Successful Musician Podcast Episode 56
Interviewee: Zach Sprowls
Interviewer: Jason Tonioli
Jason Tonioli
Welcome to the podcast today. My name is Jason Tonioli, and I have a special guest, Zach Sprowls, with me. We were just sitting here chatting before we went live. It’s interesting when I start these, Zach, you’re a successful piano player and you’re a full-time musician. Success, again, if you think about successful musicians, that’s a loaded question because success is for everybody. But you started asking me several questions and said, Well, I want to just pick your brain. Rather than our normal, where I’m probably going to ask all the questions, I think what’s going to be really interesting is you’ve got a really talented guy here, Zach, that is going to share some great words of wisdom, I’m sure. But I think we maybe will just have this back and forth conversation, Zach, that we’re going to just… It’ll be like being in the room having coffee with somebody and just listening to what’s working, what we’re frustrated about. I think it’s going to be really interesting. If you’re up for that, I think this is going to be a good time.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah, let’s go for it.
Jason Tonioli
Zach, I want to introduce you first of all. Give us your three minute origin story. You grew up as a guy that loved playing piano or you hated practicing piano. How did you end up getting where you’re at today?
Zach Sprowls
I’m trying to think of where to begin. My parents started me on piano lessons at six years old. My parents were not musical, but they noticed some musical responsiveness in me. My grandfather, my mom’s dad, was very musical. They had that category in their heads, even though they weren’t musicians themselves. When they saw me responding to music the way I did, they thought they should probably start me on piano lessons. So I did it at six, and I always loved it. I never hated my piano lessons, and I think I owe that to my first piano teacher who was a really good piano teacher and who sparked the imagination rather than being bullheaded about getting us started on the right track with theory and technique and repertoire and stuff like that. She was more about making it fun and letting us do our own thing if we wanted to. She was really good at that. Within my first year, I was already performing in my church. She had me doing, I think it was Jesus Loves Me with her as a duet.
Jason Tonioli
Very cool.
Zach Sprowls
And taught me how to arrange songs myself, even very simply. Then I just pursued piano all the way through high school. I played in my church as often as I could, played in bands as often as I could, and then went to school in college for music, and I went to a small private school, and I ended up getting a degree in church music.
Jason Tonioli
Interesting.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah, bachelor’s I guess it’s sacred music. The major was called Church Music, but the degree was Sacred Music. Then I started working for churches. I did an internship down in the DC area that had me… I would say up until this point, most of my experience with music had been my classical-based piano lessons and sacred music repertoire that I would use for competitions and playing in churches and stuff. Then my degree, obviously being in sacred music, I was doing a lot more of that stuff. But then I was showing an aptitude for music composition, and I had a professor give me some private composition lessons. Then after college, I did an internship that was more on the recording and songwriting side. It was in a studio. Then from there, I started working for churches, doing music director type work. Then back in 2020 is when I was able to go full-time self-employed music. That’s more over the years from being more like doing recording projects and freelance work that was more arranging-based, a little bit of composition, but more on the arranging side, and doing some freelance music director work and things like that.
Zach Sprowls
Now, it’s more on the composition side. I’m composing for my own projects, side projects, composing for film, and then picking up some freelance work here and there. It’s been a mixture of different things over the years.
Jason Tonioli
I’m curious. A lot of people that are musicians are always trying to go full-time, and so you’ve been able to do that, which is awesome. If you don’t mind sharing, as you were able to do that, where For your journey and your path, where is the monetization or where is the money actually come in? Did it start out with these church jobs, it sounds like, so the music director and you’re getting paid, probably do some of the church projects. But was there a point where with all the recording, you’re making money on the streaming side, on the sync side?
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. Obviously, it started out after college. I didn’t make any money for my internship, just a salary from churches. I started out part-time and then moved full-time. While I was part-time, I was also teaching private lessons. That’s how I paid the bills. Okay. Full-time for churches for a while. Then my shift from working for churches into full-time self-employed was a sharp change. There wasn’t a gradual transition of any kind. I drove a school bus for a while in that transition. Helped out a friend doing landscaping. Then I just landed it. It was freelance work for a while. I was recording stuff and putting it on Spotify and all the streaming platforms, but it takes so much time to get any number of streams that actually equals a monetary number that’s worth sneezing at. I’m doing that. I’m putting it up there, but I’m not seeing anything yet. It was just a lot of freelance work. I’d play tracks for people. I’d play piano tracks on their recordings. This is 2020, so I’m doing it from a distance. I was helping out a church down in the Washington, DC area, so that was on a freelance basis.
Zach Sprowls
That was some arranging work that was going down and leading services on occasion or playing piano for a service or two, gigging around town, sitting in on piano for sessions. Then the big thing was I landed a job with a guy in the UK who writes musicals. He writes the dialog and the lyrics and sketches out melodies, and then he would hire me to flush them out into actual arrangements. For three years, that was my main bread and butter financially was working for this guy in the UK. It was all done from a distance. And eventually, the residuals from streaming, my streaming grew. I learned how to do ads and stuff with that. And then that became pretty substantial and dependable every month. I was able to start saying no to some of the freelance work and just keep spending more time reinvesting into that more passive source of income and the more enjoyable stuff, because that’s all stuff I wanted to do, the music I wanted to make. Now I’m able to do a lot of composition work for local film companies that sometimes pays, sometimes doesn’t. I’m free to make that decision because I have these passive sources of income that are more regular.
