Tag: artist as an entrepreneur

Creating vs. Building

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Laziness is good. It teaches us to get results with the least effort possible. If you avoid procrastinative behaviour, laziness can even be a great recipe for success, because you’ll be a master at shortcuts and finding the most effective ways to get things done.

I, like everyone, can be pretty lazy at times and it can take a lot of motivation to muster up the motivation for some activities. Over the years, I’ve learned that the strongest motivators for me are either:

  • Instant gratification, eg. the dopamine triggers created by most time wasting activities and procrastination;
  • Having a purpose beyond what I’m doing.

This year I set up the MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE newsletter as a way to ‘force’ myself to write something every week. Prior to that, I had ‘created’ (written) articles mostly sporadically, but now I had a weekly deadline. And I had a vision: I knew that MxTxF was something I wanted to grow, to build, and hold to a high standard. All creation happened within that context.

Creation for the sake of creation is great.

But if you’re striving to achieve something, then the path of random creations is one where you’ll depend on luck and pure chance.

So whether you make music, work at a label, or aren’t doing anything creative – ask yourself: what could I be building?

Start from doing what you’re already doing.

  • Why are you doing it?
  • What are you learning from it?
  • Does it all fit together?
  • Does your work add up?

If the answer to the last question is no, that’s fine. If you make coffee for customers every day, then every day will look more or less the same, and every morning you hit the reset button and do it again. Same day, repeating, with the same results. Whether you fail or succeed in that case depends on consistent performance and random external factors.

The lazy person’s nightmare.

If that sounds like you, think about what you could do that adds up. Then wrap it in purpose.

Back to the coffee example. Let’s say your wrapping in purpose is that you want to become the best coffee place in your town. Now you have a context to fill. You’ll need to talk to your boss and make a plan, you need to figure out what makes a place great, talk to your customers, etc. All of this you can do while doing what you’re already doing.

The lazy person’s dream.

Now let’s look at music.

Stop expecting to get a lucky break. The word luck implies unlikeliness and when you work hard and never get lucky, it can become intensely demotivating.

Create to build.

You’re building a following.
You’re building a fanbase.
You’re building your artist brand.

Every time you release music, it’s a step in building those things.

In that context, you can evaluate your steps.

For instance, 2 times this year, the open rate of my newsletters dropped below 30%. Terrible, because I strive to keep it between 40-50% (higher would be nice, too). In the context of building something, a low open rate is terrible: if you can’t win people’s attention consistently, then you’ll lose it eventually.

So I looked at what I did.

In one case, it was just the subject line that was a bit too pushy and may have caused people to auto-ignore the email, thinking it’s yet another spammy newsletter.

screen-shot-2016-11-28-at-14-32-02

The other case was more difficult, but my hypothesis was that the edition the week before was a bit weaker than usual, so people didn’t open it the week after. I didn’t have a good way to know this for sure, but it gave me a new way to think about what I’m building.

What that means is that by placing my creations in the context of something I’m building, it forced me to zoom out and think more carefully about the greater picture.

You may assume people are not watching your new video, because you posted it on your Facebook at the wrong time of the day, but maybe it’s because your last video sucked. If you’re just pushing out creations without thinking about the greater context you’re building, you’ll miss that information.

The value in creating consistently and feeding it into something you can grow is so much greater than the sum of parts. So don’t just create; build.

Best of all, it’s a great way to justify laziness. Just don’t procrastinate.

Success in music: defining your personal strategy in four steps

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Finding your way to success can be confusing as an artist. Here’s what you should be focusing on.

At the Play & Produce conference in Ghent, Belgium, I joined a panel about digital revenue streams with Jef Martens (Basto / LazyJay), and Sebastien Lintz who does digital for Hardwell, artist management at Sorted, and is label manager at Revealed Recordings.

We discussed a lot of topics, some of which are covered in this article, but a lot of questions were left unanswered when we ran out of time.

So, for all those musicians that want to turn their craft into their livelihood, I wanted to create a basic resource to be able to refer to. This article goes over:

  • Making good music.
  • Getting your music in front of the right audiences.
  • Networking (!).
  • Retaining your fans & building community.
  • Monetization.

You’ll learn some new tricks to get better at what you’re doing, but more importantly: the below teaches you to develop your own strategy. Dive in!

Step zero: make really good music.

