About one year after playing their first show, the band I Fight Dragons (IFD) was signed by a label. It was not luck. It was not about paying their dues. Their strategy, from day one, was not to get signed, but to connect with their fans and take the Chicago scene as quickly as possible.
“I used to read a lot of books about the music business…and the biggest thing everyone always said was that it was not about looking for [labels and managers]. When it was time they will come looking for you…I thought it was not really accurate,” Brian Mazzaferri, the lead vocals and guitar player from IFD, said. “But in our case it really turned out to be true.”
Mazzaferri started IFD with his friends as a concept band. He began writing music that both integrated the sounds from various video games and was composed with video game hardware. Soon he found out that there was an entire genre of music in this style called chiptunes.
As the band was developing and writing music, they also took a serious approach to the business side of the band.
“I really did treat this as a business from day one,” Mazzaferri said.
According to Mazzaferri, one of the first things the band did was hire a social media coach. He wanted to avoid the pitfalls a lot of bands fall into, like wasting time and energy when trying to promote themselves on the web.
“It’s not about paying someone to do something for you,” Mazzaferri said. It was about learning how to become a part of the community, and not just spam everyone out there, he added.
One of the most unique marketing techniques IFD uses is giving free music to fans who sign up for their mailing list. It seems counterintuitive, because they are giving their content away for free. But not completely. By letting IFD send them e-mails, fans are paying for the music. They have created an audience who listens to new IFD material often and knows about IFD promotions and events.
Detone8.com writers have been on the mailing list for several months. We have noticed IFD sends few e-mails, but the ones they sent had great content.
Two of the most interesting promotions IFD have had were the 1,000 first fans certificates and the lifetime subscriptions for music and shows.
When the mailing list reached 1,000 subscriptions Mazzaferri wanted to create a special experience for their oldest fans. He said that everyone who is fan of a band likes to show that they were a fan before the band was big, so IDF gave their fans this opportunity. Any fan who was one of the first 1,000 people on the mailing list can receive a laminated card verifying their “original fan of the band status.” Several hundred people signed up.
IFD got creative again in order to fund the band’s first tour when they opened up for MC Chris. IFD has six members , with a lot of gear, so Mazzaferri knew touring would be very expensive. Their solution? Sell 100 lifetime memberships to shows and free music. Members are given a wallet-size USB drives with the IFD logo on it. The membership includeds a lifetime free pass to any IFD show ever, and access to a free digital copy of anything the band ever releases.The $100 memberships sold out within 48 hours. In two days the band made $10,000.
One of the more amazing aspects is not did locals fans signed up, but worldwide fans purchased memberships. Fans as a far away as Australia and Singapore became members.
The difficulty the band faces now is finding the time to share with an expanding fan base. The e-mail list has more than 10,000 members, and it’s harder to give time to every fan.
It is not luck that the band is successful. They learned early to take the same serious approach to connecting with their fans as they did with writing and performing their music.
People who struggle to advance in the music scene can get caught up in the concept of “paying your dues.” Yet, today IFD is working on their first label-produced album a little over a year after forming the band. Perhaps paying your dues means writing great music and having a serious marketing plan.