Case Study: Cornerstone Music Promotions

Besides embarking on a quick journey to listen to the stories of other entrepreneurs, I will also share the stories from my own business ventures. I was fortunate to interact with entrepreneurs who were willing to share their stories, and it was an enriching and refreshing experience to tap into unconventional experience and tap into their business wisdom.

Why my two Entertainment Businesses didn’t make the Success List

Business #1 – Cornerstone Music Promotions

Many years ago my passion and love for music drove me to start up a music promotions business. I decided to specialise in Gospel Music only because I didn’t want to do any other music at the time. At the time I’ve started the business I didn’t know much about music promotion but
Do you at this point already see part of your business in what I have said this far; if you are, continue reading because you will soon learn from these bad business practices.

Now let’s deal with the core of my story…my first event hosting a professional female group originally from Cape Town, but based in Johannesburg, South Africa. This group was Real Sisters. Cornerstone Music Promotions (CMP) decided to host this Gospel Concert and decided on a date and venue and secured the group for the most suitable date.

We reckon that popularity of the vocal group would automatically draw a number of people to the concert, but also knew how important it was to do posters, flyers and to have at least one article in the local newspaper and a radio interview. In addition to this we did word of mouth, invitations to several local churches, as well as ticket sales. This was basically the same approach that we’ve applied in most other concert
As artist it is easier to put together an event, find a gig somewhere or going out to jam with fellow musicians, and drag along those you wish to promote. Insight into the industry requires a lot of learning, consultation, advice, and trial-and-error (learn through mistakes).

The music and entertainment industry is very broad with high levels of complexities across all spectra. We understood very little of the industry back then, but at the time our operation in our opinion didn’t require the level of knowledge that could have led to more organisational success.

For us the music industry was mainly creating and consuming music, with the main platforms being events like concerts and others. We also understood that there were other platforms that were distributing channels for music consumption, but didn’t know much of how things were working.

As a musician and creator of original music a number of things around the various music rights, royalties, online distribution and consumption, etc. wasn’t very clear. But we also didn’t make enough effort to equip ourselves with knowledge.

Learning from mistakes in the industry we operated