Before anything else, you need to make great music. This is part skill, part taste, and part understanding of trends. The best music is timeless, but before it becomes timeless, great music has to be timely.

As your skills develop, so will your ability to develop a consistent sound that’s unique to you. This is important, because it’s unlikely you’ll ever be ‘the best’ — simple mathematics. However, if you make a sound that stands out, you don’t need to be the best, you just have to make something remarkable.

Seems like an obvious step, but it often needs repeating. If you’re feeling lost or overwhelmed, know that the most important thing to work on is to develop your music and your skills. Everything develops from there.

Step one: getting your music heard.

Make a lot of music and release a lot of music. Make sure it’s easy to find, to stumble upon, to access, and to share.

There are a variety of tools that help you distribute your music to a lot of different places, like Labelgrid, or distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore. They help you to be everywhere your (future) fans might be.

In order to be discovered, make sure to put time into the artwork and accompanying description for your music. The description provides keywords for people to find your music, so don’t hold back on mentioning the names of bands that influence you, genres, etc.

Make it easy to share your music. Great music is inherently viral. Since YouTube is the most universal music player, you must have your music on there. Make sure the title has all the relevant information plus an indication about the type of music, to guarantee more clicks when people share it.

Regarding the artwork, you should understand that we live in the age of feeds. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram encourage us to scroll endlessly, because it means we’ll spend more time on their platforms.

Make sure your artwork is a scroll stopper.

It doesn’t have to be fancy, just effective.

7 Maine Coons Head Bopping

If your sound is good, people will share it (hence step zero).

From there, you need to find your audience.

(pro tip: get your music everywhere, but figure out what channels work best for you and double down on them. Doing a little bit of everything is a good way to not get traction anywhere. Make sure you actually enjoy using the channels you focus on, because if it’s not fun for you, you’re going to get exhausted and inconsistent eventually.)

Step one point five: finding your audience.

If you understand your music’s audience and where they hang out, or who else they listen to, you can start doing specific things to get your music into their ears, such as:

  • Remix other artists in your genre. Don’t ask for permission, but communicate to them once your remix is done. After all: their repost helps you reach their audience and chances are they’ll have a bigger audience than you. Play nice. And don’t put your remix on Spotify or other monetized places without permission. It’s less about the legal issues, and more that it’s just bad for human relations.
  • Connect with communities in your genre. On Reddit you can find loads of communities where producers are helping others to learn to master their art. You can also connect to communities around certain genres or prominent labels inside a genre. If Reddit’s not your thing, you can find groups like these on Facebook too.
  • Pitch your tracks to channels your audience follows. These may be blogs, YouTube channels, or internet radio stations. You can be more creative also: if there’s a popular video game streamer on Twitch that listens to a lot of music like yours, you could reach out to them, offer to make a personal theme song for them in exchange for a certain amount of airtime on their stream. Be creative.
  • The value of being (one of) the first. On our panel, Sebastien Lintz pointed out that being one of the first people on a platform can have big advantages. So keep your eye on new apps that pop up, get on there, try them out, see what happens. This is how you secure a first-mover advantage for a specific segment. Not convinced? Just look at what Vine and Musical.ly have enabled.

Step two: develop strong relations with people.

Success in music is usually a combination of music skills and people skills. When you see an overnight success, what you don’t see is the many years of preparation involved in that.

An artist may be young, but the team around them will know exactly who to talk to, who to ask for favours, the right people to work with, etc.

So, don’t be shy. Make sure you’re frequently in the same room as people who can help you. If you have a chance to pitch your music and get feedback, then go do it, even if you think you’re not ready. The feedback you’ll get will be valuable, but it’s also a good chance to get into the mind of label A&Rs, learn how they think, and you’ll know who they are if you run into them again.

These things happen in live settings, but sometimes people like Sebastien call for artists to submit music & have it publicly reviewed.

Other things you can do:

  • Speak to the DJs, promoters, organisers, etc. at local shows.
  • Go to conferences and set aside your shyness. Go chat with people, find out what they’re doing, and if there’s a panelist you find interesting, grab them for a chat. They’re there to speak to people and they’re interested in meeting you.

Basically: talk to people, and if it’s uncomfortable, then take a friend with you who’s good with that. The music business is a network business, so understand that you’re building relations that will last your entire career. Start early.

