 So if you don't know me, I'm the guy on YouTube who is always going on and on about how building community around you and promoting to the people who are in your scene, micro genre community, or wherever we want to call it, is going to be way more effective than buying ads and paying to reach very few people. As well, I'm also the guy who's always telling you how to promote your music on Spotify. And this is one of those tips that helps to deer you to Spotify, as well as other musicians in your community. So this video, I'm going to combine both of those things and tell you about one of the most effective ways you can promote your music that is not only free, but gets you to the right ears that helps you make friends with other musicians who you may collaborate, play shows with and do other fun stuff. I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to go from zero to 10,000 fans on YouTube. And this is Museformation. There's this funny thing that people always say to me after they read my book or watch a lot of my videos. They ask, why don't you just form a management company and make like a million dollars? After I remind them of the fact that dealing with other humans, especially famous musicians, is one of the most stressful and life-freaking things a fun-loving human can do, and that the rewards largely favor people with extroverted personalities, and I'm one chill ass dude, they realize the bigger picture. The next thing I remind them is that while I give countless bits of advice that can help musicians build up their fan base, most musicians don't even do the easiest of them. And this video is about one of the easiest and most pleasurable things you can do to promote your music that you'd be a fool to ignore, like much of the other advice I give, intense. What I'm talking about is that you should be making playlists on your Spotify artist page that give fans an experience of discovering new artists in your community, which will also help you make friends with the artists in your community while you build bonds with them and your fans. These playlists can be formed around your favorite songs of artists that live in your local area, or that you share a micro genre with, or even a hobby, or all of the above. Each of these are ways potential fans could be interested in listening to a playlist and hearing your music as well as the other artists who you are helping by putting on these playlists. But I'm sure you have questions, and often when I tell the artist I help with marketing, this is the first question they have, which is pretty basic. If you remember all the way back to the beginning of the year to my first video on Spotify promotion, I told you that for Spotify to want to promote you, they want to see that you're being a good citizen by making playlists and posting them to your profile. And if you missed that video, it's linked now or in the description, and it will also pop up at the end of this video. For a fresher, what you do is to make a playlist from your own personal Spotify profile or one you create with your band name. But to be clear, not your Spotify for artists page since that's not possible. And then you copy the Spotify playlist ID, head over to your Spotify artist dashboard and add it to your profile. The next question becomes, what do you even put on these playlists? You want to find a theme for the playlist. And like I said, whether it's your local scene, your microjama or some hobby or niche that you have, you need a theme that's clear in the title and description for the playlist. But let's be clear, if you're thinking that playing Drake, Tame Impala or some other huge artist on a playlist isn't going to do you any good, you're exactly right. What you want to do here is put on other smaller artists and a few who are burgeoning in the genre, getting a good buzz, but not make a huge. Let's call it that the biggest artist should be under 200,000 monthly listeners with the sweet stop being the tens of thousands. This is because you want to not only include artists that people have not yet heard, but artists who will be excited that you put them on a playlist and potentially share this playlist with their fans, then you hopefully get their fans to listen to you and you will gain their fans and so on and so forth. But even if the artist only has 100 monthly listeners, it could be worth it if they have a great track. Since much of the goal here is to curate a great playlist, but also to talk to other artists and start to form bonds with them. The other goal is to get them to share to their audience. And even if that audience is small, if it's the right people and they hear your song and love it and share it, it's a win for how little time this takes to do and the potential it has to grow your music. But you may be wondering, how the hell are you going to do this? You don't know cool emerging artists, you're not hip. Well now we get back to what I'm always telling you to do. So the most important work you can be doing is researching your community. Since you need to find the other artists you're going to collaborate with and do cool things with like shows, streams or whatever else. So like I told you in my video on finding community, which is linked now or in the description, you need to find artists in your community that aren't yet popular, that you feel are good and you do this through research. So grab a spreadsheet since it's time to listen to some music. I know this is going to be painful, but you're going to have to write down a few things. I know I'm going to ask a lot of you who say your music is the most important thing in the world to you, yet still this is somehow too much effort to ask for. Now before we go any further, I need you to hear this. So if you're listening to me while you're playing some video game where you crush candy or whatever dumb thing you're doing, put down the goddamn phone and listen to Grandpa yell at the sky. Since this is really important, the key here is to not, not think big. There's no chance that Meg the Stallion is going to be appreciative of you putting on her on a playlist, but smaller artists who you find that are doing something cool and are in need of some promotion. And that small promotion is the needles you use to build