E · G · B · D · FThe five lines of the treble staff — every good band deserves fans.
One-on-one coaching for independent artists who are done guessing. Twice-monthly calls with me, a monthly call with the whole cohort, a scored audit of your entire career, and a scorecard we review every single month — so you can see exactly what moved.
After the Free Call
Most coaching sells you a feeling. This one hands you a number.
On our free 30-minute call, we work out where you actually are. If it's clear I can help and you want to go further, this is what going further looks like — a full year of working together, with a scored baseline on day one and a re-score every quarter. You will always be able to answer the question “is this working?” without guessing.
What You Get
No vague “access” or “community.” Every item below is a deliverable with a defined completion state.
A 40-point assessment of your career across the four keys you play — craft, audience, live performance, and money. Delivered as a written report in week one, with a score out of 100 and the three weakest points ranked in order of what to fix first. The fifth key is what that score becomes by month twelve.
Measured byScore out of 100, re-scored at months 3, 6, 9 and 12.A live shared dashboard tracking twelve numbers that actually predict a sustainable career — not follower counts. You update it monthly; we open it at the top of every call and talk about what changed and why.
Measured by12 metrics, logged monthly, charted over 12 months.Two 30-minute video calls every month, with me, on the record. Thirty and not sixty on purpose — you get the agenda in advance, we open on your scorecard, and a tight half hour twice a month is far easier to protect in a real week than an hour that drifts. You get the recording and a written summary with your action items inside 24 hours. Then once a month the whole founding cohort is on one hour-long call together — the things more than one of you ran into that month, worked through once, with the other artists in the room asking their own.
Measured by24 one-to-one calls a year — 12 hours of live 1:1 time, recorded, with written action items — plus 12 one-hour cohort calls.We get you registered with a PRO, set up your own publishing entity, and register every song in your catalogue. Most artists I meet are leaving half their performance royalties on the table because nobody ever walked them through this. We finish it together.
Measured byPercentage of your catalogue fully registered. Target: 100%.Three income lines from the same show: what the venue pays you, the performance royalties you file for every setlist, and real-time fan support in the room through TrueFans CONNECT — no QR code, no app download, 92% straight to you, and every dollar of it landing against a named fan in your ledger before you are off stage.
Measured byAverage revenue per show, tracked gig by gig.Moving people off rented platforms and onto a list you own. We audit every place a fan could join and fix the ones that are broken, write a five-email welcome sequence in your voice, and set a release rhythm you can actually keep. A thousand true fans is not a slogan — we put a date on it in month one and track the gap monthly. And the term gets defined rather than waved at: a true fan is someone who has given you $250 or more in the last twelve months. Your ledger counts them by name, so the gap is a number rather than a feeling.
Measured byTrue fans counted monthly, plus owned contacts (email + SMS) and 90-day engaged rate.A week-by-week template covering the twelve weeks before a release and the eight after — metadata, splits, distribution, pitching, assets, and the follow-through that most artists skip. Yours to reuse for every release you ever put out.
Measured byReleases shipped on schedule against the plan.Email and text access to me for the things that will not wait two weeks — a contract landing in your inbox, a promoter pushing back, a decision you need a second opinion on before Friday. Replies within one business day.
Measured byOne business day response, Monday to Friday.The Measurable Part
These are the metrics on your scorecard. Every one of them is inside your control, and every one of them is reviewed on a fixed schedule. Vanity metrics are deliberately absent.
