The Hub and Spoke System of Music Licensing

I'm not sure if the term "Hub and Spoke System" has a place outside of the airline industry, but I really think it should for the online world. It's a pretty straight forward concept that's setup like this: The small airlines trickle all flights and passengers back to the Hub airports.

I know your probably thinking, ok well that's great for airlines, but how does it relate to music and music licensing?

The online world is very similar to airlines in the fact that your dealing with a large amount of people traffic. The goal in the online world is to get quality traffic back to your music which ultimately leads to income, new fans, opportunities, ect.

This is kind of where the Hub and Spoke system starts to be useful for a musicians and producers. There is a lot of information out there about building an online presence but if you take that information and mix in a Hub and Spoke mentality, then you can build an awesome framework to maximize how you gain traffic and attention to your music.

So let's take this hypothetical for an example | Jim wants to license his music mainly through his music website. To use the Hub and Spoke the "hub" is Jim's website. The hub's job is to be the center piece of what Jim is trying to accomplish. This is your "head quarters."

The spokes are all the other things your doing online. The social networks, the various websites you're affiliated with, your promotional stuff, ect. Your goal is to try to funnel the traffic from these spokes back to your hub. So if Jim wants to get people back to his website and is on YouTube doing videos. To use YouTube as a spoke all he'd have to do is direct traffic from YouTube back to his website.

The hub doesn't need to be a website, it can be whatever you choose it to be. If your signed exclusively with a music publisher then your presence in their catalog becomes the hub and all your spokes well feed back to that. You decide your hub based on what you want to accomplish. Your hub could be a soundcloud account, bandcamp, YouTube page, whatever you want.

You have to think, what is the most important place for your music business, and that becomes the hub. Then all the other music related things your doing become the spokes and should try to funnel people back to the hub. The goal is to use this system to develop your traffic framework and get the most people possible hearing your music and engage with what you are doing.

I hope this idea helps with your online activity. Thanks for reading and feel free to share, like and comment below.

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