How To Build a Music Career from Scratch feat. Llynks

In this episode of Modern Music Marketing I talk to Llynks, a music artist in the trenches building a music career from scratch. Currently she has 40,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, 2,300 subscribers on YouTube, 3,500 on TikTok and more on other platforms. A lot of music marketing people talk about ‘building a community’, but Llynks has actually done it and has some advice to share.

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Important Points:

Llynks shares how staying authentic and collaborating with other artists drastically helped her to grow her audience and how to grow a community on social media that support your music.

Andrew and Llynks discuss how they balance making music and making content by creating a schedule and batch-creating content.

Andrew and Llynks talk about why it’s so crucial to have a website or mailing list to reach your audience; because if for some reason your main platform like YouTube or TikTok goes bankrupt, you might instantly lose access to the following you’ve built.

Podcast Outline:

[05:07] What helped Llynks the most to grow his audience – Llynks

[05:56] How to build a community on social media – Llynks

[11:16] How to find people to collaborate with – Llynks & Andrew

[18:30] How to balance making music and making content – Llynks & Andrew

[22:17] How to brainstorm video topic ideas efficiently – Andrew

[24:25] How Llynks grew her YouTube channel – Llynks

[28:16] Facebook ads – Andrew & Llynks

[30:43] Why you need a website or mailing list – Andrew & Llynks

[36:00] Using different artist names for different genres – Andrew

[38:43] YouTube Tools Tubebuddy vs Morning Fame – Andrew & Llynks

[41:23] The benefits of having an email list – Andrew

[44:03] Llynks’ experience with Spotify

[49:52] The challenges of changing your artist name – Llynks

[01:00:39] Playlist Push – Andrew

[01:04:09] Studying at Berkley – Llynks

Wise Words:

[03:44] “There are so many avenues that you can take. And a lot of the times I feel like artists, we just choose every single one and you have to figure out what works for you personally“ – Llynks

[05:07] “Being authentically you, unapologetically yourself, and just showing up and basically just sharing who you really are and telling a story. I think that is the thing that has helped me the most“ – Llynks

[26:23] “Consistent schedule really helps growth on YouTube“ – Llynks

[30:43] “YouTube could change anything. They could go bankrupt, you know, next week. And, if you don’t have a way to reach out to your people or they don’t have a way to find you through like a website or mailing list, then you’re kind of screwed.“ – Llynks

[43:28] “50 email subscribers who actually read every time is probably worth more than 500 followers in every platform“ – Andrew

[01:06:36:10] “I’ve heard that complaint from other people who’ve gone to school for music….when they’re done with their degree, it’s like they have of these skills, but they have zero idea of like how to actually make money with those skills.”- Andrew

Resources Mentioned:

• Llynks’ Spotify – link
• Llynks’ YouTube – link

Learn More:

If you enjoyed this interview you might also like this one I did with MMXVII on how to become a full time music and Youtube creator.