Becoming a Full Time Music & YouTube Creator feat. MMXVII ​

In this episode I talk to MMXVII on how he’s built his music and YouTube career to pursue it full-time. Right now he has over 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and about 7,000 subscribers on YouTube. We cover his music marketing strategies, his music and YouTube journey, and techniques he’s used to grow his YouTube channel.

Listen on your favorite Podcast platform

Important Points:

Andrew and MMXVII talk about the benefits of promoting Spotify playlists and why you should be aware of hiring seemingly legit companies to do that for you.

Andrew and MMXVII compare YouTube vs Twitch in terms of music discoverability, streaming numbers, communities, and the different ways how you can earn money on each platform.

Andrew and MMXVII talk about their journey to find the right niche for them and what content worlds best for their niche.

Podcast Outline:

[01:42] The beginnings of MMXVII’s music journey – MMXVII

[05:42] How MMXVII started to record his music – MMXVII

[09:34] Outsourcing beat making – MMXVII

[10:33] Promoting your music – MMXVII

[12:20] How bots accidentally promoted MMXVII’s tracks on Spotify – MMXVII

[19:43] MMXVII’s & Andrew’s experience with playlist push – MMXVII

[24:13] MMXVII on promoting his own playlists – MMXVII

[32:41] Getting into a YouTube beef – MMXVII

[43:01] Having multiple niches on YouTube – MMXVII

[46:07] Finding out what content works for your audience – MMXVII

[47:55] Switching from YouTube to Twitch – MMXVII

[52:05] Earning on Twitch – MMXVII

[55:20] The name of the game on YouTube – Andrew

[59:05] How to let people know about your live streaming schedule on Twitch – MMXVII

[59:29] Cross promoting your live streams on different platforms – MMXVII

[01:02:32] How to become an official artist through distro kid – MMXVII

[01:03:50] “It breaks my heart a little when I see people paying like a thousand dollars a year for tune core.” – Andrew

Wise Words:

[13:24] “I’ve seen people hire higher companies that, you know, claim they’re doing everything legit. And then after they get on the (Spotify) playlist, they see all this super sketchy data, like horrible save rates, horrible listen rates.“ – Andrew

[24:11] “One of the greatest things for me has been just promoting my own playlists. That has helped me like a lot. not in the sense that it’s like it gets me so many streams, but it’s that I know I always have this little reliable asset that’s like constantly growing and people are using it. Like I have a no copyright Twitch playlist. So it’s like I’ll copyright free music that people can use.“ – MMXVII

[53:22] “ If you wanna do listening to your music streams right now and you have zero followers, you can go on set up something and you can be like having a thousand, I guarantee you could have a thousand followers on Twitch in two months.“ – MMXVII

[55:21] “The name of the game on YouTube is to get the right people to click your thumbnail, read your title, and then when they land in the video, watch the whole video. The title kind of matters in terms of keywords, but it, for the most part, like if people click on it and watch it, that’s like the only thing that matters.“ – Andrew

[01:00:57] “It’s just about providing value and getting to the people that value that thing that you’re doing.“ – MMXVII

Resources Mentioned:

• MMXVII Spotify – link
• MMXVII YouTube – link

Learn More:

If you enjoyed this interview you might also like this one I did with Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) on how he’s made a living with music over the past 20+ years.