Tag: social media

Music for the Snapchat generation: conceptualizing Music Stories

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Whether you’ve ever used Snapchat or not, you have felt the influence of the social app’s design choices. How will it shape the future of music?

Snapchat is perhaps best known for its photo filters

Snapchat created something called ‘Stories’. Stories are composed of photos and short videos that stay available for 24 hours. They allow people to get a look into other people’s days, including celebrities. The feature has been shamelessly copied by Facebook and integrated in Instagram, but the low-barrier channel-flicking content format is now seeing integration in unexpected places.

Forbes launched Cards, Huffington Post launched storybooks, and Medium launched Series. This led David Emery, VP Global Marketing Strategy of Kobalt Label Services, to ask the question: what will the Snapchat for music look like?

I decided to take a stab at the challenge and conceptualize how people may interact with music in the future.

How people engage with content

I specifically looked at Soundcloud, Instagram, and Tinder for some of the most innovative and influential design choices for navigating, sharing, and engaging with content. Soundcloud for the music, Instagram for visuals, and Tinder for how it lets people sift through ‘content’. I apologize in advance for all the times I’m going to refer to people on Tinder as ‘content’, but that’s the most effective way to approach Tinder for the sake of this article.

Learning from Soundcloud

One key strength of Soundcloud is that every time you open the app or web client there’s new content for you. Either from the artists you follow, through its Explore feature, or through personalized recommendations. People should be able to check out content as soon as they open the app.

Text is easy to engage with: you can copy the parts you want to comment on, quote it, and comment. With audio this is harder. Soundcloud lets people comment on the timeline of tracks, which makes it much more fun to engage with content. YouTube solves this problem by letting people put time tags in comments.

If you really love the content, you can repost it to your network. This makes the service attractive to content creators, but also to fans, because the feature gives them a way to express themselves and build up their profiles without actually having to create music themselves. Compare this to Spotify, where the barrier to build up your profile as a user is much higher due to the energy that you have to put into creating (and maintaining) playlists.

Recommendations mean that people can jump in, hit play and stop thinking. Soundcloud is one of the few music services that seem to have found a great balance between very active types of behaviour, as well as more passive modes.

Learning from Instagram

There’s a reason why I’m highlighting Instagram instead of Snapchat. Instagram has two modes of creation and navigation. You can either scroll down your main feed, where people will typically only post their best content OR you can tap one of the stories at the top and watch a feed of Snapchat-like Stories. Tap to skip!

Instagram makes it really easy to create and navigate through content. Stories’ ephemeral quality reduces the barrier to sharing moments (creating) and makes people worry less that they’re ‘oversharing’. Snapchat’s filters, which Instagram hasn’t been able to clone well (yet), make it easy to create fun content. People open up their camera, see what filters are available, and create something funny. No effort, and it’s still fun for their friends or followers to watch.

Learning from Tinder

The brutal nature of dating services is that profiles (people) are content, which also means that the majority of users will not be interested in the majority of content offered on the service. So you can do two things: make going through content as effortless as possible and build a recommendation engine which delivers the most relevant content to users. Tinder’s focus on the former made them the addictive dating app they are today.

Quickly liking and disliking content is like a bookmarking function which also helps to feed information to recommendation algorithms.

If you really want to dive deeper into a piece of content, you can tap to expand it (open profile), but basically the app’s figured out a great way to present huge amounts of content to people, of which the majority is ‘irrelevant’, and make it engaging to quickly navigate through it.

Must haves

The key qualities of social content apps right now are a high volume of content, easy creation and interactivity, and fast navigation. Bookmarking and reposting allows for users to express themselves with little effort.

Breaking it down

This is the most important feature for the end user. There are already a lot of good services in order to access large catalogues, to dive deep, to search for specific content… Music Stories should not try to compete with that. Instead it is a new form of media, which needs to be so engaging that it will affect the creative decisions of artists.

Soundcloud’s feed is a good example, but so is Snapchat’s main Stories screen (pictured below). Both show the user a variety of content that they can engage with immediately by hitting the play button or by tapping on a profile image.

