Our topic today is how to get real sponsorships as a musician. Yeah, so one of the biggest things that artists have to do is raise money for their careers.
All right, whether that’d be crowdfunding, whether that be working a job and, you know, getting inside money, or I mean, you could get a product and sell it for a high margin, there are tons of options for us artists to raise money.
Yeah,
But I wanted to ask you about something that’s a little bit more unorthodox, and that’s finding sponsors.
Should artists try to find sponsors?
Sponsorships as a Musician
And if so, how should we go about that?
What are your thoughts on that?
Looking for sponsors?
Um, that one’s tricky, because sponsors are going to want a return on their sponsorship. They’re not just getting, nobody’s gon na give you money.
It just doesn’t happen.
But in terms of like, how would I find one?
What’s the best way to go about finding a sponsor?
We talked about the difference between sponsors and affiliates.
So, just to run back over, a sponsor is going to be somebody who worked with you more directly.
Like they’ll say, Here’s 500 bucks a month, or 1000 bucks a month in order to, like, work us into your content, like, okay, maybe you were some of our merge, maybe you wrote us in some of these articles, or whatever.
But it’s more of a direct relationship.
Okay,
An affiliate like a bunch of people can be affiliates.
And you don’t really have to have as much of a one-on-one relationship.
Yeah, with the company.
So there are people who, like we have an affiliate program, and we give a certain percentage of whatever sales somebody refers to us, but we don’t like to have email direct emails where people like that.
Now, obviously, we have conversations, general conversations with the affiliates.
And we’ll have terms and conditions and all that.
But it’s not like it’s a one-on-one relationship as much.
Yeah,
So how would I go about finding that direct sponsor?
I’d say you have to have some sort of credibility in the beginning.
So you have to look at who’s aligned with your brand.
Does that make sense?
First of all, yeah, and a lot of the brands are you guys. If you’re, you know, trying to get some company that has nothing to do with you, you’re just wasting your time.
And at that time, okay.
So make sure your brand is aligned with the sponsor.
And you should know how to drive traffic yourself before you look for something, like to shoot the traffic officer, somebody?
Yes.
So 100%.
For us, for example, before we ever had any sponsors, it was us knowing how to get traffic to our website. Okay, use this. We’ll reach out to you at that point. You won’t have to go looking for them.
So the best way to go about getting a sponsor, I know a lot of people don’t like to hear this, is that you need to learn how to get the traffic to you first, like working on your infrastructure, and then the sponsors are going to build off of that.
So once you have a system where you’re getting some sales and your business is moving, then people are gon na just naturally want to help you out.
It’s kind of like, if you have two companies who have a public offering, and they want to sell off some of their ownership of the company, they’re stuck.
Now, one company has very little sales, like you don’t have to have a bunch of sales to do a public offering. You don’t like that you can have little and still offer?
It’s probably just that you’re gon na have a harder time convincing people to invest in your business.
Yeah, yeah.
If you have a track record of sales, like you have a billion dollars in sales, and then you ask people, hey, we’re gon na open this up so that we can grow even faster, okay, then you have a much higher chance of having a good initial public offering.
But if you don’t have any sales, I mean, you’re going in cold, cold, you have no sales lady, if you’re on Shark Tank, whatever.
Those are, like public offerings, not to us, to the public, but also to private investors.
And one of the questions they asked was, you know, what’s your sales?
So, those people are looking for a sponsor, right.
So they look for not exactly a sponsor, but they’re looking for somebody to give some equity to.
In this case, I wouldn’t advise artists to give equity out.
I mean, it had to be like the greatest sponsor alive for them to take, like, you know, a percent equity or something like that.
I know a lot of influencers to get on this topic. A lot of influencers.
Now, if they’re big enough, it might be like trying to take equity.
Yeah, some of the people that want to sponsor them, because if you can drive that much traffic, it’s just a matter of how much value you bring.
Right, right.
If it makes sense for a startup company to give 1% or like, 10% or something to this huge influencer who doesn’t lie about their brand, then go for it.
Sometimes it can make sense.
But yeah, most of the time I wouldn’t.
But yeah, that’s what I have.
To say about sponsored man this new building, build your stuff first.
And then you’re gon na find that people just start to hit you up or you don’t think you could do anything but get good at the affiliate stuff.
So whenever you sign up for affiliate programs, and then you’re driving sales to the companies, like let’s say you’re doing our, our affiliate program, for example, and you’re driving like a bunch of sales to us and you’re driving so much value, you’re so far and above everybody else’s affiliate income, you’re like, you know what, maybe I’m worth a little bit more, because you see how much like my traffic is converting for you guys.
Just give me a little bit more percentage.
And then that’s a little bit more of a one-on-one relationship.
So that’s a conversation you, as artists, would probably want to initiate, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Nobody’s just gonna volunteer to give you extra percentage.
But yeah, I mean, I think we’ve done that sometimes.
There’s a couple programs that we’ve done that it became, we started as an affiliate, and it became more of like a sponsor direct, direct deal, because we were driving enough traffic, that they’re like, okay, I’ll give you a a special percentage or a special deal to include some more your content.
So we usually always have, I think, everywhere we have an affiliate, we have a disclosure, or like, Hey, this is an affiliate company, or you do have to do that, by the way.
So if somebody is like a sponsor, if it’s not like a natural ad, like if you have an advertisement in a podcast, people knows an advertisement.
Yeah,
Sponsorships as a Musician
100% you’ll always have to say, like, here’s a message from our sponsors.
Yeah,
Sounds like an ad.
Like on TV.
If you’re watching, if you go back to the TV days, we don’t just have Hulu at your house or something.
Like you could tell when it was an ad.
Yeah,
But these days, if you’re on like a blog article, or it might just look like, oh, they’re just talking about a product, but you usually have to have disclosures to say you’re talking about that.
So it’s not like if you have a music video or something and you’re sponsored by a brand, then I’d look into that, just look into the law surrounding that, but sometimes you have to disclose if it’s like an affiliate relationship, or sponsorship, or if it looks like it’s supposed to be an ad anyway, then usually it should be okay.
I gotcha.
That makes sense.
Good stuff.
How to get real sponsorships as a musician the truth
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