2010-02-16dated from the article

Understand Your Fans

Written February 16, 2010. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

We’ve been talking about tiered value for a long time here in Amp and while it’s not a new approach, it is one which is gaining traction in the music industry. Consider this article ‘The 4 Reasons Fans Buy your Products’ by Jed Carlson co-founder of Reverb Nation. It focuses on merchandise sales at gigs but there are valuable general lessons on how to understand who your fans are and why they will buy your stuff.

Carlson uses a nice graph to illustrate a segmented fanbase – it’s quite similar to the funnel graph we use . We recommend you read the original article, but if you don’t have time here are the key points: 1. Your first allies will be your friends, family and early fans. They want to help you become successful so you should make it easy for them to support you with cheap and cheerful merchandise you can sell at your gigs, preferably emblazoned with your band name.

  1. There will always be a group of people who just happened upon your gig by accident and hopefully they enjoyed your music. Consider creating merchandise which is event or venue specific for these guys. For example, if you are playing at a festival or in a well-known venue you could include the festival / venue name on your merchandise as well as your band artwork. For a current music-distribution reference, see UnitedMasters.

  2. The next segment of your fans Carlson labels “The General Public”. These people are actively interested in you and deliberately bought tickets to see you perform. They are more likely to buy higher value items at your merchandise table and go to your online store to purchase. Consider giving them a ‘Thank You’ card when leaving the gig which might contain a track download code but more importantly directions to your website.

  3. The holy grail for musicians are the type of fans who will buy anything you put out just ‘cos it’s from your band. They love to buy exclusive, limited edition, fancily packaged and signed items which can only be found through your online store. As we have blogged about before the profit margins on these items are much higher which means that selling relatively few of them makes you more money in the long run.

Read the original article here.