Jason Tonioli
That’s awesome. With a lot of the music you’ve done, I mean, you talk about streaming, I guess. As you look back on that streaming journey, and I think you’ve had some success with some playlists and some of that type of stuff. If you were sitting down with a newer artist trying to say, Oh, that wants to get their music Spotify and get… What advice would you have for them when it comes to the streaming platforms and things they should consider or do?
Zach Sprowls
The first thing I would say is you have to do something. Just putting your music on the streaming platforms and hoping that it’s going to pop is not a thing. It’s not a thing. I was going to say it used to be a thing, but I don’t even know if it used to be a thing. It’s not a thing. So don’t lie to yourself. Don’t fool yourself. You have to do something. And organic social media posting is also becoming not really a thing for success. So the biggest thing I can say is 10:48 you got to figure out how to do marketing, like ads is what I’m talking about. And I can offer up some sources that I found helpful for learning how to do ads because it is a learning curve. But if you do learn it, it is a reliable way to build a streaming presence and a fan base on streaming platforms. It takes a while, and it takes a lot of money up front that you don’t… There’s no one-to-one connection between ad spend and revenue received. It’s like you put a lot of money up front, you see none of it come back to you, but then over time, that starts changing.
Zach Sprowls
And eventually, the amount you’re putting in every month is exceeded by the revenue you’re seeing every month. And so maybe over the course of three years, then you start becoming profitable from it. But then playlisting is If you pay for playlist placements via SubmitHub or Playlist Push or something like that, there’s pros and cons to that. It can be effective at getting you a lot of streams, but it can also shoot you in the foot at not getting you engaged fans and also tricking the algorithm to think that your fans don’t really like your music because you’re not actually having real engagement in the metrics. So that’s a mixed bag. You have to be careful with that. I’d say just keep that.
Jason Tonioli
I think they’ve got some blocking that’ll happen if they think you’re a bot, that you get shut down. There’s a lot of new stuff I know that is a little bit scary for getting fake listens now that you want to watch out for.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. Now, one strategy. So we talked a little bit before we went live about one size fits all strategies. And so at the 12:48 At the risk of falling prey to giving a one-size-fits-all strategy, I will say there’s one technique that I found effective that I think would work for everybody, regardless of genre. That is creating a playlist that If you notice big artists have a this is and then the artist’s name playlist that Spotify automatically generates, you can create your own using the same graphic that says, in my case, this is Zach Sprouls. And you populate it with your tracks only. Then when you run your ads and your ad campaigns, you send people to the playlist rather than to the single or the album that you’re promoting. You end up shooting multiple birds with one bullet when you do that. What I found is you end up getting people who stream the song, people who stream the rest of your songs, and people who follow your playlist who will then continue to stream all this stuff automatically without you needing to continue to send people to it, all in one fell swoop. And it’s the most powerful thing that I’ve found.
Zach Sprowls
It’s pretty incredible.
Jason Tonioli
That’s interesting. It’s such a simple thing to do. And you’re mostly saying this is for Spotify is probably what you’re doing most of those ads for, right? Is that where you spend most of your time?
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. You don’t get the same metrics from Apple Music, but I would have to think it would work the same way with Apple Music because you can create public playlists and send people to it.
Jason Tonioli
Well, and Pandora doesn’t really have the… Well, Well, they do, but I don’t think a lot of people benefit from the Pandora playlist the way Pandora is more of an open box. Anybody can listen. I think that’s actually how I ran across you and you had some playlist that just popped when I was doing some searches, and I thought, Okay, this guy looks interesting. I’m going to reach out. Very cool. You talked about spending money. For somebody that is wanting to start spending money on doing that playlist strategy? I mean, are you talking this is like a three to five dollar a day spend? Is it $50 a day, $100 a day, $1,000? I mean, what investment do you feel is reasonable based on what you found recently with the Spotify advertising to get somebody to go to that playlist?
Zach Sprowls
I think you have to spend… So I was running conversion campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and I think you have to spend, I think, a minimum of $5 a day, if I’m not mistaken. At least, or maybe it’s… You want to get so many conversions within a certain amount of time so that Facebook moves out of its learning stage. So if you’re familiar with conversion ads, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If not, you’ll become familiar. So you want to hit that learning phase pretty quickly. The more you ads, the faster you get through those learning phases. You might have to spend a certain minimum within a certain number of days. It might be like 50 bucks in the first two, three days, or something like that, in order to get out of the learning phase. But then you can drop it back to whatever you want. 16:22 I found as a principle, just spending a little bit is whatever minimum you can spend, whatever that number is, is great. If it’s 50 bucks a month just to get through the learning phase and that’s all you can do, that’s something. And then the more money you put at it, it’s just like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Zach Sprowls
The more money you can throw at it, the more gasoline is getting thrown in the fire. I’ve found for me that 300 bucks a month, which is 10 bucks a day, is a great starting sweet spot. It’s a manageable amount per month. It’s what a car payment might be, but you’ll get a lot of traction from that. It’s enough every day, 10 bucks a day, that you’re going to be seeing enough conversions every day that you can start predicting things or analyzing things, knowing what’s happening, and see actual changes in metrics on the Spotify side of things. And then more, if you could do a thousand bucks a month, then that’s just going to magnify that.
