How to Structure and Price Your Membership Tiers

When it comes to setting up the core bones of your membership, there are three big factors to consider: 

• How often will it renew 
• How many tiers will it have 
• How much will those tiers cost 

As always, simplicity is key. Overcomplicating your program will make it hard to maintain. 

Here's some tips we've seen work well to help guide you. 

Membership Renewal Term 

With Single, you can choose to renew every month, 3 months, 6 months, or year.

We usually suggest annual or monthly renewals -- depending on the perks you’re offering to members. 

Choose annual if your program centers mostly around static perks:

• Tour pre-sales
• Product discounts 
• Fan Forum access
• Static video library
• Occasional livestreams

This is most common for established music acts. For example, Nickelback has a Fan Club for $33.00 for the year, which offers more static perks like tour pre-sales and exclusive products.

Choose monthly if your program centers mostly around content creation:

• Monthly Live Streams
• Early or ad-free access to weekly or monthly videos
• Recurring written content (newsletter or blog)
• Frequent live streams 

You see these kinds of memberships most often through platforms like Patreon, YouTube, or Substack. While those are great platforms, the benefit of doing a monthly membership using Shopify is how core e-commerce is to the experience.

You can release recurring content, but always with a partial focus on selling products – directly through a website where you have full control over fan data and your branding. 

 

Membership Tiers and Price

The number of tiers you create and the price is totally up to you, but again, the more you overcomplicate your program, the harder it will be to maintain. 

We suggest:

• 1 free tier as a way to collect email addresses, which you can use later to try and shift fans to a paid tier.
• 1-2 paid tiers priced based on the perks you're offering  

 

Here are some field-tested templates:

Annual Renewal:

Monthly Renewal:

   

The Merch Factor… 

One simple way of differentiating your tiers is by simply adding merch to the more expensive ones. Simply figure out your margin on a t-shirt or welcome gift, then bake that into the sign up cost.

For example, Lainey Wilson offers two tiers for her Fast Lainer’s Club – one for $20 and one for $40. The primary difference between the tiers is that the more expensive one comes with a free piece of merch and a bigger store-wide discount (10% vs 5%). 

 

 

Jason Aldean does something similar – the only difference between his two more expensive tiers is the inclusion of hats, t-shirts, and keychains. 

 

    

In Summary

Getting your tiers and pricing right is key to building a community that sticks around and a revenue stream that stays steady.

Keep it simple -- pick from one of the options listed in the tables above. 

Keep learning...   

How to pick perks for your membership tiers.