Step three: retaining your fans.

With the previous steps, you should have a way to get your music heard by people. Attention is fickle — so the big question here is not how to get people to listen to your music, but how do you get people to listen to your music again? And again, and again, and again.

You need to feed them to places where you can reach them again. It’s incredibly valuable, so if you’re annoyed with vloggers telling people to subscribe in every video: place yourself in their shoes. And do that!

Find the best ways to reach people. Facebook posts, once you scale your fanbase, may only have a 5% reach. Tweets are similar. It’s one of the reasons why I started a newsletter to talk about the future of music. For the last year, the open rate has been close to 50%. The typical artist newsletter has a 20–25% open rate.

Other methods to get your messages to your fans:

  • Download gates, like ToneDen, which allow fans to download your music in exchange for following your social accounts, incl. Spotify. Downloads as an incentive work well with certain audiences, but realize that ‘FREE DOWNLOAD’ in 2016 is nothing special.
  • Ads & remarketing. Sometimes it’s worth it to pay for ads. For instance, if you create a unified link for your release with a tool like Linkfire, you can integrate Google Analytics & AdSense. This way, you’ll get some data about the people that checked out your release and you’ll be able to target them on sites they visit, or when they Google something… Got a show in a town with a lot of fans? Set an ad that reveals your show the next time they Google for something fun to do on the weekend.

The basic jest of social profiles is this: be consistent, stay relevant, and frequent. Don’t abuse people’s permission to appear in their feeds or inbox, because they’ll unsubscribe or learn to ignore you. Good luck winning their attention back then.

You can also use ephemeral content, like Snapchat, to become part of fans’ habits.

Step three point five: building your fan community.

I love using the example of the fanbase as a house party. In my many years of awkward beers with strangers, I’ve learned there are roughly two types of house parties:

  • The type where you get let in, stand around a room with strangers, where nobody’s really entertained and just waiting for the host to come chat with them, and thinking of an excuse to bail ASAP. 💩
  • The type where the host lets you in, immediately introduces you to people you should talk to, suggesting topics you can discuss, and then at some point in the night you realize you haven’t even seen the host in an hour, because you’ve been having such a good time with their friends. 🔥

Building a community is a great way to get your fans to keep their attention on you, even after you leave the room. Not only that, but you now have the power to get back into the room, shut everyone up, and ask people to amplify what you have to say:

“Having a great time? Let’s get some more people in here! Text your friends. BYOB.”

Facebook Groups are an excellent way to do this. It also lets you mix fans that you’ve known for a long time (eg. friends), with first generation fans, and later fans.

Help keep the community active. Get people to talk about music, art, whatever you find interesting and is somehow a relevant connector. The music shared in the group doesn’t have to be just your music.

Step four: “shut up and take my money”

Having a connected fanbase allows you to intimately understand who the people that listen to your music are, what they care about, how their minds work, what they find cool, etc.

This allows you to better package the experiences you provide to them.

In music, the money is in the package. Whether it’s the live show, the download, merch or something else.. This means you can make the music you believe in, while also developing ways to make money off of it.

I usually hold up Yellow Claw as an example of a group that understands their fans really well and have developed multiple business models based on that understanding.

Basically, what it comes down to is this:

  • Great music shouldn’t have to be charity, so don’t put yourself in the position of having to beg fans to “please buy my album.”
  • Instead, think the other way around: what can I make for my fans that will make them thank me for giving them the opportunity to spend money on me?

No need to employ dark voodoo techniques. 👹 It’s just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. Let’s call it the Kickstarter State of Mind.

Successful Kickstarters are a combination of:

  • A great product or idea (a metaphor for your music).
  • A charismatic call to action (a metaphor for your artist persona and brand).
  • Exciting rewards for contributing money.