Jason Tonioli
One of the big mistakes, and I’m guilty of this, I still remember years ago when Facebook barely started doing their ads, and I was spending one cent per thousand views to show my ads on Facebook. So it’s funny because I can go back even on my Facebook ads accounts and I can see those. And it just blows my mind to think, oh, my gosh, it was one penny per thousand views when they first launched that. But when you’re first and it’s gotten so much easier to track conversions. You talked about conversion campaigns. I think when somebody’s new at doing Facebook ads or Google ads or any ad platform for that matter, you get something set up and you’re like, Okay, I’m going to spend five dollars a day or ten dollars a day, whatever amount it is. But a lot of people will think that just because they’re spending five dollars a day or a hundred dollars a day, that that’s working. And there’s a lot of people that don’t go that next step to just look at whatever the metrics are and decide, did it actually work? Because Mr. Zuckerberg at Facebook is more than happy to take your money.
Jason Tonioli
If you have incompetent people giving you money that just want to keep giving you money month after month after month. Facebook’s happy to take that money. I’ve even been guilty of it myself, it’s just running. I haven’t looked at that campaign in a year and a half, and it used to work. But I tell people, Gosh, you need to make sure that… I mean, unless you just want to donate money to Mr. Zuckerberg, you need to be looking at, did the metric work? Is it actually doing the thing you’re wanting to? I I think that you talked about that, don’t think it’s just going to magically start making money on playlist, because a lot of times, if I spend $5, I need to make $5.01 back if I’m going to do that. But that’s probably not going to be the case with playlists. On the flip side, however, when it comes to… I sell a lot of books, and I’ve done a ton of e-commerce stuff over the years, like the last five years. Actually, it was this spring for the music side, And I don’t know whether this is an award I should get or not, or stupidity award, but we spent over the $1 million paid to Facebook for advertising.
Zach Sprowls
Did they give you one of those plaques, like YouTube does?
Jason Tonioli
I was like, I’ve given you guys so much money. And if you ever are… I mean, there’s reasons why you would go into that type of spend. I mean, there were days we were spending $2,000, $3,000 per day. But the only reason that my team and I could do that is we knew to the penny how much we sold. So I knew the conversion. I knew that if I spent X number of dollars, let’s say $10 with Facebook, I knew that I could get $15 out. That’s one of those where I just ask people like, Okay, if I gave you a dollar, or if you give me a dollar and then I gave you $2 back, would you trade that again and again and again? Oh, yeah. Even if it’s You give me a dollar and I give you a dollar five back. Well, let’s play that game again. All day long. Essentially, if you can set up your offer or whatever your advertisement is, if you can find that somebody is interested enough to give you money for and you can set it up the right way. Facebook can show ads to the right people.
Jason Tonioli
Google can show ads to the right people. And there’s all kinds of levers that you can move and change. And I’m sure you found that quite a bit with your playlist. I’ve really done very, very little advertising for a playlist because, one, I didn’t feel like I could get my money back fast enough on that. But I probably should have invested some. I’d probably make a whole lot more money today with my streaming, had I invested more money into that. But again, the key thing is if you hire somebody to help you do it, or if you’re doing it yourself, honestly, even today, I still have a spreadsheet, and it says, Okay, here’s how much we spend on Facebook ads for the day. Here’s how many books we sold. Here’s how much those books cost me. Here’s how much the postage is to send these. Here’s how much it cost me to pay my people to package the books and send the envelope. Here’s the cost. We’ve got an average cost. Here’s the label that’s nine cents. Here’s all of these costs that are involved in getting to that point where I can send somebody a book.
Jason Tonioli
And I have a number at the end of the day that says, Okay, we made 15 or 20 or even if it’s just one cell. If I paid $10 to Facebook and it cost me another $10 to print and package and ship, well, I’m $20 into that. But if the person paid me $18, I’m losing $2 a day. That’s fun for a few days. It feels really good when you sell something. But to have a business, the reality is you’ve got to be willing to look at the situation and say, Okay, well, what levers can I move? Do I need a better target? Do I need to target better people? Is that something I can do better? Instead of getting $18 to sell a book, on average, can I get people to give me $30? So maybe you add on an extra thing with their order. And not everybody takes it, but some of the time they do, some of the time they don’t. So your average order value or average CART value, they call it ACV, goes up enough that, all right, on average, I get $30 when I make 10 cells or 100 cells or whatever you statistically want to count as valid.
