Business Before music pt 3 [update]

This post is an update from an earlier post on this subject. I decided to do updates of the M.B.P. I am working out with my friend.

One thing to remember is every band/soloist, musician and life situation is different from one another, so keep in mind, how my friend and I are working out our M.B.P. doesn’t mean what works for us will work for you, so versatility, flexibility, patience, understanding, trial and error and time are major components in achieving a successful Music Business Plan.

History

I'll give you a little bit of our history first, to give some insight, to where we are both at.

Our story in short is, my friend started the band in the 1989/90; I was the first person to join. We became the chief songwriters, the band came apart two years later, we continued writing together for years after that, but were never successful in putting a band together again for many reasons. After a lot of water under the bridge, we have sorted through many obstacles and have found ourselves wanting to finish a job we both started 20+ years ago.

What to do first?

When it comes to doing up a music business plan. The first question that might come to mind is “how do you start one?”

Here is the list [from my first post “Business before music”] of basic requirements to get your M.B.P. off and running.

• STARTING A MUSIC BUSINESS PLAN – Discussing with fellow band members the intention of starting and researching what is involved in organizing a successful M.B.P.

• COMPANY SUMMARY - This section discusses registering your band as a company, whether it’s Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Corporation or a LLC.

• PRODUCTS AND SERVICES - This is where you can discuss what type of products your band plans to sell. E.g. digital downloads, merchandise, live shows, and CD’s.

•  MARKETING ANALYSIS - That put simply is, "HOW IS YOUR BAND GOING TO STAND OUT AMONGST YOUR COMPETITION?" 

•  MARKETING - Identifying your target demographic, raising awareness of who you [band] are, and what type of music you intend to play. Price structures for your releases and where customers, can buy your goods and services.

• MANAGEMENT - Here, we get to delegate responsibilities [bookings, receiving payments for gigs, Cd sales, etc.] to everyone who is in your group, now that might only be the member's in the band at the moment. But it is important everyone knows what their responsibilities are, in the group's business dealings. But you need someone first, to head this team!!

• MONEY - Once you work out what you want to sell, you then need to work out where the money is coming from and who will pay for these upfront costs.

I’ve decided to add one extra step at the beginning, as this is very important to make sure every person is on board and agree with organizing the bands M.B.P.

Take your time

What I will do is go through the M.B.P. my friend and I are working through, but just to remind you, we’ve never had our own M.B.P. in the past, so we are taking our time with it and making sure we cover ourselves as a band and as people, learning as we go.

At this stage we haven’t covered a lot of ground due to the difficulties of our personal lives, so getting to the nitty gritty of what we want to do, is a slow process, but we are both determined people and will persevere until we have completed out tasks.

We have discussed registering our band name as a business, we haven’t got to do that yet, as again life intervened and slowed that process down. We did at first, plan to sit down together in person to discuss these matters, but because we live in different states, the process and plan we had organized, took a different turn for personal reasons and have left our discussions on hold for now.

What we have been able to achieve from our last conversation is agreeing verbally on our percentage ratio for ownership of our songs. Basically from our early days in the early 1990s when we started the band, we always had a 50%/50% share in the ownership of our songs. So, we have continued with that agreement. I then asked my friend if we could only focus on the songs recorded on four track. Reason for this is, a lot of work musically has already been done, and this will save time and effort, and give us a good start to focus on what we need to spend time on.[completing our songs.] Instead of writing new songs from scratch. We can do that later as we rebuild confidence musically between ourselves.

List

 

The next stage will be to make up a list of songs from the early four track recordings. We will pick out six songs from that list, which hopefully, we both agree, would be a good starting point to continue with our work. We will then write out that list on paper, make two copies of the agreement and sign both copies for our own records, with our percentage agreements on both.

Once we have some songs to work on, I will register them with APRA/AMCOS. This is a performance collection agency, which means that, if you are playing in a club, or if one of your song plays on a radio, etc. Apra will collect royalties on your behalf and distribute the payments to each person, whose name’s are registered on each song and the percentage splits that is agreed upon. This is an important part in your M.B.P. as this register's and protects you, and adds proof of ownership to your songs.

"At this stage we have only worked on the 2nd stage of the list above,

·        COMPANY SUMMARY - This section discusses registering your band as a company, whether it’s Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Corporation or a LLC. I will also add in here, registering your songs with a royalty collection service. E.g. Apra/amcos.

You may have to do a search for your countries own music royalties collection services business."

Today, my job is to write a list of our four track recordings with my preferred six songs to start with, and email that list to my friend and see what his preferred six songs are, and we'll go from there.

Cheers Darryl