:00] How to get to know your audience better through testing. – Jesse & Andrew

[23:34] Why CD sales still matter today regardless of the genre. – Jesse & Andrew

[27:31] Print on demand CD production companies. – Jesse

[29:47] How to figure out what merch your audience is interested in. – Jesse

[31:25] Why you don’t need a huge following on Spotify to be successfully selling your Cds and merch. – Andrew

[32:22] How to price your CDs. – Jesse

[34:44] Why earning from CDs can be much more profitable than earning from streaming. – Jesse

[39:12] Why it’s easier to market your music as an independent artist. – Jesse

[42:34] How a single fan turned out to be the most effective music promotion for a new release. – Andrew

[46:02] Tik Tok ads experiences – Jesse & Andrew

[52:25] How IndieX helps artists to reach their goals. – Jesse

[58:37] Why it’s hard for artists to give up control over their content creation. – Andrew & Jesse

[01:00:43] How to deal with explicit content while promoting on social media. – Andrew & Jesse

Wise Words:  

[13:39] “I think a lot of artists confront these template type things. They’re like, oh, I gotta think in emails. I have to think in captions all of a sudden. And I think they, for some reason, they kind of enter this more clerical mode and they’re like, okay, well, I guess I would hit these check boxes. And they kind of reduce themselves down to like, I need to write four emails rather than saying, I need to tell a story about this thing.“ – Jesse

[15:58] “People do get frozen up when it comes to doing creative stuff that’s not music, especially when it’s like trying to think about the mind of a consumer or potential fan. Especially the tech field, the biggest thing I see people do in the techfield is “our new single is out now”. And I’m like, oh man, oh no, don’t say that no one gives a shit who you are yet. They’re not gonna care for “singles out now.“ – Andrew

[24:01] “I find CDs sales to be pretty agnostic to the genres. We’ve seen hundreds of CDs go, between off the top of my head, like Caribbean artists, Calypso kind of music, like R&B / soul, folk rock. Off the top of my head, all of these examples, I personally have been involved in them selling hundreds of CDs kind of without really a sign of slowing down“ – Jesse

[35:06] “Basically the evaluation is like, if I’m going to put $50 a day into Facebook ads, I would be run so much dryer so much more quickly, going to Spotify than I would like breaking even and pulling in these people and pulling them aside and endearing them and conversing with them so that we buy the $40 vinyl three months later. And it’s like, I mean, I acquired them for $0 and then they’ve already paid me $40 more than they would ever pay through their engagement with my Spotify profile“ – Jesse

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If you enjoyed this interview you might also like this one I did with Jesse Cannon (Musformation) about how record labels market music, Facebook ads vs other music marketing methods and how indie artists can grow their fanbase.

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Jesse Cannon Interview