Jason Tonioli
So I can now afford, if my average CART value is 30, realistically, I could pay $30 to Facebook and I could break even. And then from a business standpoint, and this is what I think a lot, most musicians probably don’t think this way, but if I can pay $30 to Facebook to give me a lead or somebody who likes my music, and the average amount that I sell a book for is $30, I essentially got a free fan, or potentially got a free fan. It technically didn’t cost me anything. Then now the question is, as a business owner, or musician, or whatever the business The thing is, can I take that fan or new customer and on average get 50% of them to like me enough that they might go listen to some of my songs? Well, now I just got a free listener on my playlist. Or can I come out with a new song or a new book or just give them value so that they’re liking them? You don’t want them to feel like you’re selling to them all the time, right? That’s the problem that I think most people have. It’s like, Oh, join my Patreon or buy this music from me.
Jason Tonioli
Nobody wants to get sold to. I mean, get real. There’s a reason we make fun of car salesmen, the greasy car sales guy. The key thing as a musician that I’ve tried to do is, what can I do to add value to the relationship and not be asking you for money very often. But when I do come out with a new book or I come out with a new song, that I’ve got a line of people now that hopefully I acquired for free or maybe I even make money on it. But if you could at least get fans for free, some of those fans are going to get excited about your stuff if you share the journey of making the music. Some of them are going to be willing to be like, Yeah, I’ll give you $4 for that song. I want to play that song on the piano. That’s cool. Or you share the music video, and then they want to go listen to it online, or you monetize the YouTube channel. There’s all kinds of ways to monetize. But I think musicians in general have had this idea that they can’t have anything more than an email list.
Jason Tonioli
And then even when they have the email list, they don’t know what to do with it. They don’t value the relationship they’ve built with somebody that’s shown interest in their music.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. I think music school ought to have quite a few courses on business. That’s one thing that I think is missing, because what nobody thinks about is that our society is a capitalistic society. Everything, no matter what it is, is existing. It’s like everything is fish in the water of capitalism and of a free market. You have to… Nothing exists in our society apart from somehow being related to money. Money was needed to create it. Money was needed to furnish everything around it. You didn’t even go to school apart from somebody paying your tuition, and your professors are all paid salaries. So your art might not require money to make it. Maybe you got to buy supplies and gear, and your parents probably spend a lot of money on your lessons and things like that. But the creativity involved in making your art doesn’t require money, but it does require money to get it out there, and it requires a business sense, and it has to exist in this water world of a market. Musicians don’t really realize that they have to have the ability to think that way, and they have to have some skill sets there, and they have to be willing to play that game if they want to get their music heard by more than just them and their mom and their significant other.
Zach Sprowls
What else was I going to say? I just lost it.
Jason Tonioli
Let me just chime in there. I think you and I earlier were talking about this one-to-one experience that you have with people. I think musicians, at some level, you, I have the big… You want to reach thousands or millions of people with your music. But in reality, at least most musicians I know, if you’re in the same room with somebody and you’re playing the piano for them, you would engage one-to-one with that individual. You would share something. You’d share a story about that song, or you’d shoot. There’s times I’ll bring people and we’ll sit down at the piano bench together and I’ll show them something and let them try something. If you think about your fans or somebody that likes your music and approach it like, Okay, if I only had one person that would ever like my music, that’s not my mom or my significant other, what would… And I needed them. In order to be successful, I need that person to fall in love with my music. So step back, put your business hat on and say, okay, I’ve only got one potential client. What is it that I would do to blow that person’s mind and have them completely fall in love with me?
Jason Tonioli
You can think of it like when you’re young and you’re dating and you’re finding that special person that you’re like, Oh, that’s my special someone. Are you going to take them on a date and then ignore them for two months and think they’re going to have any interest in you? Same with your Okay, this person just bought a song from you or subscribed to your channel or sent you an email and said how much they love your music. Would you ignore them? You’re never going to get a second date if you ignore them for a month. Probably not even for a week. If the girl’s got any sense in her like, Oh, he doesn’t have any… I try to approach when I talk with musicians and just say, when they ask, What should I do? Treat that one person that shows interest in your music and set up a system so that maybe once they engage with you, do you have a text message that goes out to them? Do you have an email that goes out to them that says, Hey, it was so awesome. I’m so glad you found this music. The song that I think people like has been one of the most popular ones.
Jason Tonioli
I just want to share it with you. Here it is. It could be a YouTube video. It could be maybe you want to send them sheet music for free. Would you send them a thank you card? Would you do a personal video? If you only had that one person, would you record a personal video just with that person and their name just to tell them you love them? There’s so many things we can do with technology today that as musicians, I think we overcomplicate and think, Oh, I need some fancy software to do all this. Okay, if you only had one, can you not send an email once a day to somebody, or can you just send a thoughtful text to somebody? And those little things, if you can come up with a system or a roadmap that is going to make that fan fall in love with your music, that’s a game changer. They’re going to feel like they have a one-on-one relationship with you. The tricky part is, okay, you get one fan, now you got 10, now you got 20, 50, 100. So now, how can you do that?
