Discovery Park

Let Your Music Breathe

An Open Letter to Indie Musicians

Thanks to the rise of social media and self-publishing platforms, like YouTube and Tunecore, the music industry has become over saturated. Unfortunately, due to this over-saturation the way some of you release music has become lazy, inefficient, and counterproductive.

The combination of short attention spans and ease of access has your fans pressing the “next” button more often than ever before, which has lead to a rabid misconception that more content is superior. If you can maintain a high quality of content then more is indeed better, but it takes a very special artist to do that. Ideally, you want to release enough content on a consistent basis to keep your name in people’s heads but most artists struggle to maintain high enough quality to do this weekly.

The fact of the matter is that most artists don’t spend enough time getting to know their true audience and then catering their release to them. Almost always it seems as though artists end up cutting their releases off way too early. Let’s stop that.

Since it’s football season, let’s break the proper structure of a release up into four quarters.

1st Quarter: Content Creation

Content creation (writing, recording, editing, filming, etc) all happens in this stage. Patience is crucial in this first quarter, it will make the difference between creating great content that fans want to share and mediocre content that doesn’t hold their attention.The struggle here is when this phase takes you an extended period of time and then you rush to push it to the masses. Too many times we’ve seen artists take over a year on a project and assume that their fans will push the release far enough on their own because they’ve been chomping at the bit for content. This is untrue.

At the end of the first quarter, when you hit the “publish” button — it is only the beginning. You cannot walk away and begin working on your next project. That’s equivalent to a mother being pregnant for nine months and then leaving the baby at the hospital for the nurses to take care of for 18 years.

2nd Quarter: The Home Team

The second quarter is all about your “home team fans” — these are The “Ride or Die” Fans (i.e. always on the look out for new content and bump releases that are years old like they dropped yesterday) and The Casual Fans (i.e. decided to connect with you after hearing something they liked, but don’t actively wait for more content).

The Ride or Die Fans have waited patiently through the first quarter, maintaining their passion about your craft and, in turn, they get The Casual Fans excited about the forthcoming release. The goals for the second quarter should be to mobilize The Ride or Die Fans into an internet (and/or physical) street team and convert The Casual Fans.

There are many ways to do this and the three key factors to remember are: engage, mobilize, and convert. Here are my four favorite ways to do accomplish this:

1. Friends and Family Round: I’ve found this is the best way to kick off the Second Quarter. Gather 60-100 emails for your family and friends, it works a little better if they’re in your core demographic but not totally necessary. Send them all an email, preferably individually and personalized but you can BCC them because it’s supposed to be people who know you well enough to not be offended by that. Genuinely thank them for their support over the years, share your new content with them, give them some insight into how you created your content and encourage them to share it within their networks. The easiest 1000 views you’ll ever receive.
2. Social Media Contest: Insanely popular right now and when done right, a merchandise contest can produce effective results. The simplest way to do this is to offer five pieces of merchandise to five different fans selected randomly out of those whom share your new content.
3. Phone Calls: This may seem sort of old school considering the state of the music industry, but it works. A week before you drop a video for an unreleased track: show your fans a still from the video, offer to call and leave a voicemail of the unreleased song to every fan who shares the photo. Set up a Google Doc Form to collect information and call anonymously from a Google Voice number. This creates a unique and exclusive opportunity for fans and many of them will participate to avoid FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). It may take you awhile if it works REALLY well, but you’ll be creating an incredible experience for your fans, which is always worth the time.
4. Fan Interview: Start a thread via a Facebook update and choose a tag on twitter (#ask_______) to collect questions from your fans for a day or two. Then turn on your webcam, read the questions (don’t forget to credit each fan who asked it), and answer them. Choose questions that showcase your craft but also your personality, let the fans get to know you a bit while directly interacting with them. I prefer this method over uStream because you can save it to your YouTube channel and promote sharing over time as opposed to the short term value of uStream.

