Sam Whitney SHR4C007R
For my business I am proposing the starting of a label called MOTT. Our primary goal is going to be to grow local bands platforms into a position where they can tour the UK. We plan to do this by forming connections with a range of venues, initially across the north of England such as, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle and of course our hometown of Leeds. This network that we are aiming to increase after the first year of our business’ conception will be what gives our artists a unique foot up on their rivals, showing their music across multiple counties and reaching bigger and wider audiences than would usually be possible. For this initial investment in the bands futures, we would expect to have a small portion, between five and twenty percent of their publishing rights to be signed over to us for a period of between five and ten years.
For these deals to be carried out effectively and ethically we are going to have to contract our artists to our label. This will require bilateral contracts that state both parties’ roles and the expectations of what they will have to do. For us as the promoter and label we will deliver opportunities in the form of shows and later down the line recording opportunities too. In return we will expect professionalism from our performers and most importantly for them to bring a lot of presence and power when on stage. In these contracts would also be included deals on publishing rights, for our business model to maintain we need a form of passive income, this will support our initial spending and in time lead to the growth of our label. Taking between five and 20 percent initially while not producing our band’s music creates this cash flow which when combined with our future expansion into the production of our own music (at a higher percentage of publishing rights to the label) will ensure our growth and stability.
Looking into the practical costs of putting on shows will be our next focus, this will include, venue booking, paying artists, travel and the marketing and promotion of the events. Initial booking fees of venues sits between one hundred and two hundred pounds depending on capacity and popularity. We aim to keep these costs down by developing our relationships with a select group of venues around our target cities and working consistently alongside them, forming deals down the line for cheaper venue hire. Next we will look at the driving costs of going from city to city carrying equipment and performers, for this I will take a lead role and use my van to drive artists and their equipment, looking at previous trips I have done I can estimate these will cost around thirty pounds for our cheapest round trips such as Manchester and Sheffield and a high of around one hundred pounds to go further afield to Newcastle and Liverpool. This “diy” approach allows us to keep travel costs down and means we can afford to pay our artists what they deserve, headliners will get the biggest cut where we will always aim to pay them one hundred pounds at the end of each gig, the next three bands will get incrementally smaller cuts by twenty pounds each time. This means we will need to sell tickets between eight and fifth teen pounds in order to make the profit we need after paying for travel and our artists.
Our desire is to have a large roster of artists across a range of cities, this is gonna give us the opportunity to move people around and have them play shows together, we will need five bands in each city as a minimum, this is gonna be our longest job to cultivate these groups. However, once they have been assembled the ability to send a band form Leeds to play with say three from Sheffield will be what sets us apart. Showing off our roster across city lines and in turn growing all our groups fan bases among each other. For this reason, we want to focus onto tow primary genres of music. Leeds’ thriving hardcore scene and the ever popular post punk scene. Both other a very broad product that has many incarnations and therefor is marketable to many people. Creating our reputation is the single most pivotal part of this process, we need to fill venues and reach people who have never met and, in many cases, heard of us before. Being aligned with these popular and close knit communities who regularly communicate with other members in different cities will create this trust and reputation which when matched with our exciting shows and DIY attitude we can create an exciting, bustling and profitable enterprise.
Looking into our competitors next I believe I have discovered a corner of the market in leeds that has not been tapped, labels such as monomyth and clue records are almost entirely localised to leeds based performers. Our desire to work with artists across the north of England and creating a hub between these is what will set ius apart, offering opportunities to support fellow artists on the label we aim to create a social network between our groups that forms into a community that can be easily interacted with by our customers.
Although our initial roster of bands is going to be smaller than those of these existing labels our desire to grow quickly and put on lots of events will combat this, allowing us to grow at a faster rate than others. Our aim of supporting artists who aren’t necessarily getting the coverage they want also makes us much more appealing than these larger labels. Their will be miss steps within this as not all artists have the same work rate and production outflow as others but the ones who do reach that higher level will be further supported with gigs, merch and eventually tours. Creating a competitiveness between artists like this will push them to be more available, more active and work harder on their individual projects. The way we are going to achieve this is by creating a tiering system for our bands, with the first tier getting more of the promotion, merch and gig opportunities and the following three tiers getting incrementally less.
Focusing now onto the merch, promotion and marketing for our artists and how we will make this work. Firstly, we are going to create a website, here you will be able to see all the bands that we represent and listen to any music that they’ve released as well as viewing their respective merch. Sale of merch through the website will give us a percentage of the sale and we will take care of the packaging and shipping, for us to maintain our business we will take the cost of shipping from the profit as well as ten percent of each item sold. The upside for our artists is we will use our connection in Leeds at Total Print Studios to get discount prices on the printed units. This ensures a competitive edge for both us and our artists. The website is also going to be set up with a membership subscription at the end of the first year, or when the Instagram account hits one thousand followers, this will give access to music before it is officially released and early drops on merch and records, as well as content like interviews that wont be made available to the general public. The website will also link directly to our own and the bands social medias. This is where we intend to do the majority of our promotion, growing a following on platforms such as “Instagram” therefor will be essential. Within our label we have a group of people who have all promoted their music and gigs before so we will use this experience to once again do the same, this time investing money into paid promotion to get onto people radar. Our main goal however is to consistently post, we have all seen dead accounts with very few posts that just scream unprofessionalism. Our goal is to connect and engage with fans and prospective clients alike.
Although I have already touched on some of the costing throughout this proposal I will now dedicate this section entirely to this, I am going to outline the individual prices of each aspect and then make an estimate of our first years operating cost. Starting at the very beginning we will need to list ourselves as a limited company, this has a cost of fifty pounds and will allow us to begin trading, we also then need a website which costs around two hundred and fifty pound. Next we can begin to look at the shows and I have estimated that doing one a month in Leeds and one in another major northern city will cost us between two thousand four hundred and three thousand six hundred pounds, with travel adding a further three to five hundred. We will then need to pay over the course of the year a total of six thousand punds to our performers Looking at our merch set up next we will be spending around six hundred and forty pounds on a hundred t shirts. I believe that dealing with such large amounts could allow us to get the single unit price down to around four of five pounds each, we will also be supplementing this with money from the bands by offering to front fifty percent of the money for an equal cut in their sales. We will also be spending money on our promotion, working alongside long time friends however will keep these costs down with a single artists producing us twenty four unique posters for one hundred pound, we will also allow between thirty and fifty pounds to be spent on boosting posts on our social media. This all adds up to a predicted first year running cost of between six thousand eight hundred and seventy and eight thousand two hundred and seventy pound. This means we will need to clear our highest estimate by around one thousand pound to ensure the profit required within the first year to maintain our business. This also allows us to figure out how much we would roughly need to sell our tickets for at a minimum if every gig was sold out which is three pound and eighty six pence, which adjusted for the potential of unsold out shows equates to between seven and ten pounds on pre sale.