| Metric | How It's Measured | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| Owned audience | Total email and SMS contacts you control outright | Monthly |
| Engaged fans | Contacts who opened, clicked, attended or bought in the last 90 days | Monthly |
| Catalogue registered | Percentage of your songs registered with your PRO and publisher | Monthly |
| Setlists filed | Performances submitted for royalties, against performances played | Monthly |
| Revenue per show | Venue fee plus in-room fan support, averaged across the quarter | Monthly |
| Income streams active | Count of streams paying you anything at all this month | Monthly |
| Music income | Total earned from music, split by source | Monthly |
| Cost per release | What a release actually costs you, all in | Per release |
| Songs finished | Written, demoed, and recorded — counted separately | Monthly |
| Shows played | Confirmed performances, with fee and attendance logged | Monthly |
| Release cadence | Days between releases, against your planned schedule | Quarterly |
| Baseline audit score | Your 40-point audit, re-scored out of 100 | Quarterly |
A note on what I am measuring. These track the work and the assets you build — the things you and I actually control. I am not going to promise you a streaming number or an income figure, because nobody honest can. What I will promise is that at any point in the year you will know precisely what has moved and what has not. Twelve inputs, and one output they add up to: how many people are actually paying you.
The Year
Four keys you play, one a quarter, worked in the order that compounds — and a fifth you finish on. Each quarter closes with a written review and a re-scored audit.
The First Month
Every program says the first month matters. Here is precisely what happens in mine, week by week, with the state each week has to reach before the next one starts. Print it and hold me to it.
Thirty days in you should be able to say, without me in the room: here is my score, here are my twelve numbers, here is what I am registered with, and here is what I am doing for the next ninety days. If any of that is missing and you did your part, the 60-day guarantee below is exactly what it says it is.
Honest Qualification
I would rather you read this and decide it is not for you than sign up and find out in month three.
Investment
Same program, same access, same amount of my time either way. The only difference is how you pay for it.
Every month you get two 30-minute one-to-one calls with me, and one hour-long call with the whole cohort. The one-to-one calls are exactly that — not an account manager, not a recording of something I said to somebody else — an hour a month on your career, with the person whose name is on this page. The cohort call is the one room where everyone is together: the questions that came up for more than one of you that month, answered once, and the other founding artists doing the same work you are. It is in addition to your two calls, never instead of them.
Then there is everything I do when you are not on the call, and it is considerably more than the hour we spend on the calls. Your baseline audit and every quarterly re-score. Your scorecard, read and interrogated before we speak so the call starts with what changed instead of catching me up. Contract and split-sheet reviews. Catalogue and metadata audits. Registration checks. Release and touring plans built out between sessions, written down and sent to you. Whatever I have to go and read, chase or verify on your behalf that week. None of that is billed — it comes with the two calls rather than on top of them.
This program is new. What I do not have yet is a shelf of documented results from this specific twelve months of work, and the only way to get them is to run it with a first group of artists. That is what the founding rate buys me, and it is worth being straight with you about it.
The cap is twenty artists, and it is real. Forty one-to-one calls a month is twenty hours, plus the cohort call, and that is the easy part. What used to fill the rest of the week was the work behind them — pulling your numbers together before we spoke, building the audit by hand, writing up where you had got to. That is the toolkit's job now: your scorecard and your audit are built as you work rather than assembled by me the night before, and thirty-six calculators read from them and write back to them. I arrive at the call already knowing what changed instead of spending two days finding out. That is what lets me take twenty artists at half what I was going to charge ten. The founding rate is not a discount off a number I invented for the purpose — it is exactly half the $1,000 a month this becomes once the twenty places are gone. It does not stretch past twenty, because past twenty the calls plus the work behind them stop fitting alongside everything else I run — and the way you make it fit is by turning the one-to-one calls into a group room, which I am not doing. The cohort call is the one place we are all together, and it sits on top of your two, not in place of them.
If you join the founding cohort, your rate is locked for as long as you stay. Not for a year — for as long as you keep working with me. When the price goes up, it goes up for new artists, never for you.
These are not upsells and there is no higher tier that unlocks them. Every artist in the cohort gets all of it from day one.
Twenty-four calls across the year — twelve hours of live 1:1 time, with me, on your career. Recording and written summary in your inbox inside 24 hours, so nothing gets lost.