Go spend some time on Kickstarter and see how price tiers work. Usually they cater to different types of audiences, or fans with differing levels of commitment. But they all have this in common:

People are super excited to be able to spend their money. Not for you — that’s just a nice bonus. But for themselves.

shut up and take my money

Recap

  • Step zero: make really great music. Keep working on your skills. This is by far the most important part. It’s the fuel for everything else. If nothing seems to be working, it may just be because your music is not good enough, or simply doesn’t stand out. Sorry.
  • Step one: getting your music heard. Get your music everywhere, take into account what your music looks like when people share, and double down on the channels that work best for you.
  • Step one point five: finding your audience. Use other people’s audience (OPA) by remixing, pitching curators, connecting to communities, and securing a first-mover advantage.
  • Step two: developing strong industry relations. Make no mistake: the music business is a business of human connections. Start early. Be nice & professional.
  • Step three: retaining your fans. Keep your fans’ attention by connecting them to your socials and finding other clever ways to reach them again.
  • Step three point five: building your fan community. Fans help keep each others’ attention on you and can help amplify your message. Be the host of the most fun house party they’ve ever attended.
  • Step four: “shut up and take my money”. Besides conventional revenue streams, you should be creating things that are so exciting for fans that they’ll thank you for the opportunity to spend their money.

Success in music: defining your personal strategy in four steps

Is it that simple?

Well, yes.

The hard part is that you need to put in a lot of hours. You have to be smart and relentless. Practice grit. You have to persevere, but also know when to cut your losses.

As long as you’re flying solo, take a look at job descriptions at labels or management agencies to understand how to strategically release music and build towards milestones.

Once you’re ready to build your team:
Work with people that inspire you. Don’t work with assholes.

And for fuck’s sake, keep your focus on your music.
Your music always comes first.

Walking on stairs

Moving up the music curation food chain

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Time for a quick lesson in free publicity. The increase of easy access to information and entertainment, combined with the democratisation of creation thereof, have led to the need for curation.

As an artist, you want to get your music noticed by curators, so it gets spread around further. But how do you get them to give a damn?

 

Curators follow curators

How do you think curators get their content? They follow other curators. It can be the DJ getting selected tracks from a trusted label rep, or a blogger learning about new releases through a mailinglist.

The easiest way to get noticed by top curators, is making sure you get noticed by smaller curators.

You have to be consistent about it. People have to see your name a few times before recognising you. Only then will they start giving a damn. How you do this depends on the category of music curation.

It will take time. It can be a year if you work hard at it – or even longer. If you don’t work hard at it, it will never happen, unless you hire someone that already has the network.

 

The categories of music curation

The actual dynamics differ from category to category, but the basic jest is that you start small and try to move up the curation food chain. Follow the curators who you want to be noticed by closely, so that you can figure out where they get their music from.

Some domains to think of:

  • Radio airplay: start with local and genre-specific, and slowly work your way up. This is probably the slowest process of all, since nationwide airtime is highly valued.
  • Genre-specific publications: there are dozens of decent publications and blogs per genre, perhaps a bit less for younger genres.
  • Location-specific publications: can even be location/genre-specific, like a local rock magazine.
  • Channel curators: think YouTube, Soundcloud.
  • Theme publications: these are similar to genre publications, but generally broader. Might also report on fashion, or a certain set of genres and sounds that can be loosely grouped together.
  • Live DJs.
  • Playlist curators.

There are plenty of other areas to explore, but if you’ve never really thought about this topic, then these are a good place to start.

 

The music business is a network business

You have to build your connections. Start with the more approachable curators. You can find them at events or in online communities like Facebook groups or Reddit. Your music might be really, really good, but when you hit the inbox of a curator, chances are it’s going to look like just another promo. They might not even listen to it.

Be creative about it, like these guys who wanted to get noticed by a prominent DJ in their genre:

If you’re intent on being able to arrange your own publicity, then check out the books Made to Stick and Contagious. They’re great books for learning how to construct strong stories to communicate ideas.

And a little hack: get a free Hubspot account, so you can see when people open your emails and whether they’ve clicked your links. It will help you to determine where you’re succeeding or failing, and adjust accordingly.

Why nobody cares about your free download

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

You spent years honing your skills. Countless hours putting together your latest song or album. You value your work immensely, so you decide to give this valuable thing away to your fans. Maybe it will even get you some new fans.

But they don’t care.

In the age of constant connectivity, free downloads have lost their value.

Music has become ephemeral

People jump from playlist to playlist, see music shared in their social media feeds, and are presented with a radio station button on each page of the streaming service they use. Research done by Nielsen asked people what they do when the music they want to access can’t be streamed: most people just move on. There is so much music one can access, immediately… a free download won’t make your music stand out.

Nielsen streaming availability graph
Via eMarketer

Why download?