a haystack. And this is work you're going to do that's fun and takes about an hour a week and can really help you grow. The name of the game here is that each week you're going to find more small artists to put on this playlist and hopefully grow through this. Okay, back to your candy crush. Open up SoundCloud Bandcamp and Spotify and start entering your micro genre or your state or city and looking around at the acts. Bandcamp and SoundCloud have tags which allow you to search this, where Spotify you're only going to be able to search around to find some more artists of the artists you find while doing the Bandcamp and SoundCloud searches. And yes, you're going to have to do a lot of skipping and barfing at the bad music you find, but when you find someone who has a bit of a following or that you like, write them down in that spreadsheet. You may want to make two columns for that in fact. Now is probably a good time for a caveat as well. It can be hard to find songs you love, but remember the more you actually put quality songs on these playlists, it has the potential for people to keep checking in on it and to keep hearing these artists as well as the new music and tracks that you add from yourself. So have it be something that helps fans grow their relationship with your music. Anyway, when you find a song you like, go look for it on Spotify and add it to your playlist. Once you have four of those artists, pat it out with some of those artists we talked about who have like 100 to 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Once you have seven songs from those big artists and four from some small artists, add one of your songs sitting at the top of the playlist that you can now share it. As the playlist grows, you can put in two of your songs and what I'd like to do is put your song right after the most popular song on the playlist and get some listens that way as well. Anyway, that's how you initially build it and after that, you should put, let's say, one to four new songs on the playlist every week or two because what's important to this technique is that you should always be updating this consistently. As well, when you put out a new song, make sure to add your own song to the playlist. Then every other day, tweet about that you added them to the playlist and put your song right under theirs. So if they share it, the listener will potentially hear you like so. If you add four artists a week, spread the tweets, you tag them in over two days or so. Day one, tag artist one, day three, tag artist two, day five, tag artist three, and you get the points. So that way, if they share it, their fans will listen to them and hopefully you next. What's great about this is it's also a great way to also get Twitter followers and Instagram followers. As well, if you really want to pour fire on this technique, if you really like an artist and you end up talking or they retweet you, one of the ways you can build your listens is on Instagram, which is to do what I suggested in my video on how to build your Instagram and invite them to go live with you where you two have a conversation about your music and now to the day before to both of your fans and hopefully they will converge and you can trade fan bases even more so. But back to why this helps you on Spotify. Spotify has said they like to help artists who are good citizens. So this puts you in their favor, but it also puts you with the right artists in your fans also like tab. When you make these playlists, you start showing up on the tabs of other artists, which is one of the main way music discovery happens with the music fans who are really engaged and who tell other people what to listen to. In my video on why I don't like Facebook ads, which is linked in the card or description below, I talk about how Facebook ads can often mess up your fans also like section since it doesn't target fans effectively. If your fans also like section is a mess, this can help get it on track. Okay, back to Spotify playlist though, updating these playlists and then sharing it is an incremental way of growing your fan base that is fun, helps you do the important work you should be doing of finding your community and becoming a person in that community, people feel they should watch. And let's remember in your community, you can share these on message boards and talk to people about it every once in a while and keep promoting that you have all these music recommendations that other people in the community may like, which can help you get heard with each update, you will fully bring in some new fans and a new music group in contact with that you can hopefully keep promoting each other and building your community and each other's fan bases. Also keep in mind you can be doing more than one of these and if you feel you have the material, make as many playlists as you can to a point. Not only does this help you promote your music, you get to know your community, understand your music better and the fans who enjoy your playlist, so you make lives better and can bond with these fans and build your relationship with them and help your music and even deeper with them. Also remember, this isn't only about gaining fans, you make friends and songs together with the people you find while doing this. Approach this trying to build up your community, not just yourself, I bet you will do well if you stick to it. For as long as we're still locked down, I think there's very few promotion techniques that work better on this, so I implore you to get to work. Thanks for watching. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you, since I want to answer them, so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, subscribe and get notified and I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information, no playlist or con artists, only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me, work on a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials. One last thing, there's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from 0 to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with and the other is on how you promote your music with Spotify and the other is specially chosen to match this video or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians.