The Secret To Social Media Growth For Music
Short form vertical videos dominate social media growth for musicians in 2023, but text-based platforms, podcasts, and long form content still have a place. Tailor your strategy to fit your brand and audience for the best results.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Welcome to the first edition of Music Marketing Monday. I had started something of a newsletter previously but based on the positive response I wanted to form it into something bigger and better.
The purpose of Music Marketing Monday is to give you actionable music marketing advice to start the week off strong.
Additionally, i’ll be filling you in with new content of mine you may have missed throughout the week and relevant news in the music industry.
Let’s dive right into it, enjoy!
Main Topic
Today I want to talk about organic social media strategies that are effective right now in 2023.
As you may have expected, the king right now is short form vertical formatted content. So that is what we’re going to talk about in this week’s main topic.
But I want to give a shout-out to other methods that can totally work if they fit your style more:
Text based social (Twitter, Reddit)
Podcasts
Blogs
Long form video
Don’t feel like you must follow the trends just because it makes sense for most people. Your brand may not fit the short form trend and that is okay, just keep in mind it may be an uphill battle.
The beauty of short form content right now is you can turn 1 video into multiple posts across platforms. Such as:
TikTok
Instagram Reels
Facebook Reels
YouTube Shorts
Vertical 9:16 content less than 1 minute in length will fit on all of these platforms. Even if each piece of content only gets you 100 views on each platform, that means 400 views across platforms.
Remember back when you thought you could just release music into the world and people would eventually find it, listen, and love it?
That was cute.
— Andrew Southworth (@southwortha)
6:03 PM • Jun 3, 2023
Master Plan
Your master plan for short form content is going to be to prepare 40-50 pieces of content per song.
I know, that sounds like a lot. But when I explain how you’re going to do this it will sound much less exhausting.
Just to keep this example short, i’m going to use an example of a solo artist. Likely a singer or rapper. If you’re a producer or instrumental composer this may tweak slightly.
The homework: 1-hour
Record 3 videos of you performing (lip-syncing) your song in different aesthetically pleasing locations.
Brainstorm 10 text ‘hooks’ for your song, pick the best 4.
This will give you 40-50 pieces of short form content.
All you need to do now is cut those 3 performance videos into 4 separate parts of the song. Now you have 12 videos. Then get your 4 awesome hooks and export each of the 12 videos with those 4 hooks.
That gives you 48 pieces of content.
But isn’t there a lot of repetition in these videos? Surely people will get annoyed with this!
The answer is no. Every time you post only 10% of your audience see’s your new video. This means most people will only see 5 videos from you, if that. In general these platforms mostly show your content to new people anyways.
The super fans that watch all your videos won’t care either, because they’re super fans.
If you post all 48 videos to all 4 platforms you now have 192 posts. If each one gets 100 views that is 19,200 views of your song for free.
Chances are a couple of these will get thousands of views. Maybe one will even go semi-viral. Extend this across multiple songs for an entire year and you have an enormous amount of views. The math is in your favor.
New Content
Here is some new music marketing content I released on my YouTube channel and blog!
This one also has a blog version here.
The last one is SUPER relevant to today’s main topic. Ayaz is a master of social media marketing for music.
News
Here are some music industry news highlights from the past week.
There are now 120,000 new tracks hitting music streaming services each day
Tidal launches ‘Tidal artist home’ profile management hub for artists… but still no analytics platform
Queen’s catalog might be sold this year for over $1 BILLION
DistroKid has a mobile app
Audius has 7 million monthly users, but still doesn’t have a royalty payment model for artists
Quote of the Week
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.
Think about this from a music industry perspective. Your favorite music artists, the most successful record labels and industry gatekeepers are all just regular people.
Everyone sucks making music when they start. Every artist starts with no fans.
Most of them aren’t naturally gifted or brilliant. They’re just average people that worked their asses off doing what they love.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads.
My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.
My Links:
🚀 Spotify Growth Machine Course: https://learn.generastudios.com/spotify-growth-machine
🏆 Hire us to run your ads: https://www.forbidmedia.com/
🌍 Best website / store / funnels for music artists: https://musicfunnels.io/ (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
🎬 YouTube Growth Machine: https://learn.generastudios.com/youtube-google-growth-machine/
🌍 One software to power your entire business: https://fanfunnels.io/
🧑💻 Consultations: https://generastudios.com/pages/consulting
⌨️ Chat in the community (FREE): https://community.generastudios.com/
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I hope you enjoyed the first edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give me your feedback using the poll below.
In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.
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