There are certain use cases for downloads, and I’ve written about them below, but if it’s easy to retrieve tracks on YouTube, Soundcloud, or Bandcamp and stream them… then why would you bother with downloading? Especially when the user flow often looks something like:

  • Click download
  • Get sent to another site
  • Click download again
  • Prompted to connect to Facebook
  • Prompted to like the page of the band, label and lead singer
  • Prompted to share the track on Facebook
  • Prompted to do the same things on Soundcloud
  • *curl up in a ball and cry a little*
  • Download starting
  • Select location for your file

Is that worth it? How many times do you expect people to listen to your download?

Overused

Free downloads have become such a standard part of the strategy of artists, that it’s actually not that special anymore. Think about it: seeing FREE DOWNLOAD next to a track used to pique our interest to give it a listen. No more. Now, the only ones who get excited by seeing that are dedicated fans of the artist, label or genre.

Nobody cares about your free download

Or at least less than you’d think.

But free downloads still work in certain cases.

Free downloads can be a good way to please fans

Fans will care about your free download. Make sure it fits into a broader strategy, like I’ve shown with Yellow Claw. For instance, you can use mixtapes to hype an upcoming release and a tour you’re doing. Definitely offer those mixtapes for free.

yellow claw hype cycle social media

Know your audience

There are some easily identified types of audiences that would actually care about a free download, other than hardcore fans. For instance:

  • Very young teens who can’t afford a streaming subscription. This may be changing due to Spotify pushing family plans.
  • Audiophiles. They often complain that streaming audio quality is not good enough and they want higher definition sound, typically best offered by downloaded files.
  • (Bedroom) DJs. If you’re making electronic music, chances are a lot of your fans are also aspiring producers or DJs. Most DJing requires files, whether you use software on your laptop, a USB drive, or burn tracks to CD.
  • Older audiences. Many people in the older demographics want to be able to listen to ‘owned music’. They care less about music discovery – making music less ephemeral for them.
Important features for streaming services by age group
Source: Jackdaw Research

Audience first, strategy second

I wouldn’t want the elderly to get bombarded by trap producers. So, to avoid people thinking “so THAT’S who I need to target with my free downloads”, let’s get your strategy sorted first. I wouldn’t want the elderly to get bombarded by trap producers.

Look into the data you have on Facebook and Twitter. Look at the faces you see when performing live. Research the audiences of other artists who make similar music. Understand how they use the web, what they do, what they like, whether they’re streaming subscribers or not.

This is your point of departure.

Then set goals: what do you want to achieve? A bigger fanbase? More people at your shows? Make it tangible if you can. Now, free downloads become a method to achieve something. A tactic, rather than just something you do.

Free downloads should be something that makes people excited.

Make it so.

Further reading:

Music Business Growth Hacking 101: How to Scale Your Fanbase & Revenue Sustainably
Click here to continue

Why should artists be able to make a living off of music?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Does this question make you feel uncomfortable?

If so, allow me to break your music industry bubble for a second.

People outside the music business are often filled with astonishment by the music industry’s prevalent sense of entitlement.

“I made something, so I deserve money.”

Nonsense. What kind of business is that?

To me, the best way to think of yourself as an artist is as an entrepreneur or freelancer.

You have a business to build, an audience to identify & serve, and a competitive landscape to understand.

The landscape is hyper-competitive and choosing to participate in it, especially without identifying a good niche, means there is a good chance you will not be able to make a good living out of it.

If you make good music, appeal to a well-defined audience, and have a good business strategy for monetizing that relationship, whether that’s through gigs, sales, Patreon or something else, then you’ve got a good chance to make a good living.

But you’ve got to keep working hard at it – just like an entrepreneur.

If you build enough, work at it long enough, you might be able to let the reins go and collect money on your past achievements – just like an entrepreneur.

But if you fail to identify your market or risks, you’ll go broke – just like an entrepreneur.

A recent report commissioned by Dutch rights organisations and a labour union for musicians revealed that as much as 19% of Dutch musicians who live with a partner or family are able to make a living from music (PDF). It’s as much as 31% for singles.

Graph: percentage of musicians making a living from music
How cohabiting musicians (left) & single musicians (right) make a living. Green means they live from money generated by music. (Source: Pop, wat levert het op?)

It’s a decent success rate.

If we look at the survival rate of businesses in the US, we can see that half of them die within the first 5 years. The 20 year survival rate is just 20%.