The content in the app needs to be bite-size so users can get a quick idea of the content immediately and decide whether they like it or not. If yes, they should be able to go deeper (eg. Tinder‘s ‘tap to expand’) or interact, like reposting. If not, they need to be able to skip and move on.

When a user has an empty content feed, you can serve recommendations. When a user went through all new content already, you should invite them to create something.

You want people to be able to lean back, but ideally you’ll pull people into your app a few times a day and get them to browse through some fresh content. To get them to re-open the app, there needs to be meaningful interaction. That can come in the form of swipes, comments, or remixing.

One of the cool things about Snapchat is that you can discover new filters through your friends. Think:

“Woah, you can be Harry Potter? I want to be Harry Potter, too!”

So if we extend that to Music Stories, creating some music idea needs to be as simple as making yourself look like Harry Potter or face-swapping with a painting or statue in a museum.

Snapchat is why millennials visit museums. (jk)

This means that artists should be able to add music to the app in a way that allows people to remix it, to make it their own. All remixes can stay linked to the original. You could even track a remix of a remix of a remix in the same way you can see repost-chains on Tumblr.

How do you make it easy to create and to interact with music?

That’s the biggest challenge. People are shy or may not feel creative.  You could let them use images or video (like Musically), or you could let them replace one of the samples in the beat with a sound from their environment (imagine replacing the “yeah” from Justin Timberlake‘s SexyBack with your own sound), or you could let them play with the pitch of the vocals.

Options need to be limited, easy-to-understand and manipulate, and inviting. It should be as simple as swiping through Snapchat filter options.

Through creation and interactivity, users build up a profile to show off their music identity. Content is ephemeral, unless you choose differently (like on Instagram). I’d go for ephemeral by default and then give users the option to ‘add to profile’ once content reaches a certain engagement threshold. This will need a lot of tweaking and testing to get right.

Interactions are not ephemeral. Reposts go straight to profile, until you undo them.

Stories are all about being able to jump through content quickly. Tinder’s Like / Dislike function could work in Music Stories as a ‘skip’ and ‘bookmark’ function. By letting people bookmark stuff they’ll have content to come back to when they’re in a more passive mode. Perhaps an initial Like would send music to a personal inbox which stays available for a limited time, then when you Like content that’s in that inbox it gets shared to your profile, or saved in some other manner.

Music Stories should NOT be a Tinder for Music. Tinder’s strength is to let users navigate through a lot of content that doesn’t appeal to them, while making the interaction interesting. It’s an interesting model that manages to create value from content that may be irrelevant to some users.

Translating to features

The next steps are to start translating the concept into features. This means user stories (what you want users to be able to do with the app) need to be articulated clearly. Mock ups of specific interactions need to be drawn and tested with audiences. Challenges need to be considered, like the classic issue of getting people to start creating content when there’s no audience in the app yet (Instagram solved this by letting people share content to other social networks).

Now I invite YOU to take this challenge and develop the vision for Music Stories.

(Don’t forget to read David Emery’s original post, which prompted me to write this piece)

 

Quick guide to the relaunched Anchor: reinventing the radio format

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

You may remember Anchor: it started as a sound-based social network where users could start discussions that others could chime in on. A kind of long-form Twitter, but with voice instead of text. I remember getting involved with some discussions started by Bruce Houghton, from Hypebot, but people’s interest soon waned and many of us moved on.

So the startup went back to the drawing board and re-envisioned its service, relaunching with a complete overhaul last week. It now allows users to include music in their audio stories and aims to “completely reinvent the radio format by making it easy for anyone to easily broadcast high quality audio from your phone, to wherever audio is heard.”

Screenshots of the relaunched Anchor 2.0

My first impressions

I paused writing in order to do my first show on Anchor (listen now) in order to get more familiar with the service. You can check it out for my first impressions on the call-ins feature, which allows station hosts to let other people get some airtime, the ephemerality, as well as some thoughts about Anchor as a place for music curation.


Expires in 24 hours, so you may be hearing something else by now.

After playing around with the app a bit more, checking out some of the content, including Cherie Hu’s, I’ve come to revisit my first impressions.