3rd Quarter: The Away Team

Now that you’ve taken care of your home team, it’s time to move onto the fans who don’t yet know your name. They’re music fans, probably of your chosen genre and more than likely enjoy artists that would be apart of your Pandora Channel. This Quarter is the most difficult because you don’t already have a connection with them to easily put your content on their computer screen. This Quarter will gain you exposure with potential new fans but it’ll be up to the quality of your content to guarantee conversion to “The Home Team.”

The Blogosphere: Blogs currently plays a large role in gaining new fans from The Away Team.As an indie artist, you’re either extremely familiar with the blogosphere or you’ve never dove into it. There never seems to be a happy medium. Blogs can hold access to many possible future fans. Spend some time getting to know the shape of the blog universe, promote yourself across genre-specific blogs based on what has influenced your content, and don’t be afraid to reach out. If a blogger does post your content, say “thank you,” and continue to develop a relationship. Bloggers tend to have great ears, which is why they love blogging about music, try to create a relationship with at least one blogger during the First Quarter whose feedback you value. This will help immensely down the line for both your craft and your exposure.

Reducing Friction: One of the oldest rules in marketing a product is to lower the difficultly of a consumer’s ability to obtain a product. This applies to music just like anything else. The fewer barrier to entries there are for a consumer, the more likely they are to consume your content. Marc Goone and I exchanged a few emails about this topic recently and he sent me this:

Highest Barrier to Entry: Full album
Medium Barrier to Entry: Short EP
Medium to Low Barrier to Entry: Music video
Lowest Barrier to Entry: Unique spin on familiar material (remixes, covers, medley)

Not only do I think he’s completely correct, he’s executed on this theory and shown that it works. That’s not to say you should never release an album or EP, but it’s crucial to consider the ease at which a consumer can enjoy and share your content. If all of your content has the highest barrier to entry consider mixing things up a bit and making it easier to adopt new fans.

4th Quarter: The Final Push
The Fourth Quarter is when you give your content one final push towards victory. Depending on the kind of artist you are, this can come in many different forms: release a second single from the project, release a music video, throw a release party, perform a StageIt show, have your record remixed by a producer, remix the record with a guest verse, create merchandise, etc. etc. etc. The key is to make sure you really squeeze everything possible out of your release before you stop actively promoting it.

There are literally hundreds of options when it comes to The Final Push, do not be afraid to get creative. Think outside of the Facebook/Twitter status update box.

Overtime: Study Game Footage

Athletes study old game footage to make improvements to their efficiency, competence, and experience before the next game. As a musician, you should be doing the same thing.

Next Big Sound: If you don’t have an account, go sign up for one right now. This is by far the easiest way to track your analytics across platforms, they’ll even email you a weekly summary. It’s easy to read, it’s easy to use, and they have a paid plan with even more information. You should be using this to compare each release to the next one and figure out which parts of the release were most effective.

YouTube: YouTube analytics have gotten insanely powerful over the years. The interface is easy to use and it gives you just about everything you could possibly need to know. Look at your traffic sources for your video, especially the “embedded on an external site” metric—if blogs are accounting for a majority of your YouTube views, then you may be slacking on engaging the audience you’ve already earned access to, your fans. YouTube analytics can give you a sense of whether your approach is balanced and which groups of people are going to count for the most views, likes, and subscribers. The other metric you should be looking at is your demographic. This can tell you a lot about who your audience is and the best way to reach and engage them even further. An added bonus is that knowing your core demographic is the key to monetization down the road. Look for trends or patterns and keep good records of when you did what on the promotional side so you can really examine your fan’s behavior and maximize your outreach.

There are many more sources of data and information, especially on Facebook, but these are my two favorite and what I find to be most useful.

The key takeaways for this post are to encourage you to ride out the full length of your release; take care of it while you’re crafting it so that you don’t get sick of it and push it out too quickly. If you’ve read this and have any questions (especially in the arena of data and analytics), don’t hesitate to reach out. I would also love to hear what’s worked for you, what hasn’t worked out, if you hated this whole post, or if you have some insight to add.