Over 80% of businesses FAIL.

Why should it be different for music?

Let’s take the 20-30% success rate for musicians who can make a living and think about how we can increase that.

First, we need to shatter the sense of entitlement, that has new artists entering the business with false expectations. It sets them up for failure.

We need management companies, record labels, booking agencies and rights societies who stress the importance of hard work and strategy. Who can communicate the necessity of reinventing yourself when your chosen path hits a dead end.

Many artists choose to continue down a dead end path. Becoming wedding DJs or playing covers of classic rock ’n roll tracks at the opening of a friend’s shop in a local mall or something.

“This is the music I play. I should be able to make a living off of it.”

No. Your entrepreneurial pursuit failed. Start over. Do something else. Pivot.

We need music schools to prepare artists for this.

Artists also need room to fail – just like entrepreneurs.

Look at startup accelerators and incubators, look at tax incentives or cuts from governments. Governments, businesses and the existing music industry could do more to give artists some room to breathe while they work on their music & business strategy.

Many initiatives already exist. Every country, and every city, having its own mechanics or ecosystem.

What I’m particularly interested in are collaborations between people from different disciplines. Take artist managers, musicians, developers, tech entrepreneurs, designers, and organisations in music with a lot of data, like ticketing services, event organisers, collection societies, etc. Divide them into groups and give them 48 hours to hack something together.

We need:

  • More data to help artists & management to understand their markets and to develop strategy to address them;
  • More collaboration to make it easier for entrepreneurs to have their products piloted at scale;
  • More applied innovation – we can talk about blockchain, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, but how do you apply it to your strategy?

I’d love to live in a world where everyone who wants to make a living with music is able to do so. It’s just not likely. But let’s expand that 20-30%. Let’s push it to 25-35% and then higher.

Rapid developments in technology means we’ll be able to offer a greater diversity in experience. It’s these developments that has led to a situation where more artists are simultaneously earning some money with music, than ever before.

Technology, combined with human creativity, can expand the market.

And that may be just what we need to help more artists make a living.

Hat tip to Marco Raaphorst for the link to the research report.

Music Business Growth Hacking 101: How to Scale Your Fanbase & Revenue Sustainably

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

How can “the intersection of creative marketing, automation, and smart use of data” help you grow? Read on…

This article originally appeared as a guest post for the Midem blog.

Instead of hiring marketing managers, startups are recruiting growth hackers to work on more sustainable deliverables than just ‘dumb traffic’. How can growth hacking be used by artists and labels? Let’s start with the most common growth hack in the music business.

 

Chart manipulation

Being at the top of iTunes or Beatport charts can make such a big difference in sales that the act of getting a big group of fans to buy a track or album simultaneously has been turned into an art. The phenomenon has also become subject to dodgy practices akin to buying followers for social media accounts with countless companies popping up offering to get you into digital music store charts for a fee. This is a poor strategy, because if caught, you’ll be removed from the charts completely and perhaps suffer further penalties for breaking the store’s terms of service.

A more sustainable strategy for influencing the charts, with no marketing budget, should include building engaged followings on various social media platforms, so that you can create hype prior to release, get the release date into everyone’s heads and give people a feeling that they’re part of something larger than themselves come the release date rush to play or purchase your music. That’s not really growth hacking though, because for any strategy to be scaleable, you need to be able to automate it.

 

What is growth hacking?

There are a lot of definitions for growth hacking, but the clearest is probably Growth Tribe’s (top image; click for full size), which explains growth hacking as the intersection of creative marketing, automation, and smart use of data.

Famous examples of growth hacking include Airbnb’s crawling and reposting of Craigslist listings, and Dropbox’s encouragement of word of mouth and referrals.

To hack growth successfully, you need to set clear goals. For this, you can use the AARRR framework, which divides growth into the following steps:

  • Acquisition
  • Activation
  • Retention
  • Referral
  • Revenue

It’s a more practical model than the AIDA model most marketers are familiar with (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), because it’s easier to define actionable goals by it.

Since the AARRR framework is usually applied to services, we have to redefine some of the words to make sense when applied to the music business. To make it easy, we’ll follow the ecosystem approach of developing your business as an artist, which means building up a fanbase (henceforth referred to as tribe), keeping it engaged and monetising it by carefully listening to it and understanding opportunities.