Anchor is like Instagram for audio

Instagram lets people share moments from their lives. It’s used by professionals and amateurs. Some content is more social and some is not. And with the introduction of Instagram Stories, a lot of the content has become ephemeral. That’s exactly what Anchor is, or could be, but for audio content.

While I was initially skeptical of Anchor’s ephemerality, it may be an upside: it reduces the hurdle for sharing content and stimulates creators to deliver content in a bite-size format. People can use it to record their day and share their experiences, like music tech blogger Cherie Hu is doing at SXSW, while others use it as an extension of their professional podcasts or YouTube channels.

When someone calls in, it can be added to the station, after which it lives for another 24 hours. The host needs to take into account that whatever the caller might be responding to is not available anymore by the time their audience checks it, but that can be easily mitigated by adding a short “So yesterday I asked how people feel about fainting goats, and here’s what some of you had to say!”

As people add new audio, it’s added to their stories similar to what Snapchat (or Instagram) do in their apps.

The Instagram analogy extends:

  • A station can be seen as a profile
  • Pressing favorite is akin to following
  • Calling-in is like tweeting & featuring a call-in is like retweeting

It seems Anchor may be able to deliver upon Soundcloud-founder Alexander Ljung’s vision of the web becoming a more audible medium, with sound possibly becoming bigger than video:

“Sound is one of the only mediums that can be consumed completely while multitasking, so it has the potential to do so much more on the web than it’s already doing.”

So forget the radio lingo: Anchor is still a sound-based social network and it’s pretty awesome.

Experiment with it. Develop a format. Then ping me on Twitter, so I can check it out.

The “F*ck the long tail” manifesto

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Don’t spend your time on something broken, when you can do something that works even better.

Unless you’re a huge business with a lot of legacy to deal with, the shape of the long tail doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether music is getting increasingly “winner takes all”. This graph does NOT matter:

Long tail in music and movies
From: Mass entertainment in the digital age is still about blockbusters, not endless choice

Why it doesn’t matter

Going into music, you know that the economics are messed up. Everyone has told you so. Unless you haven’t told anyone you’re going into music. Even then — opening one music business blog will tell you the same thing. Constant bickering over the way money is distributed, who gets paid, how much, why not more, why not less, ticket scalping, streaming royalties, exclusives, royalty split disputes…

It’s not pretty.

So you know that you should not create a reality for yourself where you’ll be dependent on the outcome of the ugly side of the music business. Create one where it doesn’t matter.

As soon as you commit to that, the overall economic picture of the music industry won’t matter quite as much.

What matters most

You should be focusing on your music, and on your fans, and on people who make music just like you. Focus on positivity.

Money is not the problem. Your attitude is.

Be proactive. Tell people about your music constantly. Find out who the programmers are for the venues where you want to play. Who the authors are of blogs or YouTube channels that post similar music. Comment. Message them. Ask them for feedback. Be humble and positive.

One day they’ll give you a chance. But they have to SEE that you’re working hard at it, so document your progress. Post at least 5 things to social media every day. Maybe even 10. Snapchat and Instagram Stories make that SUPER easy.

If you’re a band: set everyone up with access. More content.

You need to stand out above all the noise and you need to sustain people’s attention, so they don’t forget about you, so they don’t move on, so you keep appearing in their Facebook timelines and their inbox.

People’s individual attention long tails are the only long tails that matter.

You have a camera on your phone. Get in front of it. Document. Share.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be genuine. If you work hard, it will get better over time. Then people will feel part of your narrative, part of your story… and that it was kinda shitty early on is actually great: people LOVE a good underdog story.

If you’re worried about being boring because you spend too much time in your studio — set up a livestream. Sure it could get boring, but there will be highlights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgeWHnSmPKE

What about the money?

Then you’re going to make money on your own. Away from the rat race. Away from the long tail. Your fans are part of your story. Set up a Patreon. Use Kickstarter to launch new projects. Give them a way to commit.

