CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for musicians

Being an independent musician is a lot like running a small business, and just like a small business, keeping and maintaining a fan database can be a huge boon to your long-term success. Here, we break down how CRM for musicians works.

Guest post by Sara-Lena of BlackbirdPunk

CRM for musicians can be a valuable tool. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It originally comes from the sales world.

With CRM software you can keep track of all your contacts. What is more, you can tag and categories them. This can help you greatly to identify the ‘value’ of a contact.

If you think about it, being a musician is quite the business. Hence the word music industry. This is crazy, instead of selling products like computers, you are very much selling your music.

Having a good overview of your contacts can be a time saver as well as to professionalize your work approach. Here’s the thing: the music industry is all about contacts. If you want to get booked you need the right contacts as well as if you want to strike a good deal with a digital distributor.

I hear you, CRM sounds just like another tool that takes more time than it is useful. However, if you start it right from the beginning it can become your best friend fast. For once, most CRM software has an integration into e-mail programs.

This way, you can save any new mail address as well as your newsletter followers. Properly making use of this could also help you see when a mail was read, for example. Good to know if you want to get in contact with any important music business experts.

If you are really onto something you can also use the CRM software for your fan communities management. By all means, having a clear overview of all your fans’ segments can be vital. What is more, having information stored like Instagram handles of your superfans can support your communications big time.

Using CRM for musicians

(musicians) are consistently managing many different types of contacts – booking agents, promoters, other industry professionals, crew members, band members, other musicians, fans, venues, etc.

*ImmensityforMusicians

There are many CRM software that you can use. One of the most commonly used is by no means Hub-Spot. They even have a tutorial on how you can use this program as a musician. The tutorial focus on how to get more gigs using the Hub-Spot program.

Once the pandemic is finally over for good, having a prepared game-plan for getting gigs is a good idea. The competition will be even higher than before corona broke out. What is more, you will probably be super eager to make it back on stage. Doing the preparation work now can set you up for success later!

There is also Magnetracks. This is supposed to be designed for music management explicitly.

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Make use of all features available

Most modern CRM software has many more features than just keeping track of your contacts. For once, many have email templates that you can use or a feature where you can set up your own templates.

What is more, you can share documents over your CRM software. Very useful if you are about to send out some EPKs and want to track the response rate.

Hup-Spot even offers in-app calling. This means that you can even track your phone calls now and add valuable information directly into the CRM software.

For international businesses, the live chat function can be super useful. Nobody has time to reach out to you if it is too complicated. International booking agents and managements only have very limited time resources. If they come across your music and like it, it’s better to give them a direct way to contact you.

There you have it, making use of all software that is available to you is important. By all means, CRM software wasn’t invented for the music industry and musicians alone. However, don’t make this a reason why you don’t use it. Be smart and adapt it to your needs!