Once a month, the whole founding cohort on one call for an hour. The questions that came up for more than one of you, worked through once, and a room of artists doing the same work you are. Recorded, so you can miss one without missing it.
Audits, contract and split reviews, catalogue and metadata checks, planning written out and sent to you. Hours that never hit an invoice.
Where you stand today, scored across the five keys, then kept as a living number we open at the top of every call. No guessing involved.
The full partner platform, open to you for as long as you are a client. Not a trial, not a limited tier, not a stripped-back version of the real thing.
Eighteen calculators the public never sees — catalogue valuation, advance recoupment, deal comparison, publishing royalties, foreign withholding, runway, business structure. They read from your scorecard and write back to it, so you are running your own numbers, not example ones.
Whatever I add to the toolkit while you are a client — calculators, templates, contract markups, playbooks — lands in your account the day it ships, at no extra cost and with no tier to upgrade to. You keep what shipped during your year even if you leave.
When something time-sensitive lands — an offer, a contract, a decision that will not wait a fortnight — you can reach me between sessions.
Forty years of my answers, searchable at 2am on a tour bus when I am asleep — contracts, royalties, booking, releases. It is not me and I will not pretend it is: use it for the question that cannot wait, and bring the decision to the call.
Call recordings, written summaries, registrations, your playbook and a year of your own data. You leave holding the assets, not a pile of notes.
An hour of my time one-to-one each month, an hour with the cohort, and everything else on this page — all for the same $500.
Renews once a year at your founding rate — cancel any time before it does. Payment plans available, just ask on the call.
Paul Saunders Scholarships
I hold back a small number of scholarship places each intake. One takes up to 50% off the monthly price for exactly the same program — the same two calls a month, the same cohort call, the same audits and reviews, the same TrueFans PARTNERS, ANALYTICS and ASK PAUL. Nothing is stripped out.
There is no form and no application. Every scholarship is decided on the free call, on what you are already doing with your career rather than what you can prove on paper. If the founding rate is out of reach and the work is real, tell me straight. Places are limited and they go as the cohort fills.
Book the Free CallInside your first sixty days you will have three things in hand: your scored baseline audit, your live scorecard, and your PRO and publishing registrations underway. If you have done your part and any one of those is missing, tell me and I will refund every penny you have paid. I will not guarantee what the market does — nobody honest will — but I will absolutely guarantee the work I said I would deliver.
The Smaller Door
Some artists want to know what I would actually say before they commit a year to hearing it. Fair enough. There is one thing you can buy on its own, it costs a single month, and it comes straight off the program if you join.
One-off · No subscription
This is not a lighter version of the audit the program opens with. It is the same audit — the same forty points, the same scoring, the same report — sold on its own to anyone who wants the diagnosis without the year of treatment.
The audit is the one thing here you can buy outright — no qualification, no pitch. Would rather talk it through first? The free 30 minutes is always open, and I will tell you honestly which of these you actually need.
Questions
For the program, yes — I do not take anyone into twelve months of work without speaking to them first. Thirty minutes tells us both whether this is a fit, and it costs you nothing. If it is not a fit, I will tell you straight and point you somewhere more useful.
The Baseline Audit is the exception. You can buy that outright without ever talking to me, because the audit is the qualification — by the end of it we both know whether the program makes sense, and you are holding a written plan either way.
Then say so on the call, because there are three other ways in and none of them is a watered-down version of the work. The Baseline Audit is $500 once, with no subscription attached — and if you join within thirty days it comes off your first month in full, so at the founding rate your first month is free. I hold back a small number of scholarship places that take up to 50% off the monthly price, decided in conversation rather than on a form. And I have single sessions at $250 a call whenever you need one. I would far rather you work with me at a level you can actually carry than sign up for something that puts you under real strain.
The 5 Keys Program is built for artists who already have money moving through their career and want to move considerably more of it. If that is not you yet, the free call is still worth taking and I will tell you honestly which of these is the right one for you.