If you work hard at it, people are going to take note. Including people with money. Influencer marketing is one of the hottest areas in marketing right now. Sponsors are going to show up. Reject all of them, except for the ones that really make sense. Don’t trade in your fans for money. Be you.

If you have a huge excited fanbase, they’ll be LOUD. People will hear you. So the deals will come. The shows will come. Their size will grow and so will the money you make from them.

Work hard.

Ask questions.

Stay humble & positive.

And communicate your passion. ❤️️

(Oh yeah, and follow my newsletter 📰 and listen to Quibus 🎶)

What if Marilyn Manson was a YouTuber?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

On establishing an artist narrative in the digital age.

Last week I came across Lucy Blair Pettersson’s thought piece about storytelling for artists and what we can do to learn more about how fans respond to the stories we tell. It triggered a question in me.

I’ve recently been involved with young artists or new projects and aliases by artists who have already built a fanbase before, and one of the biggest creative challenges is often:

How do we establish a narrative with no historical context?

Why is a narrative important?

Attention is the scarcest good in the digital age, so in order to build a career as an artist, you need to figure out how to sustain people’s attention over long periods of time.

A narrative gives context to the stories you tell. A story is finished, a piece of history, but a narrative provides something that fans can become a part of, something that lives.

But constructing a narrative is not easy: it’s a creative exercise that needs input from the artist and often someone who understands the market for their music well.

The challenge is not necessarily in “what do we talk about?” but more in:

  • How do we talk about the things we talk about?
  • How do they fit into the overall narrative?
  • How do we include fans in that narrative? By speaking to them directly, by implicitly including them, or do we let them aspire to be a part of it? The latter is a strategy often used by luxury brands.
  • What do we not talk about? This is going to be way more than what you actually talk about. Sometimes you have to make explicit choices, especially when coordinating with a larger team.

All of these decisions shape your brand, and your narrative. And the question that your fans, journalists, and you yourself must be able to answer:

Who are you to be talking about these topics?

The answer may be simple: for Adele, it may be something like “I’m a girl like so many others, singing about the issues we all have.” Although, admittedly, I’m not that familiar with Adele.

If done well, your narrative should make your life easier, as it will make decision-making about content on social media, styling, tone, etc. much less difficult.

With some luck, a narrative can span an entire career.

The Marilyn Manson of the social media age

In a quick email exchange I had with Lucy Blair Pettersson, I mentioned Marilyn Manson. The guy has always been smart, eloquent, and very image-aware. He constructed a narrative that transcended a particular song or release and he did so in the 90s. Imagine if he had been born on social media.

What if Marilyn Manson was a YouTuber?

What I always loved about Marilyn Manson was how he used shock to win people’s attention and then showed himself to be thoughtful, intelligent and humorous. It’s a refreshing contrast among a lot of shock bands with no substance and it made him worth talking about.

Surprise is one of the foremost reasons why people share content.

Perhaps I’ll do a talk at a conference or a university on the topic of re-imagining Marilyn Manson as an artist born in the digital age (invite me and make it happen), but for now I want to leave it as something for you to think about on your own.

Understanding why people share

I have to make an important distinction here:

It’s not the narrative that gets shared, it’s the stories that are part of the narratives that people will repeat.

But your narrative gets turned into a story when people are telling their friends about you, or when journalists are writing about your new album or video.

There are a lot of good books about the topic of what makes things catch on, and Contagious is one of my favourites. The book proposes a STEPPS framework for why people share content:

STEPPS, taken from Contagious

  • Social currency: makes them look smart, funny, politically engaged, or something else when they share this.
  • Triggers: think of a context in which you can repeatedly be top-of-mind for people. The book uses the example of Rebecca Black’s Friday, which sees strong peaks in streams and shares on Fridays.
  • Emotion: when we care, we share. Content that triggers a strong emotional response, like shock, surprise, or outrage, is more likely to be shared.
  • Public: if it’s publicly visible it has a higher chance of catching on. Think band merch, but also things like festival wristbands that some people collect and keep on their wrists like trophies.
  • Practical value: if it’s useful, it will get shared. If you’re a protest band, perhaps you can make a video about how to stay anonymous in this day & age and soundtrack it with your music. If you make electronic music, chances are a lot of your fans will do so too: tutorials are really valuable content.
  • Stories: the book talks about the oldest stories in existence, which are often parables or fairy tales. They’re powerful tools to communicate ideas and some of these stories have managed to live on for thousands of years.