Jason Tonioli
And the beauty of it is there’s a lot of tools, CRM tools. I think I’ve used 12 or 13 different CRM softwares over my career. I used to do consulting for banks on that software. But there’s some tools now, software-wise, that are dream systems for musicians. It’s so easy to set some automations up so that if somebody interacts with you or messages you on Facebook or buys something for you, you could have a whole series. I call it an onboarding campaign that I do. It essentially allows me to introduce myself, tell my story, and send them some free stuff. I find out if they play piano or if they’re just a listener and they don’t play piano. Depending on whether or not you play piano or not, you go down two different paths. Hey, you don’t play piano? Here’s a playlist on YouTube that we created. Hope you like it. If they’re a piano player, Hey, here’s a free song. Song, just go download it. Here’s a coupon code just for you to go get this free song and download it. I’m not making any money on that, but guess what happens? I add that.
Zach Sprowls
You get a long-term fan.
Jason Tonioli
Eventually, hopefully, some of those people are going to turn in to give me money back, which is awesome. But at very least, I’m able to… Hopefully, I made somebody’s day and I put a smile on their face. If that’s the only payment I get, I’m cool with that. Maybe they can’t afford to spend any money on music. I don’t care. I’m glad I could share my talent, my music with you, and that’s amazing. But there’s going to be a percentage of people that want to engage and do more with your music. For those people, you want to have a system in place to monetize it. My systems aren’t perfect. I’m the first one to criticize and be like, Oh, I need to improve this. There’s so many things that we can always be doing better. But just like you said at the first, if you don’t start writing music or you don’t start putting some automation or system in place, you’ll never do it. A lot of people just flat out don’t know how to do it either. They’re overwhelmed with technology. Most creative people do not think analytically and the whole idea of like, Oh, I got to build an email secret.
Jason Tonioli
They can barely send an email, let alone create an automation to have it go out.
Zach Sprowls
You can’t blame musicians for not being wired that way. Because being an artist is such a right brain thing, and all this analytical stuff is such a left brain thing. Even if there’s somebody, even if there’s an artist, and there are some out there, I think you and I are this way, where you can bounce between the two sides of the brain. It’s taxing, and it’s not fun, and it’s all that. But I’ve actually… So this year, this would be a little encouragement to somebody who’s either overwhelmed with it or not wired that way or doesn’t have time. Think about hiring somebody. That sounds crazy, and you’re thinking, I’m not even profitable. I’m only spending money on my career now, not making anything. How could I afford to hire somebody? But even just two… I hired somebody this year for two hours a week, and I’m giving them 20 bucks an hour, a living wage, because I’m an idealistic person. I want to give them a living wage. That’s 160 bucks a month. That’s really not that much. The trade-off has been an incredible amount of peace of mind, because the person I hired is really talented at administrative stuff, all the things that I’m really not talented at.
Zach Sprowls
They can do it much more efficiently than I can and enjoy it more. Just the peace of mind of having somebody who’s on my team, who’s shouldering these responsibilities with me, who I can just send an email to and they’ll take care of it, who’s fielding emails that I don’t want to be receiving, little things like that. It’s like the return on that is so much greater than… The sum is so much greater than the part. They’re putting in 2 hours a week worth of work that might have taken me 4 hours a week to do. But those 4 hours freed up for me to do things that I’m good at, and that’s 8 hours worth of productivity that I didn’t have before because I was spending this time doing things that drained me and I wasn’t good at. So it is worth thinking about finding somebody, even for just that little bit, to help you with some of that stuff. It’s worth thinking about and trying.
Jason Tonioli
I totally agree. I’ve got several team members here in the States that we… I’m running multiple businesses now, and I have multiple people here for pretty much every business that are here in the States. I think it’s key to recognize what you’re good at. And then there’s stuff that you’re not great at and recognize that instead of trying to do it all on your own. For some reason, I think entrepreneurs, we love to feel like we have to do everything. Everything from the music, especially. I’m writing the music, trying to build a website, trying to figure out the accounting, trying to figure out plugins and why that’s not working, trying to do customer support and respond to emails, trying to do the marketing, to figure out how am I going to sell the stuff, doing the ads for Facebook, and then trying to sell whatever project I want to do next. There’s so many hats, and that’s why most people, I think, entrepreneurs, burn out. They try to do everything. It’s important to learn how to do a lot of that stuff. I feel like it’s absolutely important to be competent and know enough about it that you could do it.
Jason Tonioli
But then when you really graduate to that next level of being like, All right, like you said, I’m going to take four hours to do that thing, and this person does it in two hours, and they’re happy and they like it. Oh, my gosh. That changed my life. I think one of the things that was really interesting a couple of years ago, I was introduced to a site called onlinejobs. Ph. It’s essentially like the LinkedIn jobs site for the Philippines. I think there are several hundred thousand people in the Philippines now that use it. But I can literally, in onlinejobs.ph, you can go on there and you can search for pretty much any skill. You need a website builder that does WordPress sites. Type in a website, WordPress, and you’re probably going to have 500 or more people that pop up that are looking for work and have a full range of experience. There’s a bunch that don’t. But what I’ve learned, and I think we have about a half dozen people now on the team that are in the Philippines, their English is really good for the most part. There’s some that don’t speak great English, but there’s some really good English where I could put you on a phone call with them and you would not know they were not in Arizona or wherever you wanted to say they were from in the US.
