The subscription model - sustainable income?
Inspired by recent blogs by @organduo, I have often thought of how I can work towards financial freedom. In our recent conversation, he said ”Poor people have one income stream”, and Rich people have seven”. In other words, the key to wealth is multiple streams of income.
I have noticed over the last few years that many businesses are turning to subscription models. This is because instead of a one time payment for their goods or services, they are turning it into a recurring form of income. For a consumer this potentially means that their initial upfront investment may be significantly cheaper, but they must continue to pay for the service as long as they need.
For example, just imagine we did not have Netflix (!). We would have to buy a DVD player and 100s or 1000s of DVDs just to make up what is currently in the Netflix library. This would be a huge investment and we may not necessarily be able to watch each DVD. The Netflix story solves this by providing a valuable service in which you can choose from an extensive library of movies and TV shows—all for a modest monthly fee.
Asides from Netflix, we can see that news sites are now implementing paywalls and software like Adobe Creative Suite are using subscription models to make their businesses sustainable whilst still providing value.
So I got thinking…(puts on musician hat)…how can I provide value and create another revenue stream based on the subscription model? This led me to setting up my Patreon account. Albeit my second attempt at launching this, I hope that I can provide some entertainment through my organ videos. Where does the money go? Well first and foremost—my time! And secondly, equipment and consumables (like batteries/memory cards) all come at a cost. What about the internet access used to upload my videos? Everything costs something…
There’s one thing for certain though and that is that Steemit has made me more “money” from my organ videos than any other platform I’ve used.
Yours sincerely,
@contrabourdon
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I'm glad my thoughts have inspired you to write this post. Yes, subscription model can be put to use for musicians too. But...
Every business solves a problem otherwise it's not a business. For example, Netflix solves the problem for people because they don't have to own physical DVD's and stream only what they want.
So in the case of your Patreon videos, (and you can easily repurpose your Steemit content to maximize your productivity) you'll have to think about what kind of problem you are trying to solve for your potential subscribers too.
Questions like, is there a lack of organ music videos online?
If there isn't a shortage of organ music, what exactly they are buying? They are buying you. Your personal brand.
The way to discover if you have a personal brand is to ask this question:
If you stopped posting, would they notice? Would they write to you? Complain?
In other words, would they miss you if you were gone?
If the answer is yes, then you can build yourself a nice recurring income from your true fans.
A true fan is a concept created by Kevin Kelly. It's a person who spends on your products or services around 100 USD per year.
If you have 1000 true fans, you are all set in any country of the world because it's a 6 figure yearly income.
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So we come back to the topic, “music should be free”! Unless someone is in the upper echelon of music and backed by a company we cannot make a sustainable living.
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As Steve Martin says, "become so good they can't ignore you..." Then you will have more fans than you will know what to do with them...
By the way, if your upvote value for a comment is less than 0.02 USD, it comes back to the reward pool and not to the author you are trying to support.
By the way, today we've been chatting over email, Messenger and Steemit. Do you have a feeling which way to communicate is the most rewarding to you?
All have different purposes. I reply based on which medium was used. I don’t cross platforms as it gets confusing otherwise.
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An expense. An investment returns you what you pay and some more money. Watching videos doesn't pay you, so you are unable to get back your money. You could get some money if you are using Bittube Airtime extension, but will never get the amount paid for the physical content.
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Honestly, the subscription model is absolute greed for some companies. I get Netflix and Spotify. Their service provides more value to a user for less than if they bought all the content on these sites themselves, there is always new content, and it's accessibility on many devices increases the overall value. But, the Adobe suite subscription is an absolute scam. They provide no value in the form of new content, you can't access the programs from more than 2 devices, and it was cheaper when you could just buy the programs needed once you have it longer than 2 years. The price also goes up very quickly the more artistic you are. They only realized they could make way more money by charging large companies these subscriptions and pretty much said screw the little guy. This is also the case for Sketchup, which I was just about to buy until they adopted this model. For someone who likes to dabble in many things, I could never afford an Adobe suite subscription for photoshop and illustrator and a Sketchup subscription long term along with a few others. Considering you have to pay long term, you also can't jump in and out of the subscription as required like you can with Netflix.
I like Autodesk's model for Fusion 360 and large companies should be offering this more for the hobbyist. If you're make less than $100k with the program, you can have a free full license. Why should a multi-million dollar company like Adobe care if some people like to draw with their program in their free time? They are after the big design firms money, not the individual - except the greed.
I know that doesn't have much to do with your Patreon idea, but those are my thoughts on the subscription model. You have to provide more value than if the content was bought outright, or have good exclusive content not available anywhere that people want to access.
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Very true, especially with Adobe Products...
I used Google SketchUp many years ago, in fact I tested one of the first versions of the product back in 2007 at their offices in Boulder, Colorado! I don't really have a need for it now.