Your Guitar Academy Gives Away All Its Content yet Still Makes Money
Here’s how they do it
As a small business owner, I love talking to other people in similar positions and learning about their marketing strategies. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Dan Holton, the founder and managing director of Your Guitar Academy (YGA).
This is the strapline from YGA’s website:
“Over 800 professional guitar lessons, filmed in stunning HD video, from the best tutors in the business. Oh, and they’re all free.”
That’s right, Dan and his team of guitar tutors create amazing video courses, and post them all on YouTube, in their entirety, and don’t charge a penny.
How could this possibly be a sustainable business model?
Dan explained that there are two main strands to YGA’s business model. Firstly, they act as a matchmaker between guitar tutors and students and take a cut of the tuition fee. Secondly, they sell guitar courses — those same courses that they give away free. We’ll come back to that shortly.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all YGA guitar tutors gave their lessons face-to-face. However, a small number offered tuition through Skype.
“We were lucky to have a foot in the world of virtual guitar lessons and some experience of how it could work,” says Dan. “When lockdown started, we offered all our students virtual lessons, and we were pleasantly surprised that 80% of them continued working with their tutors.”
Dan further explained that most of the tutors at YGA are also performing guitarists earning part of their income from gigging. This work vanished overnight, so it was a massive relief to many of them that they could continue with the teaching. As time went on, Dan says he found there was a growing acceptance and interest in virtual lessons, and they added more students.
“Before the pandemic, if we weren’t able to offer a tutor who was geographically close to a student, they wouldn’t normally want lessons. Now, virtual interactions have been so normalized that we can pair students and tutors regardless of geography, and we’ve found that many students prefer virtual lessons as it removes the hassle of travel and saves them time.”
On a mission
Providing such a matching service only works if YGA can attract lots of potential students to its website. This is where the free courses come in. They are brilliant for bringing in traffic. But there is more to it than great SEO. Dan has a mission to make great guitar tuition available to as many people as possible.
“I know there are lots of people who simply cannot afford guitar courses, let alone one-to-one lessons, and I want everyone to have the same opportunity to learn,” says Dan. “There are millions of free guitar tutorial videos on YouTube, but not much is structured. As a learner, it’s very easy to go down a YouTube rabbit hole, clicking one recommended video after the next, but making little progress as nothing is connected.”
In contrast, the YGA courses are structured around topics and take students through them in a measured, progressive way. And all the material you need to follow the course is available completely free, no strings attached.
Nevertheless, some people are willing to pay — or rather, they want to pay. Dan says there are a few reasons for this. For some people, it’s about ownership. They want to download everything onto their computers, own it, and be able to work through it offline. He added this often applies to older learners — he meant people my age, but he was too polite to say it. A second group wants the paid-for version to avoid the annoying YouTube adverts that interrupt the flow of the course. And a third group simply recognizes the effort that has gone into creating the content, they support the ethos of the company, and they are happy to pay to support that.
Do people get anything extra if they download the courses? Dan is very clear that everything you need to follow the course is available for free. But, people who buy the course also receive a nicely designed PDF book with all the course notes, plus they get to see some behind-the-scenes videos that aren’t necessary for the course but add personality and color, and bring the learning to life.
YGA started as a student-tutor pairing service. Today, business revenues are roughly split 50% each between YGA’s share of tuition fees and money it earns from course sales. Longer-term, Dan believes the course sales revenue will become the biggest part of the business, despite it all being available for nothing.
Fortune favors the brave and it takes courage to spend hours (and money) on creating professional guitar courses and then give it all away, but for YGA, it’s a winning strategy.
