Jean Morrison said
Hey John

So going over the call and the notes I made, this is the strategy that I got from the call in concurrent order. Just thought I should let you know that the target number of subscribers I’d like to have on the day my album is released is 25 000. Album Release month is October.

That's a pretty big number and you'll want to get started on that as soon as possible. To be honest, it's going to be hard to hit that goal. It can be done. But it will be hard to do it at an optimal price, that fast.

1. Blog One: Just Add Music

2. Blog Two: Music Video Short Story Post (Chaos Theory/Cardboard Skies)

(Regarding Blog 2, I’m about to do a music video of a song from my 2008 EP called Chaos Theory which is a brand new remastered version done by John Davis (Led Zeppelin, Gorillaz etc). It makes sense for Blog 2 to be this music video for now right? Since the LTO is coming soon thereafter.

That makes sense to me.

However I already have another music video “Cardboard Skies”(released in 2015) which will be on my upcoming album which as we discussed on the call I could re-upload to vimeo as a new release and I do also plan on re-releasing this song as a radio-edit and remastered version as well. So I’m thinking maybe using the Cardboard Skies Radio-Edit/remastered release to support the album release campaign a few weeks/months before the album launches or just changing the second blog post closer to the time? Seems more relevant right?)

Yep, thats what I would do. Save the new video for the release sequence and drop it just a few weeks before the release.

 

3. LTO: Pay what you want for the 2008 EP

4. Keep in touch with growing audience releasing content regularly.

5. Start Record release formula strategy

6. Album Launch (membership site/sales)

 

If my goal is 25 000 subscribers by album launch day, what portion of that budget would you allocate to the initial “Pay what you want” funnel if that's still the approach you favour?

I don't know what your budget is, but because your goal is so ambitious, I would spend as much as you can as quick as you can, so long as your price per subscriber is good (within reason). I only say that because it will likely get challenging as you start to scale. But we really don't have any data yet. You need to know you can get affordable subscribers before you can project budgets and things like that. You might get cheap subs immediately, or it could take you months of testing. Once you have a handle o those metrics, you can project better.

I’ve also added two very short teasers of what my EP sounds like compared to what my album sounds like as this may change what strategy you think I should use. Thanks John

 

  

I don't remember the other tracks well enough to compare. But all you can do is use what you have.

Jean Morrison said

Jean said:

3. LTO: Pay what you want for the 2008 EP

4. Keep in touch with growing audience releasing content regularly.

5. Start Record release formula strategy

6. Album Launch (membership site/sales)

 

If my goal is 25 000 subscribers by album launch day, what portion of that budget would you allocate to the initial “Pay what you want” funnel if that’s still the approach you favour?

 

John said:

I don’t know what your budget is, but because your goal is so ambitious, I would spend as much as you can as quick as you can, so long as your price per subscriber is good (within reason). I only say that because it will likely get challenging as you start to scale. But we really don’t have any data yet. You need to know you can get affordable subscribers before you can project budgets and things like that. You might get cheap subs immediately, or it could take you months of testing. Once you have a handle o those metrics, you can project better.

Budget would be $25 000 for 25 000 subscribers. So you still think I should start with $10 a day or because there is such a limited time for the 25k goal, I should start higher? I already have a winning ad from a dynamic creative campaign from 3 years ago that was getting me around $2 per sub. I was thinking to run a new dynamic creative campaign using that winning ad with newer elements (photos text etc) to refine it down even more. Is that an approach that sounds good to start off with?

I think you need to start bigger to get there faster. $25,000 divided by the number of days you have left is about $165 a day. So I'd start at around $30 a day and scale up as soon as you have a decent price per sub.

I do want to stress that 25k is a lot of money to spend without being clear on how profitable you will be so be aware that there is a lot of risk associated with this. Normally we start smaller, make profit, then scale up.

But I think starting with your successful ad is a good place to at least start, but so many things have change that you may find prices to be completely different and you may need to start a new round of testing.

Jean said:

I’ve also added two very short teasers of what my EP sounds like compared to what my album sounds like as this may change what strategy you think I should use. Thanks John

 

 

John said: I don’t remember the other tracks well enough to compare. But all you can do is use what you have.

The reason I added these clips for you to listen to was because my EP sounds a lot different to my album which we've discussed before in the past. So after listening to the clips, do you think a good strategy to start testing would still be doing the "pay what you want" LTO for the EP? Then later the buildup to the album launch? The other approach we discussed on the phone was going straight into album sales right out of the funnel which is an option I also like because the target audience for my EP is completely different to that of my album as you can probably hear. The reason I chose Jeff Buckley as a target audience is because his music is almost somewhere in the middle between the style of my EP and the style of my album. My EP is acoustic pop-rock singer songwriter and album ranges from emotional singer-songwriter to grunge to Queen-esque to Bowie-esque. If that makes sense. 

Thanks John