Beyond the day job: a paid membership built out of what Sam already knows
Simon and Sam: this is a plan for a second income stream that runs alongside the ten retained clients rather than competing with them. It is built on one asset nobody else in classical music has, which is the media list in Sam's head and the judgement that goes with it. Read it in order once, then live in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 8.
- What Sam sells: a membership for classical musicians who cannot afford a retained publicist. A maintained classical media list, one written press-readiness review a month on their own material, a live pitching clinic, the template library, and an annual campaign plan. Three tiers: £49, £299 and £1,500 a monthS40.
- Who buys it: the artist with a label release, a tour or a competition win whose only alternative is a publicist at roughly £1,500 a month on a three-month minimum, which is about £4,500 to find out whether it worksS4, S5. Not the median musician: UK musicians average £20,700 a year from music and 43% earn under £14,000S6.
- Why £299 is defensible: a professional media database costs £6,450 plus VAT a year for up to five licencesS7, and there is nothing classical-specific anywhere between a $49 spreadsheetS10 and that. The gap is the product.
- What it costs to run: about £412 a month at month six, roughly 4.9% of revenue, on Circle plus StripeS29. Everything else is Sam's time.
- Base case: month 6, 37 course members, 20 membership members, 1.8 done-with-you places, £9,947 a month at about 12 hours a week. Month 12, £18,469 a month at about 18 hours a week, and £125,225 of cash across the first twelve monthsS27. That 18 hours is the problem this guide spends most of its time solving.
How this guide was made, and what it is not
Who wrote it. Simon Minton, with Claude (Anthropic's AI) doing the research and the drafting, on 5 September 2026. The AI read Sam's public website and her one published interview, fetched vendor pricing pages, downloaded a UK government price schedule, and built the revenue model in model/revenue.py. Treat it as a well-researched briefing from a colleague, not as gospel.
What is solid. Every platform price, every published PR price, the Musicians' Census figures, the Roxhill price schedule from the UK Digital Marketplace, and the ABO membership scale. All carry a URL and a check date in Chapter 15.
What is judgement. The three prices. The tier boundaries. Which things are deliberately left out of the £299 tier. The pace of sign-ups in each scenario. All labelled as estimates where they appear.
What we do not know about Sam, and did not invent. What she charges her retained clients. How many hours a week she actually has. Whether she wants to teach at all. Whether any of the ten clients would be happy to have their names used. There are no testimonials in this guide, no member numbers, no case studies and no claims about results, because none exist yet. Every one of those blanks is a question for the first conversation, not a thing to fill in later with something plausible.
What it is not. A promise. A substitute for asking Sam what she wants. Legal or tax advice. The revenue scenarios are arithmetic on a stated pace of sign-ups, not a forecast.
What Sam already has that almost nobody else does
A public roster at the top of the profession
Her own site names Víkingur Ólafsson, Alice Sara Ott, Bryce Dessner, Bertrand Chamayou, Pekka Kuusisto, Jean Rondeau and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, with Barbara Hannigan, Colin Currie, Michael Barenboim, Naïve Classique, Alpha Classics, the Festival de Pâques d'Aix-en-Provence and the International Tchaikovsky Competition as previous clientsS1. A stranger can verify all of it in ninety seconds. That is the credential, and it is worth more than any marketing copy.
A working classical media list
Not a database anyone can buy. The knowledge of who covers what, who has moved, who takes a call, who wants an embargo and who will never write about a debut recital. Roxhill charges £6,450 plus VAT a year for up to five licences of a general UK journalist databaseS7, and it does not know classical.
French
Fluent, lived in Paris, has run French campaignsS2, S38. Every English-speaking competitor is locked out of Diapason, Classica, ResMusica, the Paris and Lyon conservatoires and the whole French festival circuit. This is the most under-exploited asset in the list.
The training a musician respects
A postgraduate diploma in classical piano, taken after EMI closedS2. Musicians will not take career advice on publicity from someone who has never been on the platform. Sam has been.
Both sides of the desk
EMI and Albion Media, campaigns spanning Kylie and Coldplay through to Marin Alsop and Joyce DiDonato, then digital communications at Universal McCannS2. She can explain what a features editor is thinking, which is the entire content of the course.
Ten paying clients as a distribution channel
Not as customers. As the people who know, between them, several hundred artists, managers, label staff and festival programmers who are exactly the buyer. One email asking ten people for two names each is the whole pre-sell.
