Millions of artists create music content every day. However, just a very few artists manage to build a solid fan-base and to monetize their creations. While iTunes mainly offers a stage for international major-artists, independent artists are too often burried by them. The music-streaming service Lizzar (Lizzar.com) sets a new approach and offers independent artists a stage to expose and sell their music, while building a solid artist-fan-relationship.
More exposure and revenues to independent artists
The majority of listeners is still willing to spend money on music-downloads - and music downloads still represent the largest revenue stream for artists. At the same time, listeners are more interested than ever in discovering new music. The music-service Lizzar is developing a hybrid form of streaming and distribution, which allows artists to offer certain songs free-of-charge, while charging for the download of others. "We decided to combine streaming and distribution in one service, to offer the artists both exposure and revenues", founder and managing director Kevin Gehrmann explains and continues that "as of May 1st 2014 every artist will finally be able to earn a 100% of the revenues on every album and single-sale". Revenues are paid directly from the buyer’s to the seller’s Paypal account.
Customer-relationship as key-success factor
Many artists upload their music on services such as Soundcloud and give away their music for free, hoping to be discovered - mostly without success. The largest reason for artists' failure is the missing ability to build up a strong and long-lasting relationship with their fans. Many artists rely on social media to engage with their fans, however overestimate the reach and effectiveness of social media and underestimate the spreading losses of each tweet or post. Because 1,000 likes on Facebook does not mean to have 1,000 true fans. As a consequence, most artists sell fewer releases than they anticipate.
As a matter of fact, the most direct way of digitally interacting with followers are still email and text messages. The music-platform Lizzar offers artists the chance to build a sustainable CRM (customer-relationship-management), by gathering the email addresses and even phone numbers of their customers. This gives the artist the ability to reactivate these value-fans in the future through targeted email or short message campaigns. "Every customer can decide to leave his personal details to the artist, which will help the artist to build an active and sustainable fanbase", Kevin Gehrmann explains.
Subscription instead of sales-commission
Lizzar offers its artists a premium-subscription, which mainly grants the artist unlimited releases on Lizzar, unlimited sales, access to customer-data (name, email, phone nr., etc.) and cross-media promotion. This monetization approach is similar to Soundclouds', while giving the artists the necessary tools to generate revenues and to run a sustainable music-career.