 

Acquisition & activation

The first step is to get your music discovered and then having a way to get back onto the radar of the people who discovered your music. Nowadays most music platforms have a Follow function, so it has gotten significantly easier than just a few years ago. Other than that, make sure your music ALWAYS has complete metadata. Having a very recognisable sound also helps. Now let’s growth hack.

Don’t believe the hype: email newsletters are still a valuable tool for communicating with your tribe. Posts made on social media platforms are fleeting and can be missed either through noise or because of algorithmic filtering. Just jump into your Twitter analytics panel and compare the number of impressions with your total number of followers. It’s likely around 10%. Even quite poor newsletters have higher open rates than that. Besides this, email newsletters give you great data, so that you know who opened your newsletter, what links they clicked, and more.

 

Setting up a newsletter

Since you need to automate your processes, you won’t be sending your newsletters from Gmail with your mailinglist in BCC. Use a good tool, like MailChimp or Revue. Decide about what kind of content you want to feature and how regularly you want to send something out. Consistency is key.

These tools will give you a bit of code that you can use to easily subscribe people to your mailinglist through Twitter Cards. Twitter Cards are a type of ad format which allow you to collect people’s email addresses with 1 click. You can keep campaigns paused, so you can use these Twitter Cards completely free of charge. Here’s an example (and shameless self-promotion).

They can be a bit tricky to set up, but persevere. It’s worth it!

Twitter Cards can be linked to, just like individual tweets can be linked to. This means that in your welcome email, you can ask people to retweet your Twitter Card so that their followers can also subscribe with 1 click. Now, every time someone subscribes, you have a good chance they’ll refer new subscribers. Automation in action.

Newsletter CTA retweet

You can pin your Twitter Card to the top of your profile so that everyone sees it. You can also use a tool like Zapier or IFTTT to automatically tweet to new followers to make them aware of your new release, newsletter or simply to strike up a conversation. Just don’t be too spammy about it.

Now you have set up a simple hack that:

  • Helps you stay in touch with your tribe through email
  • Converts Twitter followers to email subscribers
  • Helps you get referrals
  • Engages new Twitter followers

 

Retention

Online services usually measure retention by looking at repeat users or customers, such as weekly or monthly active users. Unless an artist app is central to your strategy, you will probably have to define retention in a different way.

Should you focus on your newsletter, then it’s important to understand how you can get more people to consistently open your newsletter and click where you want them to click. This is not about the total subscriber count, what matters is the percentage of subscribers that open, and the percentage of openers that click. Actions performed post-click may matter too (eg. sales).

Should you prefer to focus on music playback, you can use Spotify’s Fan Insights platform (for instance), to understand the sizes of segments of your listener base, such as:

  • Streakers; people who’ve listened to your music every day in the last week
  • Loyalists; people who’ve listened to you more than any other artist
  • Regulars; people who’ve listened to you on the majority of the days in the last month

Knowing this data, you can then set up experiments, such as scheduling tweets throughout a month that promote a particular release, to see if you can influence these numbers positively and attain more regulars, loyalists or streakers. You can use this simple guide for effectively gathering and scheduling interesting things to post to your social media channels using Pocket and Buffer.

You will be able to see the click through rates through your Twitter or Buffer analytics, so you can experiment with different messages to see what works best. You can also sign up to Bitly to generate unique links that give additional data.

 

Referral

If you’ve ever tried to download a ‘free’ track on Soundcloud, you’ve probably come across tools that make you follow accounts and repost tracks before you get access to your download. It seems like a good growth hack. A download for some exposure sounds like a fair trade. However you need to consider the experience of this fan who likes your music so much that they actually want to save it offline.

These people have invested a lot of time in following artists and curators to get a great feed of music that they can check out when they want to hear something new. Users go on discovery sprees and afterwards go to their liked tracks to grab the free downloads. Having to go through 10 different platforms, following scores of random accounts and curators and spamming your friends with reposted playlists when you only liked one track in there… that’s a pretty crappy experience. There goes their carefully curated feed.

Here’s the awesome thing about referrals: when people really love something, they want to share it. When people share your music, they deepen their commitment. When you force people to share things they would have shared anyway, you take away all of the meaning in the act. You need to channel the love people have for your music, make people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and drive them to perform an action with purpose.