Your overarching artist narrative doesn’t have to include all six of these, but they’re useful to think about when crafting content based on your narrative.

A trick I learned from Niels Aalberts, who managed the band Kyteman and has an excellent music biz newsletter (in Dutch), is that you have to be able to answer this question:

“[Your name] is the artist who [story]…”

Think about what story you want your fans to share. Think about what they are likely saying already, if anything, and whether that’s exciting enough to actually make people listen.

Be brutally honest to yourself: “that guy from our hometown who was featured on the radio everywhere” may sound cool to people from your hometown, but nobody else will care if that’s the only story. You want people to tell your story and have someone reply: “did you know he’s actually from our hometown?”

Pitfalls!

Don’t overcomplicate it. If you create a very complex narrative, your choices for content, the way you react to interview questions, etc. will become more difficult. The point is to make your life easier.

Choose a direction and draft a narrative that is easy to support consistently. Your narrative is never finished. It builds, it grows, and who you are today may not be who you are tomorrow: the transition will be part of your narrative and just like your fans that moved through the transition with you.

Think carefully about whether you’ll get tired of something. Would you have the stamina to walk in huge boots all the time and put on layers of make-up like Marilyn Manson? Do you see yourself carrying on with the never-serious shenanigans of Die Antwoord for 10 years, even if you’re not nearly as successful as them?

If it’s not close to you, and if you don’t fully believe in it, it’s not a recipe for longevity. Most acts don’t make it as big as they hoped to, so it’s usually not a problem to abandon a narrative you don’t like.

But what if you succeed? 😱

The value of fan remixes as part of artists’ content strategy

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Putting fan remixes in the spotlight is a hundred thousand times more valuable than taking them down.

The scarcest good on the internet is attention. Any savvy artist, manager, or label employee knows this and develops strategies to sustain the attention of fans over long periods of time.

This comes in the form of content strategies, where the social media outlets of artists turn into media with frequent updates. It’s a pretty tiring process and can take a lot of focus away from other important activities.

Social media is so exciting…

But it’s necessary.

One way to sustain attention is to connect fans together and have them keep each other’s attention on you. It’s something I wrote about in 2011 and preceding years, and since then, a lot has changed. For the better.

We have powerful connected devices in our pockets at all times. Our web browsers have also grown more powerful, with the Web Audio APIs enabling a lot of new possibilities. And basically everyone is on social media now.

Throughout the last year, I’ve spoken to the founders of apps and platforms like Pacemaker, MetaPop, and 8Stem. All enabling people to take existing music and mix it, or remix it, and then publish it. Legally.

None of these would have been possible 5 years ago, but with current technology and in today’s landscape they make a lot of sense.

Remix culture is going mainstream and ‘listeners’ are increasingly being shifted from passenger to driver’s seat.

Instead of creating all of your own content, why not let fans do some?

As a matter of fact, they’re already doing it. Look at the fanbases of the Monstercat and Lapfox Trax labels. It seems exceptional, but it’s just about the culture you create around yourself as an artist or label.

Instead of taking down unauthorized remixes, give them a spotlight.

So what if there’s no immediate way to get those 5 cents of revenue from the 5,000 streams it’s going to garner? It’s a hundred thousand times more valuable having an inclusive culture in your fanbase, and a following of fans that actually participate in what you’re creating.

And when I say a hundred thousand times, I mean it.

Taking a fan remix down over a tiny bit of revenue can alienate a fan and stop them from spending money on you, but the value of a highly engaged fan that actually helps you seed your content strategy… Could it be $5,000? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes even more.

Gradually, a participative culture will emerge.

It takes time. There are no shortcuts. You are building.

But you’ll create something that ultimately doesn’t just save you time — you’ll create a fan culture with an output that can inspire you.

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.