1. Engage Your Business Mind: I believe every person has a money mentality. As a matter of fact many people who are not academically educated are very good with money. In the same way the artist/band/musician has the innate ability to understand money if they choose to engage that part of their brain. Can I ask you to please do away with thoughts like, "I am only doing music out of love". These are the major barriers to thinking in a profitable manner. At the basic level you tend to think about what you are spending and what you are making. So if you spend £10,000 making an album and £5000 promoting it then I must make back money in excess of £15,000 if I am to be in business profitably. Such simple facts must be allowed to permeate your mind. Be careful to think about being profitable so that we do not end up like those other artists who sell millions of albums but end up in council flats and who were cheated out of millions by managers and labels because they chose to remain the uneducated artist.
2. Write How You Think: One of the main stumbling blocks for musicians when it comes to writing a business plan is the feeling of having to write the business plan in a corporate, business language. I think such thoughts are not only untrue but cause many people to give up even before they start writing. For a start, most business plans should be used for running the business so no matter the way it is written the important question to ask is whether the people concerned are capable of understanding what is written within the plan. Furthermore, if you write a business plan in plain language and you feel it needs to be much more formal with business jargons then there are many services to help you put your plan in that context. But all the main ideas would have to come from you!
3. Follow Your Own Ideas: Although it is important to read many other people's approach to a music business career or release, the plan you write must be built with your own ideas. This means that although other people's strategy and approaches can be included, they should never be the dominant ideas to run the business. What I am saying is that unless an idea fits into you or you are very confident you can achieve it, the idea should be held in a second. The reason for this is that what worked for someone else may be devastating for you. In other words, following the pay-what-you-like model implemented by the Radiohead may be disastrous for a small label whose fans may not be as loyal or inclined to offer fair prices.
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