And the things Sam does not have: an email list, a newsletter, a blog, a podcast appearance, a single piece of published career-advice content, and any public pricing at allS1. There is no audience to launch to. Every number in Chapter 8 assumes the ten clients' networks answer in the first two months. If they do not, the low case is the ceiling.
What is different about selling a membership
Sam already knows how to win a client, run a campaign and keep a relationship. Keep all of that. These six things are new.
| In the agency | In a membership | So |
|---|---|---|
| Ten clients, each known personally, each priced individually. | Sixty members, priced identically, most of whom Sam will never speak to alone. | Publish the price. Never negotiate it. The founding rate is the only discount that ever exists. |
| The work expands to fit the client's need. | The work must be capped or it eats the agency. | One asset per member per month, reviewed against a fixed rubric, returned in five working days. That is the contract. |
| Success is coverage. | Success is renewal. | Members leave when nothing happened this month. Publish a visible monthly rhythm so something always did. |
| Access to Sam is the service. | Access to Sam is the thing that must be rationed. | Questions go in one place and are answered on the clinic, never by DM or email. Say this on day one or never. |
| A client who cannot pay goes away. | A member who cannot pay drops to £49 and stays on the list. | The £49 tier exists to catch churn, not to make money. |
| Sam is the product. | The list, the rubric and the templates are the product; Sam is the reason to trust them. | Every hour spent writing something reusable is worth ten spent answering the same question privately. |
The chapters
1 · What Sam has
The public footprint, the roster, the assets that are actually saleable, and the three things nobody knows yet.
2 · The buyer
Who cannot afford a publicist, what a publicist costs, what a musician earns, and the arithmetic that decides who the £299 tier is for.
3 · Market and comparables
Every priced comparable with a URL: memberships, courses, media databases, professional bodies. The gap in the middle.
4 · The offer
Three tiers, what is in each, and the longer list of what is deliberately left out to protect Sam's week.
5 · Pricing
£49, £299, £1,500. The founding offer for the first 30. The annual plan. The rules that are never broken.
6 · The curriculum
Twelve modules with a deliverable each, and the monthly live calendar the membership actually runs on.
7 · Delivery stack and costs
Circle plus Stripe, why not Kajabi, the setup steps, the monthly bill and the weekly time budget.
8 · The launch plan
Ninety days from the pre-sell to the founding cohort, then the column and the conservatoires. Three scenarios as a chart.
9 · 200 targets
Conservatoires, competitions, media, festivals, promoters, labels, bodies, managers and ensembles, tiered and filterable.
10 · Channels
The eight routes to the niche, ranked by cost per member, with what to say in each.
11 · From member to client
The triggers, the upgrade conversation, and the capacity rules that stop the membership eating the retainers.
12 · Metrics
Nine numbers, one hour a month, with healthy and worry thresholds and the conditions for stopping.
13 · Templates
Sales page copy, the founding-member email, the conservatoire email, the monthly review format, the testimonial request.
14 · Collateral
The one-page offer sheet and the sales page, printable, with their HTML sources.
15 · Sources
Every figure in the guide with its origin, its date, and whether it is published, derived or an estimate.
The five things that decide whether this works
- Sam wants to do it. This guide assumes a person who enjoys explaining her craft to musicians. If that is not true, stop at this page. Everything downstream is a lot of writing and a lot of live calls, and none of it can be delegated in year one.
- Thirty founding members sign up in the first quarter. At £199 a month, price-locked for twelve months. They are the base case. If ten people say yes in the first month from the ten clients' networks, the plan is alive; if two do, the offer is wrong and should be reshaped before any money is spent on a platform.
- The monthly review is capped and returned on time. One asset, one member, five working days, one rubric. It is the entire justification for £299 and it is also the thing that will quietly grow into twenty unpaid hours a month if the boundary is not written down before member one.
- Something outward-facing lands by month four. A column in Gramophone, The Strad or Classical Music magazine, a Classical:NEXT session, or a conservatoire partnership. Without one of those the list stops growing at whatever the ten clients' networks produced.
- The retainers are protected in writing. The Campaign Partner tier never includes Sam contacting a journalist on a member's behalf. That single sentence is what keeps the membership from cannibalising the business it is meant to feed. Chapter 11.