How I Make an Extra $52,476/year as a Jazz Musician

The Skool platform CHANGED my life. As a jazz musician it’s allowed me to break out of the grind of trading my time for money, and build something that will scale over time.

In this video I’m going to do 2 things: the first is give you a quick overview of the Skool platform and why you should use it, and the second is showing you how this enables a whole new style of teaching as a musician, that will give YOU control over your income and life.

What is Skool?

Skool is a community-first platform created by entrepreneur Sam Ovens. You may know him as the creator of Consulting.com or maybe for his hugely popular and influential YouTube videos talking about business, entrepreneurship, and life.

It’s a place for you to gather your group of people in one area online to share ideas, sell courses, host live events, and much more.

What Skool is not?

It is not for people that want to have courses without the community element, and later I’ll explain why you shouldn’t want this either.

It’s also not a “paid” FB group, as you might assume. Because there is a direct connection between the Community, Classroom, and Events, the % of members that engage is extremely high and the quality of posts and replies are as well.

For example, my own Skool community is 100% engaged.

Comparison to Kajabi

When my brother and I first started creating courses, we used another platform called Kajabi, and still do for some things such as our email list and this blog. This was good for where we were at the time, but we’ve seen that the BIG issue with that system of selling standalone courses is the fall off in sales over time. Now, Kajabi does offer a community aspect to their platform, but it’s honestly nowhere near as good or simple to use as the Skool platform. 

Why I use Skool and why you should too

I started using Skool around 10 months ago, and since then I’ve been able to grow my online jazz guitar community — what I call Chase’s Guitar Academy — from 0 to 85 members, each paying an average of $50/month. My goal for the year is to get to 100 members, and it’s already looking like I’ll get there much earlier.

Let’s take a minute to really understand the math on what this means and how it compares to the cost of Skool.

Skool is currently $99/month. This means I only needed to have 2 members join to break even, everything after that is profit. Again, compare that to an upfront cost on Kajabi around $2000 to get the best deal and you can see how much of a no-brainer it is to use Skool.

What’s the upside for me in creating using this platform? Let’s break it down.

- With 0 members you pay $99/month

- With 2 members you break even

- With 22 members you make an extra $1000/month

- With 50 members you’re making an extra $30,000/year

And it just scales up from there

Imagine this scenario. If you have a group of students…maybe you’re driving to their house, teaching at a music school, or they come to you. Either way, I’ve worked all of these situations and I know it’s time consuming and exhausting.

Now instead of doing that, what you should do, and what I did, is Create Your Community on Skool and teach your students that way.

This topic could be its own video, but here are some reasons why this is 10x better.

1. You can schedule group lessons online to make more money per hour.
2. You can expand your studio beyond your local area. For example, I teach students in France, South Korea, New Zealand, etc. You can access the ENTIRE world for potential students.
3. Your students get to know each other and give each other support and feedback. This is a HUGE benefit for them and for you in retaining students.
4. Last one I’ll mention off the top of my head is your students learn faster and are much more motivated in this kind of environment.

If you’re interested in the exact details of how I grew my Skool community consistently and want my help to actually build this out for yourself, let me know by sending me an email to [email protected] and I’ll share my framework and method with you.

Ok so if you’re sticking around at this point you’re interested in the idea but want to see it in action. Keep reading below or watch my video here.

Look inside Chase's Guitar Academy built on Skool

Community

The Community tab is where most of the action happens within your Skool community. This is where you and your members can make posts, reply to posts, share photos, video links and files, and more. There is a lot to talk about in how this all works together, but I want to focus on two key features and benefits within this section.

Categories

Each post gets a "Category" type which is helpful for members to stay on track with posting the type of content you want them to, as well as easily find the content they want to find.

For example, two of my categories are "Music Inspiration" for posting performance-based videos that inspire you and "Music Insights" for posting educational-based videos that you found valuable.

These categories help the members understand that Chase's Guitar Academy is a place to share that kind of content, as well as quickly and easily search for inspirational and educational videos within the community. 

As time goes on, this aspect of my community only becomes more and more valuable as more members share the BEST inspirational and educational content.

Action posts

One of the best features for music teachers that Skool added is "action posts". These are normal posts where you can "add an action" to which requires the member to comment in order to "complete" the action. If the member hasn't completed the action then they see a red "Complete action" on the post.

Once they've completed the action, they instead see a green "Action complete" instead.

Why is this so useful? 

Well, in my opinion, one of the best ways for a student to improve is to get lots of feedback from their teacher.

In most cases, students only get this feedback on their playing every week or more when they go in for a private lesson.

However, using these action posts I can ask members to complete a specific assignment that demonstrates they're ready to move on and give specific feedback on the videos they upload within the post.

In addition, these action posts link into the "Classroom" tab and members feel the positive social pressure to complete the assignments that their peers have completed.

Classroom

The Classroom tab holds all of your courses for your community, as well as the videos and any additional resources for each lesson.

For example, if we look at that same lesson with the action post above we can see how it exists within the Master Standards Blueprint course below the video lesson and accompanying PDF.

This system of having live calls with members, turning those into courses, and having the members engage on course content in the Community allows me to create an engaging curriculum that builds on previous lessons and thrives on member engagement, both in the live lessons and afterwards in comments.

I used to teach at a music school and drive to students to teach privately, and one of my biggest pet peeves was the fact that I would teach the same concept over and over again. Now, I can focus on creating the absolute highest quality content for my members and not on re-teaching material.

And, my members love this approach too!

Calendar

The Calendar tab is where members can find any upcoming events, such as our live lessons on Zoom. All of the events appear in the members local time zone and they can easily click on an event and see the direct Zoom link to join.

Leaderboard

Lastly, Skool communities also have a Leaderboard which allows for ways to increase engagement and gamify your community. 

When members receive a 'like' on a post or comment, they receive a point. 

This rewards members for contributing valuable posts and feedback to the community. 

After a certain number of points have been achieved, members will level up. I set up my levels to match the belt levels in jujutsu since I also practice that art.

For the members that are in the Top 3 at the end of each month, I award them a free private lesson with me. You can decide how you would reward your members for being at the top of the leaderboard.

One initial concern might be that some members would try to cheat the system, but because the members become fast friends and support each other, there hasn't been any of this kind of behavior.

Final Thoughts and My Ask of You

If this doesn’t really convince you that this is the new BEST way to teach music online, then I don’t know what will. I just know I’m definitely not going back to the old way of teaching music when this system exists.

I really want to see other musicians and music teachers create their own community and online lesson studio using Skool.

If you want to learn more and try it out for yourself, click this link to Create Your Community.

If you join using that link, it does help support my work on this channel, at no extra cost to you. I really appreciate those of you that support me in that way. 

In return for using my affiliate link, I'd be more than happy to help you get started and share the methods and frameworks for making my Skool community a success. Email me at [email protected] if you'd like to learn more.

To your success,

Chase

P.S. If you want to join Chase's Guitar Academy, click here to see the membership options.