For musicians, getting your product heard and seen through music marketing and music promotion is an endless endeavor. Putting your songs on Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp; increasing your social media presence on sites like Instagram and TikTok in the hopes of going viral; designing and selling merch; and putting together your band website and EPK (electronic press kit.) It's a lot of work!

One way to take some of the weight off of your music marketing to-do list while building a supportive fan community is by establishing and promoting fan memberships,. also called subscriptions, on a site like Fourthwall. By setting up paid memberships, you can offer your followers and fan base access to your tour dates, special video content, exclusive merchandise, previews of your new music, connections to your social media platforms, and more!

Memberships are a great marketing strategy for promoting music, and they're also such a good way to grow your fan base and get extra revenue from your supporters, so you can keep on creating music!

Why Should I Launch Memberships for My Music?

Here are some ways launching memberships as a musician can help you with your music promotion, social media presence, increasing your followers and fans, and ultimately growing your music career:

• Let Your Fans Support You: While there will always be different levels of supporters throughout your music career, it's beneficial for both your fans and you to offer a variety of ways that your fans can support you. Letting them engage on a deeper level with your music and content creation without breaking the bank is one big way that memberships can be beneficial; offering different tiers from low to higher price points, like you can on your Fourthwall site, lets fans choose which level of support they want to (or are able to) participate in.
• Engage Your Listeners: People who love your music generally want more of it - but creating music takes time! Offering memberships gives your fans access to other facets of your music career, and lets you share exclusive extras with them while you invest time into writing and recording your tracks and producing music videos and other content.
• Grow Your Social Media: Fans who sign up for memberships clearly already have an interest in your work; think of them as a supportive squad that you can deploy around the internet. Include highlights of your social media posts on your Fourthwall website, encouraging your members to share your socials, comment on your posts, and repost them. You can even make separate custom membership posts on your Fourthwall site that only your members can see, adding another level of exclusivity.

• Get Promoted! Whether you're releasing a single, a music video, an album, a playlist, new merch, or a whole schedule of tour dates, the squad we mentioned above can also help you get the word out about all of these things, whether it's getting extra views on a new YouTube video, or getting a crowd to show up for your live gigs. Memberships make people feel like they're part of what's happening (your music career!), and as a result many of these people will be hyped to mobilize and help promote your music.
• Extra Revenue: Finally, we can't ignore the income side of memberships - they're a solid way to bring in extra revenue to help support your music! Memberships are generally recurring, so over time they can become a reliable income source that you can include in your budget as you continue to pursue your music career.

Q&A with Manuel Gardner Fernandes

Let's check in with one musician who's already making great use of his Fourthwall site and memberships to build up his fan base!

Manuel Gardner Fernandes is a guitarist and content creator known for his one of a kind percussive electric guitar style. The German musician started playing music as a young kid with a strong passion for guitar, working his way through a wide range of music styles from soul and funk to fusion, inspired by fellow musicians like Mateus Asato, Guthrie Govan, and David Gilmour as he developed his own unique playing style. Today, he's known for his solo percussive guitar work, and also for the music of his progressive band, Unprocessed.

To help promote his music, Manuel used Fourthwall's website builder to create a beautiful music website for his fan base, with custom branded pages that allow him to offer his fans access to exclusive merch, connections to his social platforms, subscription memberships, and more. He also offers unlimited guitar tabs to his paid supporters, a unique music marketing benefit that helps set his website, music brand, and store apart.

Let's pick Manuel's brain to find out how he approached adding Fourthwall to his music marketing tool box!‍‍

Why did you decide to offer memberships?

Manuel: 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 Memberships for two main reasons: for a better profit split (95% on Fourthwall vs 70% on YouTube), and also because 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?

Manuel: 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?

Manuel: We straight up offer one tier ($10 on his Fourthwall site), 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.

At $10 per month on his Fourthwall site, this simple, passive perks strategy is both accessible and valuable to Manuel's fans.

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

Manuel: 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.

Make Your Own Musical Memberships with Fourthwall!

Following Manuel's lead is a solid plan for any musician looking to increase their music marketing, music promotion, and fan base! With Fourthwall, it's easy to create a branded website with multiple offerings for your fans, from custom merchandise to blog posts and exclusive behind the scenes peeks at your new music.

Fourthwall's easy connections to your socials, like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, let you share posts and sell merch across platforms; the Twitch Gifting integration even lets your chat gift your custom merch to each other while you're performing live on Twitch.

There are so many amazing ways that Fourthwall's features, especially memberships/subscriptions, can benefit musicians, helping you build your fan base and get your music heard. Get started on Fourthwall today!

(And don't forget to Check out Manuel Gardner Fernandes on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok!)

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