How To Write Your Music Business Plan

From innerrhythm:

I had a request recently on how to write a music business plan. Here’s the format I recommend my clients to follow. Call it a template. A music business plan gives you a sense of leadership, strategy and direction and I discussed it briefly in my free e-book, How To Design A Winning And Profitable Music Business.

If you’re still not convinced on the importance of writing a music business plan for your career, here’s a very simple analogy: If I were to ask you to come to my home in London, I’d tell you the address and point you to Google Maps to get your directions from where you’re starting out. If you didn’t have those directions and my address, it’d be very difficult to get here without the map. Your business plan acts in the same way for your music career.

Whether you are a band, solo artist, songwriter, instrumentalist, producer, manager or any other music industry individual, you need a plan to help you achieve your goals and be fulfilled. The template below will help you create one. In helping to make this template real, I’m going to use a fictitious R&B/soul artist called Tina.

Music business plans can be created in many ways, but there are four core components that I like to advise people to write up: Operations (the activities you do in your music business), Marketing (how you’ll get those activities out to more people), Financials (how you’ll spend and make money) and Action (your time-line for getting things done).

Covering these four sections creates a very simple and excellent plan for your business. If you are looking to create a business plan that will help seek investment in your music business, you may need to go to more detail like analyzing your market, understanding your infrastructure, etc, but that is not the purpose of this article.

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