Jason Tonioli
You’ve got people that are way more talented at all these skills. But the sad thing is over there, the Philippines doesn’t have a lot of natural resources. The resource that they have to make money for the country is its people. It’s a human resource. There’s a reason there’s so many… If you’ve been on a cruise before, there’s a reason there’s so many people working on the cruise ships from the Philippines or Indonesia, those areas, because that’s how they can make money and send it back to family. There’s a lot of call centers over there from the US, and they pay them terrible. We’re talking like, I don’t want to throw Cole’s under the bus, but I know one of our team members was working for Cole’s credit cards, and he was like a manager there for quality type of stuff. I want to say he was making less than $300 a month, and he would go and he’d be gone Monday through Saturday, and $300 a month. Just crazy. That’s normal over there. But if you think about spending that $160 or maybe you can afford $500 a month, you essentially can change somebody’s life so significantly.
Jason Tonioli
They could be a full-time employee for you for $500 to $1,000 a month. They are very talented people. That’s been a game changer for me for scaling some of my stuff I’m doing because a lot of them won’t have any clue how to do it. I’ve hired some people where they can speak English, and they’re smart, and they’re hard workers. If I can get that from somebody, and they’re very trustworthy people as well, but if I can get somebody who’s a hard worker and smart and give them the ability to not have to leave their family for six days a week and be able to work from home, and twice as much as they might have been making somewhere else, that’s amazing. Based on the quality of life they could have and have them be involved in their family’s life. And down the road, would I love to be able to pay more? To those individuals and be even more fair? Sure. But it’s one of those where that’s something I think any business owner ought to at least consider, are there some things that I could hire somebody to do? And if it’s remote, great.
Jason Tonioli
If it’s not and you want to do it locally, that’s great, too. But the Internet’s done amazing things for remote workers and allow certain countries to completely get out of the poverty cycle that they’ve been in for years.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah, that’s great. I wrestle, and maybe this is a question for you, I guess. I wrestle with it, so it makes total sense to hire somebody like that for a coding job or a website job or helping to run ads jobs or setting up email campaigns and things like that. But if it’s something that requires a real cultural and branding knowledge of For example, if I wanted to hire somebody to run my Instagram for me, or my TikTok, and I want them to both capture my personality, my brand, my vibe, but also the the zeitgeist of American culture, because that’s where I want to grow my fan base, because that’s where I’m based, then can you hire somebody from the Philippines to do that effectively?
Jason Tonioli
Can you hire somebody from the United States to do that effectively? Is what I would ask you. Because catching somebody’s personality. I worked with ad agencies for years when I was in the corporate world, and we’re spending $150, $200 an hour for people. They were smart people, and they were good. But the reality was I still had to train them. I had to train them about our branding at the bank and in the different businesses we had. You still got to teach that person what your zeitgeist and what your personality was. And so essentially, I think you can take anybody in any part of the world. And if you spend enough time with them and work with them, that’s possible. For a musician, I think it’s tricky. I don’t think a musician can just say, Oh, go do my TikTok or go do my Instagram and expect that somebody’s going to completely nail it. I’ve actually had people here in the US that ran my Facebook. I’ve actually got my Philippines people on multiple Facebook and Instagram channel stuff. And they do a fantastic job. What I think is important, if you are considering doing that, US or out of the US, you need to have some way for them to set up and create the poster, whatever the thing is.
Jason Tonioli
Then you need to have some oversight on approving it and giving feedback. Over several weeks or months or maybe even years, that feedback, they’re going to learn, and then they’re going to get better at it, and they’re going to, Oh, Zach didn’t like that thing, or, He didn’t like pictures that had purple in them. Just what we’re all going to have with our branding or the way we want to do stuff. And with that, they’ll get better and better and better. I would say I’m probably 50/50 for successfully hiring people to help with social media stuff here in the US. And honestly, actually, I think I’ve done better with somebody in the Philippines helping with my social media posts and learning than I’ve actually been in the US with getting people to help and figure it out. So they may not have the best quirky little things that understand the culture. But if you are reviewing that, you can give them ideas. You can brainstorm ideas. Chatgpt has been amazing for coming up with just, give me 50 potential social media posts that I could do about a piano. There it goes. You could look at that and just have that be the beginning, and then you can tweak those and run with them.
Jason Tonioli
That probably does a better job than you would do yourself.
Zach Sprowls
That’s good.
