We’re Losing Money: Why Music Acts Must Stop Using Data File Host

So, you’re an independent musical act – DJ/Recording Artist, etc – with a website that cost you about R9000 (excluding maintenance fees). Your team of representatives include: A Publicist, A Manager & A Booking Agent (who all have their respective fees). Costs of production for your latest single amounts to (roughly) about R5000. You then go & sponsor posts on Social Media, directing over 10k people to DataFileHost where they’ll actually get the song for free ? Not to your website, Not to a digital store, but to DataFileHost. My question is: how/when exactly do you expect to get see some ROI  (Return On Investment) ? Because:

Image: SS College Festival. Source: Anokha Sounds

1. Your booking agent can’t identify where you’ve built a demand, neither can she/he get decent enquiries (if any at all). So NO DECENT ‘PAYING’ GIGS.

2. Your publicist is useless, as they thought DataFileHost is a great idea (to begin with). Furthermore, not only have they slept on your website + they also hardly have anything newsworthy to share. So NO DECENT MEDIA COVERAGE.

Image Source: Personal Liability

3. And as for your manager, well, much like the publicist, he/she is also useless. Simply because THEY’RE MISMANAGING YOUR CAREER by allowing all this to happen & they’re also ROBBING YOU BLIND (again, much like your other 2 reps).

Now that you realize you’re losing money, who do you blame ? Sadly, as Nic Burger, Universal Music Group South Africa,  would say: ”No one but YOURSELF !” And, I agree with him. But, Why – you might wonder? Well, see, it’s YOUR career, YOUR talent, YOUR money and it’s YOUR responsibility as an act to educate yourself. I’ve been saying this, for a while now and I will say again: We really need to attend Conferences, Read blogs, subscribe to relevant magazines, and seek out mentorship, etc.

Image Source: Machine Intelligence Lab (MILAB)

We honestly need to stop giving MONEY AWAY without understanding how we can get it back. Granted, there’s no guarantee that we will get it back, but still; we should, at least, try using the proper channels + good strategies so we can better our chances of seeing some ROI. Believe it or not, we can make as much money (if not more) as those that have signed to majors – we first need to start working harder smartly.