If you are planning to put up an online music publishing business, you got to now the typical figures. The most important of these figures is your website conversion rate. Basically conversion rate is defined as:
(Total Number of Successful Downloads/Total Number of Unique Visitors) x 100%
So if you have 15 successful downloads in the month and your website have around 2000 unique visitors for that month, and then your website conversion rate is around:
Conversion Rate = (15/2000) x 100% = 0.75%
Conversion rate can change from one industry to another. One industry (particularly those in the shopping niche) tends to have higher conversion rate because of the completeness of their products. Websites such as Amazon and EBay reportedly have conversion rates around 5% to 10%. If any person shops in Amazon, most likely he/she will find the things that they would like to buy; thus this explains one aspect of such high conversion rate.
In independent/online music publishing industry; this conversion rate is not the same. If you would like to know the actual figures; you can see how www.musicforlicense.net performs in terms of free music downloads conversion rate:
Conversion rate and download statistics of musicforlicense.net as of September 2, 2011:
Total number of successful downloads = 501
Total number of unique visitors = 53654
The scope of the data is from November 12, 2009 to September 2, 2011.
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Do you know the difference? Supposing you have film project that uses copyrighted music. You then search online for suitable music and there you meet two types of music providers: music publishers and music libraries. You check the music publisher and they let you license their music. You also check the music library website and they let you license their music also. So what is the difference between a music publisher and a music library?
“Music Publishers” owned the rights to the music/songs and its lyrics. Music publishers are mandated by copyright law to represent the copyright ownership in behalf of the songwriters that they are associated. It is why if you are a songwriter and wants to have your song signed by a music publisher; you need to sign a document called “transfer of copyright ownership” to the music publisher. However the percent of ownership is shared with the songwriters. You can see in typical songwriter-artist agreement of 50% – 50% split between the music publisher and the writer. When the song earns any income, it will be split to half between the publisher and the writer.
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If you self-published your music, you will have all the freedom to manage your own business. How you manage your business is a critical factor to your long term success. Business management is a broad/complex topic and even have a complete college degree offered by universities. But you do not need to obtain a business management degree just to manage your own music publishing business effectively. Below are some business management tips that can help you succeed in the “long term” (I intentionally put this in quote because there is no short cut/short term way to succeed in this business). Be patient, it can take up to 10 years for an independent business to fully mature and stabilize even if you are working 10 hours a day on it.
1.) Formulate Strategies, Know the expectations and TEST it.
Every business has its own strategy to succeed. In big corporations like Apple, Google and Microsoft; the strategies starts from the top management like the CEO. In self-music publishing business you are the sole owner which would be responsible for formulating the business strategies. Like most entrepreneurs, you would most likely fail the first time you implement some strategies, don’t be upset it is normal. But as time goes by, you would know the music publishing industry very well and could come up with pretty solid business strategies. Over the years, you would be implementing a LOT of strategies and would settle for the most effective one that could stabilize your business.
You should have some form of business strategy to succeed. Below are some examples of business strategy in music publishing common for independent publisher and some expectations:
STRATEGY1: Offering your music for free to the public only for non-commercial use and asking them to “like” your page in Facebook and other social network sites.
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