Jason Tonioli
I know we’re probably way past what we planned on, but I think just in this conversation, it’s interesting to just… I hope the takeaway is that people have had a lot of value bombs, but there are absolutely ways for people to generate revenue. What I talked about earlier with you is that for years, I’ve had people say, Oh, will you teach us how to do this and do a webinar and do some big class? Frankly, I’ve not felt comfortable doing that because I feel like every musician is different. And so providing a lot of value that’s going to actually be applicable to musicians is going to be really tricky to do. And so I haven’t actually done a webinar course type of thing, and I probably could have made lots of money and sold lots of people on it. But just recently, I started doing a one-on-one coaching thing with people. And I’m not charging near what I should, but I allow people to submit an application if they want to be part of that. Then if they’re accepted, I have a four-day one-on-one coaching, and I literally ask a whole lot of questions from people, and I go through and give ideas that hopefully would be applicable and generate money.
Jason Tonioli
Then with that, my hope is that those musicians that go through that little four-day coaching thing are 100 times better than they were when they met with me. Again, I’m barely paying for my time for that. But then for a very small group of people that I think is the right fit, we’ve started putting together a mastermind type of group where we’re the right person. Again, I almost pushed more people away. I don’t even offer it to very many people. But I have this full team that does my websites. I think we have 24 different websites we’re doing. Not all our music ones. We’ve got the travel companies and things like that, but they are really good at doing basic stuff, and we’re really good at doing musician stuff. I’ve basically made my team available to this small group of musicians that want to be in this mastermind group, and they can help, whether it’s setting up a funnel, whether it’s setting up an ad. I’ll jump in and do training, and my team does training as well. But it’s been fun to see people open up their website and they’re like, Oh, my gosh.
Jason Tonioli
I had no idea that that one little change would generate this much more revenue. Just last night, I was going through and did a little video for that group. In the last seven days, I launched a book. We’ll just use it for simple numbers. Let’s say that it generated $10,000 in sales for the new book. With one little tweak in addition to the site, my launch of the book added 13% more to the amount that I’d sell every day. I said $1,300 of that $10,000 would be people adding on a little bit more. Basically, I’m making people thrilled that they got a little bit better deal, a little bonus, adding this little, it’s called an order bump. One little tweak that we can add to the thing generated in $1,300 in additional sales, that 13% bump in one week. I think the thing that’s interesting with that is just by working with the team and helping people see the opportunities, you don’t know what you don’t know. I think that’s been what’s is I see people like, Oh, my gosh, I had no idea. They’re literally sitting on extra money and not helping their people for one and missing out on, hopefully, making a little bit more money so that they can maybe do the full-time musician thing that so many of us struggled to do when we’re starting out.
Jason Tonioli
Anyway, so that’s the pitch, but that’s where we’ve been going, and it’s been fun to see the successes that people have had. And again, this is not something that I’m offering. I For anybody listening to this, I’m pushing you away. It’s probably like you might be the right fit, but you probably aren’t yet. Yeah.
Zach Sprowls
I have two questions. Is your one-to-one coaching thing genre-specific or limited to a certain number of genres? And then two, what revenue streams do you feel competent to consult on, or do you feel competent in all of them? And so, namely, I’m thinking, obviously, sales is one you’re an expert on streaming. But then what about things like touring and sync and getting record deals and other sources?
Jason Tonioli
I would say I mean, the sales, the funnels, the website stuff is definitely where our teams excels. There’s huge opportunities that are right under people’s noses that they miss all the time. When it comes to touring, I have four kids. I don’t want to travel around a ton. I do very limited concerts, and if I do, most of the time, it’s my house here. That is not my expertise. I’ve been involved in a lot of concerts. I’ve lost my shirt at several concerts that I’ve tried to… I’ve got some horror stories. I’ve got a handful of successes for sure as well, but I’m not one that’s going to probably be your guy to do that. I do know several people in the industry who are really good at it, and I would just… If that’s the direction somebody is wanting to go, I’d say, Hey, you need to talk to this person. When it comes to streaming, I’ve done well. I make way more than a school teacher makes with my streaming. But I don’t feel like I have that down. I think that’s a moving target that’s going to. And so I think if anybody tells you they’ve got that nailed down, I think they’re blowing smoke.
Jason Tonioli
There’s absolutely things you can do, but it’s where you don’t control the streaming platform. I feel like you don’t have enough… You could have a Thanos Snap that just eliminates that revenue source for you tomorrow and wouldn’t be able to think about it, which is- We don’t know what AI is going to do, especially to Spotify. When it comes to consulting for sync placements, I have been through two courses that I have been really, really good at. I have two really good friends that I can text them, call on the phone. If it’s the right thing for the right person, I absolutely can tell you this person would be a good fit for that. I could call up my friends and say, Hey, go run through this guy’s course. Some of those people only run their courses once a year, even. But the sync isn’t right for everybody. You and I were talking earlier that it’s getting harder and harder to find those sync jobs. On the flip side, I think it is getting easier and easier to find those sync jobs if you know what you’re doing, because there’s never been more TV shows, series, and opportunities for placement of music than there’s ever been in the history of ever.