Someone who has given you $250 or more in the last twelve months. Not a follower, not a monthly listener, not somebody on your list who has never bought anything — a person who has actually paid you, and whom you could name.
Twelve months rolling, not a calendar year, which means a fan can drop back under the line without doing anything wrong. That is not a failure, it is information, and it is the single most useful thing your ledger will tell you.
Most artists I meet have somewhere between two and twenty and have never counted them. The counting is month one. What you do about the number is the other eleven.
The audit is the diagnosis. The program is the twelve months of treatment. They use the same forty questions and produce the same score, so nothing is duplicated and nothing is held back — if you buy the audit first and then join, we do not do it twice, we carry your score straight in as your day-one baseline. The honest difference is what happens next. The audit tells you what is wrong and hands you a written plan you can run on your own. The program is me running it with you for a year, twice a month, and doing the registrations, reviews and chasing myself. Some artists genuinely only need the first one. If you are one of them I will say so on the free call rather than sell you the other.
It is real, and here is the arithmetic behind it. Two calls each is twenty hours a month, plus an hour with the cohort, before I do anything else. The prep behind them — the written summaries, your scorecard review, the audits and re-scores, the contract and catalogue reviews, the planning I write up between sessions — used to be several hours more again per artist, every month, which is why this was going to be ten places at twice the price. The toolkit changed that half of it: your scorecard and audit build themselves as you work, so I read rather than assemble. What is left is still twenty hours of calls plus the better part of another working week behind them, and I have two other businesses that need the rest of it. Twenty is where that stops adding up. There is no twenty-first place available at any price, which is exactly why I am telling you the number rather than saying “limited spaces.”
Nothing. If you join at the founding rate you stay at the founding rate for as long as you keep working with me — on monthly or annual. The increase to $1,000 a month applies to artists who join after the first twenty. I am putting the future price in writing here precisely so that nobody has to wonder whether the deadline is genuine.
Thirty minutes, twice a month, with an agenda sent beforehand so none of it is spent working out what we are doing. We open your scorecard and look at what changed since last time. We work whatever is live for you right now — a contract, a release, a show, a decision. We close with your action items for the next two weeks. You get the recording and a written summary inside 24 hours, so nothing gets lost.
An hour, once a month, with everyone in the founding cohort on one call. I take the questions that came up for more than one of you that month and work through them once, and you hear how the other artists are handling the same quarter you are. It is recorded. It is in addition to your two one-to-one calls, not a substitute for them — nothing about your own career gets moved into the group room.
An hour on the two one-to-one calls, an hour on the cohort call, then realistically two to four hours a month on the work between them, plus updating your scorecard, which takes about fifteen minutes. Call it five to seven hours a month all in. This is not a course you watch. If you do not do the work between calls, the program will not do anything for you and I will tell you that early.
On the monthly plan, any time after the third month — the minimum exists because meaningful change does not happen in four weeks and I do not want to take your money pretending otherwise. Annual is paid in full for the year and covered by the 60-day guarantee above. It then renews once a year at your founding rate, and you can cancel any time before it renews — you are never locked into a second year, but if you stay, the price you started on is the price you keep.
Yes. One fee covers the act, not the person — bring whoever needs to be on the call. For bands I would usually want at least two of you on most calls so decisions do not get lost in translation on the way home.
It is a platform I built that lets people in the room support you digitally during your set — no QR code, no app to download, 92% goes straight to the artist. It is one part of the live revenue work and it is optional. The setlist filing and venue fee side stands on its own regardless.
That is the fifth key, Flourish, and it is a deliverable like everything else. You leave with the assets — the registrations, the owned audience, the playbook, a year of data, and a written plan for the next twelve months. Plenty of artists continue at a reduced check-in rate. Plenty do not need to, which is rather the point.
The Next Step
Thirty minutes, no charge, no pitch. We work out where you are and whether the program is right for you. If it is not, I will say so.
Book Your Free Call