How Music Artists Accidentally Kill Their Growth

In this video, I'm going to talk about five things that music artists accidentally do that kill their growth. And what I'm talking about is artists that have genuine momentum or genuine moments that they could have capitalized on to actually create some significant long-term growth for their music and then because of the things in this video, they just kind of completely flopped and ruined the moment or didn't take full advantage of the opportunity. and true self worth. [music] >> All right. So, first we're going to talk about disappearing or not having a consistent release schedule to follow up what you're doing. I've worked with a lot of artists who had a song do very very well. Like let's say for example under 20 cent cost per conversion tier one countries. You have no idea what I'm talking about. Check this video right here. I guess um basically really good ad campaign marketing their song and on Spotify really good growth really good engagement high save rate high playlist ad rate and then really good algorithmic traction so Spotify recommending it on radio discover weekly release radar etc and we're getting all these signs that this song is a winning song and the song grows and they get hundreds of thousands or even millions of streams and then the artist just doesn't put anything out for like a year [laughter] and they don't do any more marketing so you end in the situation where you had this this song that maybe took this artist from zero in in some cases literally zero starting from scratch first song up to 50k or 100k monthly listeners on Spotify which is huge growth right that's a significant milestone and then the artist just let the campaign end and just vanished for a year and then they just slowly fell down to like 10,000 monthly listeners or less because people don't relisten to a song forever, right? A lot of people will listen to a song for forever or for a very long time. But if you're waiting like a year and you're not following it up, you aren't giving potential fans an opportunity to actually fall in love with you with an artist, right? People don't become fans off of one song really. Like they they might feel like they're fans, but it takes a while, right? They got to get into material. You got to follow it up. And you have to have other channels for people to actually engage with the artist. Which brings me to number two, which is not posting or engaging on social media. So, what I mean by this is the artist has that really good situation, really good ad campaign, really good whatever. Maybe it's even going viral on social media or whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Song's going really well, but they're not posting on social media throughout this moment. They're not engaging with people on social media throughout this moment. Uh what ends up happening, let's just go with the case of running an ad campaign first, is you have all these people checking you out because your song is taking off and doing well. But then you're not actually uh posting on social media at all. So when these people check out your socials, there's nothing to check out, right? Why would they follow you if you never post? Why would they follow you and interact with you if your content sucks? Why are they going to keep commenting if you never ever comment back or never like their comments or never engage with them in any way whatsoever? And there's edge cases of this. Maybe someone has this cool brand where they're supposed to be mysterious or whatever, but those are very rare. Most of the time for most artists, it's good to be very present on social media, posting daily, at least a handful of times a week, replying to as many comments in his DMs as possible. Uh, and that's how you convert people to fans. That's kind of like a grassroots movement, so to speak. You have people that are checking you out and they they want to express interest. They want to lean into your music and you're not giving them that opportunity, right? Imagine going to a page that has a bad profile picture, no description, and almost no content. They haven't posted in 11 weeks. And [snorts] then you go to another page and profile picture good profile laid out great. Post content every single day and the content's engaging. If you like the music equally, which one are you going to follow, right? Why are you going to follow that account that hasn't posted for 11 weeks? There's no reason to follow them. They don't post anyways. So, um, and I've seen artists do this. It's not going to like magically make you famous, right? Doing this. It's just allowing you to fully capitalize on all the attention you're getting. If you're getting 10,000 people to check out your song during an ad campaign and you could capture 10% of them long term on social media just by posting a few times a week throughout the process, why wouldn't you do that? It's just a free way to make your investment go further. Now, if you are posting on social media, uh well, what does this mean? Well, it means make sure you're actually engaging with people. Don't just like blindly post. like post your content, analyze the performance, see who's engaging, reply to that engagement, try to reply to every comment, like every comment that's positive, reply to every single DM, and just be like an active member of your community. If if people are checking out other artists in the area, and then they're not only seeing you in your content, but seeing you reply in other people's content, people start to notice like, oh, like that band is is pretty present, like they're one of us, and that actually does make a difference. Number three is basically the realworld equivalent of what I just said. So, not posting, not engaging with social media, not being part of your online scene. Next is like not collaborating, not playing shows, not selling any merch. Uh, and this is partially like just the real world equivalent of what I just described in social media, being part of a real life community, right? Collaborating with other artists, releasing features, and then um playing live, touring, and all that stuff, opening for bands and and meeting people in real life. But it's also kind of like getting fans to pledge their support to you in different financial means. Whether that's selling merch, whether that's having a Patreon, or also playing shows. Um, fans often have a journey to them. And if you go on Google and you type in like the customer journey, you're going to find the e-commerce version of this where people essentially find something or they become aware of something. They