Indie Success in the Digital Age: For decades, the industry standard for building a brand as an artist involved live touring and boots-on-the-ground promoting––the grind that easily requires thousands of hours. Leah McHenry, a Celtic Metal artist from British Columbia, has leveraged the power of the Internet and savvy new marketing strategies to build a fan base from her house where she homeschools her five kids. With limited resources and her inability to tour (with five kids at home), Leah created a six-figure music business from scratch by getting very specific with her “micro-niche,” which she says is the key to creating a connection that fans truly desire, and the missing link from many artists who try to be everything to everyone. Creating a heavy metal/Celtic music hybrid (“Enya meets Evanescence”), she quickly realized the importance of standing out from the pack with a focus on culture and niche marketing.
Helping Other Musicians: When friends and fellow musicians caught onto McHenry’s success, interest in her methods led her to create an e-book that outlined her strategies. McHenry turned her ebook into a multiple video format that became the flagship course and laid the foundation for a repeatable program and system. “Its goal was to help both musicians who had never recorded and veterans eager to transition their marketing efforts into the digital age,” she says. The course teaches basics about creating quality music, identifying one’s micro-niche, mastering social media, creating fan culture and community, branding, launching music online the right way and building an online following. That ebook, The Online Musician, was the beginning of Leah’s journey to expand her inner teacher by helping other musicians navigate to success in the new music industry. Shortly thereafter, Savvy Musician Academy was created and the mission became official. McHenry and her husband Steve now lead a team fully dedicated to supporting the music goals of over 120,000 musicians and growing.
How You Can Get Started: SMA’s flagship course, The Online Musician, is available as part of a monthly or yearly membership to the Savvy Tribe. This evolution from the original course developed when Leah and her team discovered that musicians need more than just instructions––they need feedback, support, and even motivation when things get difficult. Joining the Savvy Tribe is like signing up for a gym membership, personal trainer and a community of accountability partners––except all for your music goals and for a much smaller investment. Tribe offers the proven step-by-step strategies Leah has used, and is still using, to create her six-figure music business from scratch. It’s completely self-paced, and supports you with monthly Q&A live seminars, discussion and forums, hot seats with personal feedback on your projects, accountability groups and continued access to the SMA Success Team––a part of the Savvy team dedicated to your success. Leah McHenry, who records as LEAH, says, “We believe that there has never been a better time to be an independent musician because the dream is achievable independently of corporate music labels.”
To learn more about Leah and joining the Savvy Musician movement, check out getsuperfans.com
