Sending supporters to iTunes doesn’t make sense

Written by Kyle Kraft of Krafty Entertainment

Krafty Entertainment is a music business development coaching company dedicated to providing guidance to musicians (and their teams) on how best to grow your audience and properly monetize it. Krafty Entertainment’s founder Kyle Kraft has over 20 years experience in assisting both developing and established artists in substantially growing their net income from their music. Interested in working with us? Let’s talk!

While the prospects of making sales income and potentially getting a chart position may be enticing, sending your supporters to iTunes to buy your music doesn't make sense for several reasons:

Most importantly, you don't get contact information for the people who purchase your music from iTunes. It is 5 - 10 times easier to sell someone something if they have bought something of yours before, so having and nurturing a mailing list of your customers is the best way to grow your business in a tangible way.

You can sell digital downloads to people who want them (or to people who  just want to support you in a low-cost way) via Shopify and most of its competitors, who allow you to retain all of your customer data so that you can contact them directly in the future to make additional sales offers to them. You should focus on getting the average lifetime value of your customers well into the 3 figures if not more by making multiple sales offers to them via email over time, as opposed to making one digital sale to them and then having to work hard to get even one more additional sale to them in the future.

Next, iTunes takes 30% of the purchase price. Most online store platforms like Shopify charge a small flat fee per month, which makes more sense to pay if you have even a moderate sales volume or already have an online store set up to sell physical products (or are planning to in the near future, which you should be since it's often a lot easier to sell physical products than it is to sell digital downloads in the streaming era). Even Bandcamp is a better option than iTunes given they charge a lower percentage (and also allow you to get contact info for your customers), though Bandcamp has less than ideal functionality when it comes to tracking conversions for ads which should be an important tool in your toolbox for maximizing your income.

Finally, selling digital downloads on the same platform as you have other products available on allows you to upsell people in the same transaction which can often result in more income. While someone might go to your online store to buy a download, they might also be willing to buy a physical album, a hoodie, a merch bundle, or an even a higher value offering like a VIP meet and greet experience, a video call/ lesson, commissioning a song from you, a private show, or whatever else you want to offer that may be of interest to them. Not only should you be trying to maximize the average lifetime value of your customers, but you should be trying to maximize the cart value of every transaction.

While pushing your supporters to iTunes with the aim to get on their charts has the benefit of gives you the chart positioning to talk about in the first week of release, you can still aim for the Billboard downloads charts by reporting sales via your online store using a plug-in (for example the Single plug in for Shopify, which you can learn more about at https://single.xyz/pages/music-sales-chart-reporting ) or if you can't find a plug in for your existing online store platform that will do that you can also communicate with Luminate Music Connect (formerly Nielsen Soundscan) to set up the ability to report online store sales directly to them for chart inclusion at https://luminatedata.com/partners/ .

Aiming to sell your music via iTunes is costing yourself the benefit of getting contact info for your customers that could lead to many subsequent sales, is sharing a substantial percentage of your sales with an unnecessary middle man, and is potentially also costing you upsales that you can make in the same transactions. Is sending people to iTunes less work? Yes. Does it cost you a fair amount in the short term, and A LOT in the long term? Absolutely.

This information was compiled by Kyle Kraft of Krafty Entertainment. Whether you are an artist who is in the early stages of building your career and have next to no money to invest into it looking for the best paths to generating income, are an artist that has established a following and are interested in getting assistance with securing tens of thousands of dollars in funding to further your career, or are an artist or collective with an extensive fan base that would like assistance with increasing the efficiency of your business development, we can help you.

Want to read more articles written by Kyle? You can do so here.