then kind of start to like that thing and then eventually they make a small buy into that thing and then eventually they make bigger buys into that thing. In a nutshell, in a in a fan community, looking at music instead of like a generic product, you become aware of a band and you might not like them the first few times you see them. That's not an unusual thing. you're you're probably just indifferent or maybe you even dislike it. And then after a few times of being exposed to them, whether that means just seeing posts in social media or maybe it even means listening to a song uh one or a couple times on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever, there's a few touch points that happen before you get to the point where you actually go to a show or buy merch or join an artist Patreon. Right? Generally, the first purchase you make with a band, it's going to be a band you like a lot. And then that first purchase isn't going to be a $500 VIP ticket. It's probably going to be like a t-shirt on their website or it might be buying their vinyl or something like that. Uh and then as you become more and more of a fan, you start becoming more willing to invest in bigger experiences around the bands you love the most. And this is like the fan journey or the customer journey for for music. Um and if you don't have that, you're just not allowing your fans to express their fanhood. Um, and you know, a lot of artists don't like the idea of being a capitalist and and finding ways to monetize their audience, but it's not necessarily just a bad thing. You're finding ways that you can give your audience something cool that allows them to be a fan, right? People like being fans of things that they enjoy. People like going and buying t-shirts with bands they like. People like going to Disney and buying merch while they're there, right? No one's forced to do it. People do it because they like it. And so if you're not doing that, you're just kind of just keeping all your fans under a certain threshold. And it doesn't have to be merch. It could be Patreon. It could be something cool you do in a live experience. That's all up to you. But just make sure you're not artificially throttling this by just saying, "I'm only going to do streaming and I'm going to post social media and I'm never doing anything else." That maybe is a little more hard work. Number four is botting. So what I mean by this is going on and purposefully purchasing artificial streams or artificial views or whatever for your music, music videos, etc. And people do this because they want to look a certain way online and have a lot of numbers behind it. They might even do it to get opportunities, get a label's attention, get a manager's attention, get a show, another band show opportunity thing. But but a lot of the times the people in the industry can see right through it. they'll see that, oh, they have artificially high numbers on this one platform and nothing anywhere else. Um, or even on that same platform, they have an artificially high this number, like for example, streams, but they have almost no monthly listeners and they have like pretty much no followers. Like that's a pretty like this one indicator of something being ary um even just from the outside in. Never mind if we're looking at your stats. I was looking at someone's stats recently and they had numbers shoot up for a week and drop down and a bunch of streams but like no listeners. And I looked and during every day of that week, they were getting like 80 streams per listener. Uh, and they weren't running ads. They weren't doing all these things. They hired some company who claimed they were doing playlisting, but none of the streams showed up as playlisting. They showed up as if they were ads, but they weren't. So, they essentially got botted. And it was super obvious when I saw it that like you got ripped off. So, anyone in the industry can see that, but there's a lot of indicators from the outside in. So the worst case scenario that happens in this is everyone sees that you're faking it. Uh even casual people, not just industry people. But then you also get pulled your music pulled from the platform or even banned from the platform. And this is why this is this is the one of the worst ones in this list. Or really it is the worst one in this list because this kind of jeopardizes everything you're building, right? It's it's it's embarrassing and it can literally get your music pulled from the platform or get you removed from certain opportunities. Right? If if you're trying to get some work with a label and they see that you're faking your numbers, they're probably never going to take you seriously again. Um and I have seen artists mid campaign all of a sudden have songs um pulled because they were running some sketchy thing in the past. Like literally like we're running a campaign. And then like the rest of their catalog just vanishes and then and then we talk to them and it's like, "Oh yeah, but before I started working with you, I was hiring so and so blah blah blah and we were doing this and it was very obvious that it was fake, but we stopped doing it." And then they just got caught and they got their catalog pulled. Um, and in some cases they're able to get it back and then they go clean going forward, but in other cases it's it's more problematic than that and it can be kind of tricky. So, don't touch any of the fake stuff with 10 foot pole. Anytime you hire a company, just try to be very clear in what you're actually hiring them to do. Try to see if they have any reputation online. If there's a face to the brand, um, a lot of people who are running scams, you won't find a person that's behind it. Like, for example, there won't be like this person owns this company and like I know their real name. It'll just be this is a company and there's no actual name tied to it, right? So, there's a lot of red flags like that. So, make sure you don't get scammed, but also make sure you don't hunt this stuff out on purpose because I I've never seen it actually. I've never seen someone purposely bought their stuff and have it turn into anything good. It's It's always bad. Now, the fifth way that music artists accidentally kill their growth is by not watching this video, which shows you how to run meta ad campaigns to promote your music from start to finish. And if you want to see how YouTube thinks you should promote your music, check out this video right here, which is whatever YouTube thinks you should watch. Anyways, thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe if you found this interesting. and I'll see you next video.