Let’s say your goal is to create buzz around a certain release, so that you can get high on the charts on release date. Your incentive: an exclusive pre-release livestream where you present your new project. The method we’ll use is “Flock to Unlock”:

  • You get people to retweet a certain tweet;
  • You set up Zapier to automatically reply to retweeters and send them an invitation code (can be as simple as tweeting a link to a Typeform which collects email addresses);
  • The reward only gets unlocked after you’ve reached a certain number of retweets.

The fact that the retweet count is public, makes people feel like they have a shared goal; that they are part of something bigger than themselves… a movement!

Yes, people who keep a close eye on your feed might be able to get into the stream without retweeting. You don’t lose anything. Don’t worry about that. You could add a bit of text to the Typeform and appeal to people that if they haven’t retweeted, it would mean a lot to you if they would do so anyway. Reciprocity is a powerful dynamic.

During the unlocked livestream, you can thank everybody and tell them it’s important to you that if people want to buy your release, they do so on the day it comes out. If they want to support in other ways, explain how they can share social media posts on the day itself. Again, make them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. This helps you hack the charts and get new fans and more sales.

Another example are Yellow Claw’s mixtapes, which promote highly anticipated unreleased music. The mixtapes are so popular that the group even makes creative trailers to promote their mixtapes. Hype upon hype upon hype. It has worked well for them.

If you’re clever, you can create a simple tool that lets fans connect their Twitter accounts and then they’ll automatically retweet one of your tweets on the day of release. It’s quite likely that such tools actually exist, but make sure to do a little bit of research into the company before you ask your fans to connect their accounts to them.

Make sure to test your tweets! By spending $10-20 through Twitter Ads, you can easily test which messages get the most engagement, so that on the day itself, you’ll know exactly what the best things to tweet are.

 

Revenue

If your goal is to be able to make a living as an artist, then ultimately all of these steps should lead to increased revenue. If you can activate your following, it means more sales and more streams both directly and indirectly through network effects.

Having an engaged following gives opportunities for more exciting types of business models. You can create a fan club with all kinds of exclusives for anyone who’s a member. Look at Kickstarter, Patreon or PledgeMusic for great examples of the type of things you can offer to your most hardcore fans. Having a membership model opens up a lot of options and experiments you can do to better monetise your following, such as:

  • Significant discounts on annual membership plans
  • First month free trials
  • 15% discount for life
  • Temporary discounts with countdowns to give people a sense of urgency

It also changes what types of products you can offer, because you can go way beyond music streams and sales.

Fan clubs can be set up with tools like Drip, Fullscreen Direct, Music Glue and SupaPass. They offer different pricing models, so take some time to figure out which tool best suits your short and long-term needs. This list is not exhaustive, so also look at similar services and competitors.

 

How to decide what to do first

Any growth hacking starts with brainstorming. There are a million things you can be doing. What goes first? The answer is PIE.

  • Probability: how likely is this to succeed?
  • Impact: how big of an impact will it have on my core metric?
  • Ease: how easy is it to setup or implement this?

Score them, rank them, and then you have your list of priorities.

Understand that you’re building funnels, so focusing on getting more revenue out of your total of 2 fans is probably not the right priority.

 

Double down on what works

If you’re trying out 10 things with mixed results, but you’ve verified that 1 or 2 channels are performing really well, then scrap the other 8 and focus on these 2. The goal is not to be doing as many things as possible. The goal is to measure what works best, so that you can focus on that and move on to the next experiment. Remember: Build, Measure, Learn.

It might all seem overwhelming, but over the next days, look at all the things you’re already doing. What social media channels are you using, how do you distribute your music, what kind of info do you collect from your fans, etc. Look at small things you can improve, such as better use of hashtags or more consistent posting schedules. Then try to automate something.

It’s a learning process and you need to make it fun for yourself. Let your curiosity drive you. None of the above examples might be relevant for you and your fans, so find out what works for you. Constantly look for ways where a small investment of time will save you loads of time in the future. There is always something to improve, something new to try out.

Enjoy the journey.

 

Extra resources:

Marketing Stack – a great directory for growth hacking tools.

The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking – a very extensive, infographic style, guide to growth hacking with loads of examples and good depth.

Growth Tribe’s e-course – a free email course in growth hacking

GrowthHackers.com – a community portal for growth hackers with loads of fresh info, case studies, and discussions.