Jason Tonioli
It’s knowing the right people or being in the right library or doing the right type of music that’s a good fit for those types of shows. If somebody is like, Hey, I want to sing, I would absolutely want to hear what they’ve got and send them in to the right person because I’m not trying to be everything by any means, but I know I’ve been around long enough that I can usually spot opportunities for people. I’ve got some friends that are really good at doing music videos. Actually, we just yesterday planned, we’re do a retreat here in Utah, my recording studio at the end of October. He’s coming in from DC, and we are going to have a hybrid mastermind retreat we’re doing where he’s going to actually teach people how to do music videos on their own. So you can do it on the cheap, but we’re going to film music videos for everybody that wants to. And he’s going to show some methods that we’re. We’re literally going to film 20 music videos in a 10 hour or less period that are going to be completely different music videos and be over the top, really well done.
Jason Tonioli
That’s going to be one of those exciting things. I think we decided we were going to like 16 spots for that. I don’t even have a place you can go to sign up yet, but that’s something that I think for any genre, I’m really good at the piano side. You asked about piano, and I’ve done a lot of hymns. You’re the church music guy, it sounds like, was your major, but I feel like the things that I can teach are applicable to heavy metal. I mean, I grew up in junior high. I was playing punk music and Green Day, Pennywise on the piano and stuff. I love all genres. There’s a handful that I’m not a huge fan of. Some of the rap stuff is, I mean, that’s just not my jam. But anything that’s got a good musical melody to it totally applies. I mean, all of the stuff I can point somebody in the right direction on, it applies to any fan list. It doesn’t matter what genre you’re in.
Zach Sprowls
When you say four days, do you mean four one hour calls over the course of four random days? Or is it like- I’ve got a little agenda that just works through.
Jason Tonioli
My goal is to have somebody walk away with something that they can implement and be successful with. A lot of what we go through, it’s four, about 30 to 60 minutes calls. It just depends on the situation of how deep somebody’s wanting to go. But by the time somebody leaves, the first day, really, what I do is I’ll dive into asking questions and helping them figure out what they want, because a lot of people don’t even know where they want to go. They write music, but they don’t have any direction. The second day, we talked a lot about this onboarding. What’s the roadmap? If you were that one fan, what’s the journey you’d take them on? And we map that out of what that person’s situation would be. And then the third day, we actually will write out, whether it’s emails or text or a personal note, whatever, we’ll come up with what’s the two or three things you’re going to send out? And I’ll give feedback and help with that. And then on that fourth day, it’s a Q&A follow-up on stuff we’ve talked about. And then in a very few select situations, if somebody’s really wanting help or needing help, and it’s the right fit for both of us, we may say, Hey, this might be the right fit for you.
Jason Tonioli
But a lot of this stuff, I feel like artists can do a lot of it on their own, and they don’t need to spend. There’s the time to spend money and get the right people. And then there’s other times where, frankly, you can do a lot of it on your own. You don’t need to go pay thousands of dollars to have somebody do it for you. Frankly, I found that when people want to have somebody do everything for them, most of the time they’re not successful because why would they expect somebody else to care about their music or their success as much as they should?
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. Well, yeah. And then sometimes the owner or the artist, whatever term you want to give the person in this scenario, needs to have some blood, sweat, and tears in it in order to have investment in it and ownership in it and to understand the strategy and participate in the strategy. And if they just hired it out, It’s like you become two different parties doing two different things, and they’re not sinking together.
Jason Tonioli
I’ve seen it happen not only with musicians, but just businesses in general. They decide they’re going to just pay somebody to go do the thing for them, and they wash their hands of it. Some of that initial stuff is the most important thing you’ll ever do as a business owner. It’s your business. Why would you not want to have some say in how it’s going to be done? Could we charge 50 or $100,000 to have somebody come and go in and set a bunch of stuff up and do it for them? Sure. But for me, I’d rather see that growth in the artist and be there to hold their hand and do it with them if they need the help. But I really hesitate to tell people, it’s done for you. I haven’t seen that be successful very often. In music, it’s a mini business thing where it’s just you wash your hands. You’ve got to be involved at some level as a small business.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. So what do you charge?
Jason Tonioli
You know what? So right now for the four days, if you’re accepted, it’s 497 bucks is what we’ve been doing for those four days, one-on-one coaching with Jason. I don’t do more than one person a week. A lot of times I’ll skip weeks just because I got so many other things going on. But it’s my way to give back to the community. Then for those that need the help, it depends on what the need is. It ranges anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 a month. But I am insistent that we are not doing it for you. I can get in and do some of the hard technical stuff, absolutely. But I don’t even want to work with an artist that just doesn’t want to be involved and do some of the work. I just know they won’t be successful.
Zach Sprowls
Yeah. No, it makes total sense.
Jason Tonioli
Anyway, I think we’re way out of time. But hopefully, people got some value out of this, and hopefully, it just makes people think of a little bit different way to think through your music and how you can earn money. This has been fun, Zach. I appreciate you sharing a lot of your story, your value of how you’ve made money. I think that type of stuff is going to help a lot of people. So thank you.
Zach Sprowls
Great. I hope it is helpful.
Jason Tonioli
Awesome.