Memberships for Musicians: Engage Fans with Exclusive Content & Community

Manuel Gardner Fernandes is a guitarist and content creator known for his one-of-a-kind percussive electric guitar style. He used Fourthwall's music website builder to create a beautiful homepage for his fanbase. His custom-branded website template allows him to offer fans access to exclusive tabs, merch, and subscrption memberships.

Why did you decide to offer memberships?

We wanted a way to offer guitar tabs to our community on a subscription basis. On YouTube, we release one video per week alongside guitar tabs that we sell for $5. By offering a $10 flat monthly subscription, we reduce the amount of transactions for our followers and offer them a big discount. In exchange, we get another way to grow and engage the community and continuous cash flow.

Originally we used YouTube Memberships for this. We switched to Fourthwall for two main reasons:

• A better profit split (95% on Fourthwall vs 70% on YouTube)
• It was much easier (for us and for our members) to make perks available

How did you promote your membership program and incentivize fans to sign up?

When we first launched, we offered 63 existing tabs that we had previously offered through YouTube to anyone who signed up on Fourthwall. That’s an offer that remains available today, meaning that anyone signing up will always have access to all past guitar tabs from our previous membership program we had on YouTube.

We also made sure to leverage our reach across YouTube and other social media to promote the new membership site and get the word out. Fortunately, it really landed with our community and was a much appreciated offering.

What perks do you offer your members?

We straight up offer one tier, which gets members access to all guitar tabs for free. It’s simple, easy to understand, and affordable.

In addition to being able to offer guitar tab access, we really like the private community feed, which allows us to stay in touch with our members and also to get valuable feedback on the perks and features they want to see in the future.

What advice would you give other musicians and content creators looking to offer memberships?

• Make your membership program simple and easy! Focus on offering the perks that your audience cares most about.
• Leave out all the fluff and extra perks that might stress you out. Underpromise, overdeliver, and focus your energy on being as consistent as possible.
• The more members you get, the more energizing and rewarding it will become to provide meaningful value to them that they will truly appreciate.