What Artists Miss About Music Discovery
”There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”
Once said Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, referring to the mission of Amazon. A company whose takeover of the shopping and retail landscape is all built on a simple presence: know what you want before you know it. Amazon has struck the perfect balance between product and data. You can find almost anything on Amazon, and guess what, Amazon knows what you want before you can think it. While this is a lethal combination for a shopaholic, this should be a dream for an independent musician.
While all musicians dream of selling millions of records, this unfortunately is no longer the reality for most. Each year, the threshold for album sale celebration’s gets continuously lower. We’re now praising artists who go gold, compared to a decade ago where gold was almost an automatic for a major artist. This is not a post to harp of the declining sales of albums. This is a conversation about discovery.
Discovery has always been one of the most important parts of the music industry. What started as going to the record store and looking through rows and rows of albums has turned into curated Pandora stations and Apple Music playlists.
A&R and Marketing make up over 27% of major labels budgets, just to give you a chance to discover their artist. Any music producer on Twitter knows of the bombardment of messages of, “check out my soundcloud bro!” Though the medium keeps changing, the facts are still the same: The challenge in discovering something new. The difference now is that musicians are not in the dark about who is discovering their music.
Through using platforms like SuperPhone, artists can build a relationship with fans that are discovering them. They can get to know their fans, where they are located, how the fan found out about them, etc. Maybe most importantly, they can understand how much money a fan is willing to invest in the artists careers.
Artists can identify who their top supporters are and offer them value. Most importantly, they can take budding relationships, started from discovery and curate them into life long bonds. That is way more valuable than the $.0006 that Spotify pays per stream.
In a 2014 interview with the guardian, Ed Sheeran said: “I’m in the music industry to play live. That’s why I make records, that’s why i do radio interviews, that’s why Ido Amazon events, that’s why I put things on Spotify. having recorded music is fantastic, but playing live is where I buzz the most.”
Through a combination of free to low cost discovery and building personal fan relationships, artists can know what their fans want, in the same way that Amazon knows that you totally need another (insert embarrassing purchase).
Discovery platforms like Spotify are only the first step though. It is the top of the sales funnel where fans encounter you for the first time. It’s what happens next that matters. As you grow your social following and discovery options, make sure you building real relationships with those who will be the life-blood of your career.
- Ben Thomas, Marketing Associate at DMM
