 So one of the most common questions I got on this channel is how to start a music project from scratch and handle all the little music marketing details so it's set up for success. And I know for most of you it's not your first project but you feel you made mistakes in the past and wanna make sure you start off on the right foot first. And you're totally right to think this way as there's so many dumb things musicians do when starting off as well as unnecessary and expensive ones. So this video I'm gonna try to save you a ton of time, stress and money by telling you how to start a music project properly. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and this is Muse Formation. Okay, so you wanna be a rock star? Well, I kinda hope not since that term is only said by tech bros looking for some pencil deck geek who can write sick code these days. But really you wanna get your music project off on the right foot and you've come to the right place. So let's go through the basics. The first thing of course is you need a name and I highly suggest you don't delay thinking about this since more often than not by the time you've written for six months a bunch of songs and then have them all mastered, this still may not be something you're happy with. As someone who's mastered over a thousand records, I can't tell you how often people are mastering their debut release and still are unhappy with their name and asking if they should go with one of the few choices they have. This is why I made a whole video on this subject that is linked in the description if you really wanna get into it in the dynamics of how you choose a name. But the short of it is this, you need to first search Spotify, allmusic.com, SoundCloud and Bandcamp and make sure no artist who is even semi-active is using the name you wanna use. Since it'll give you a sane amount of headaches if they're using it and wanna take up legal action and can hinder any progress you make in a huge way. Then after that, I want you to go to NameCheck which I've linked in the description and I want you to pick out a social media handle and you're gonna use that on all the sites in your social media and make sure it's free. Now keep in mind, you could do all sorts of things like ad music or .mp3, ya boi or whatever the hell y'all are doing these days but what we wanna do is keep it the same on all the platforms since it makes your life so much easier if it's all uniform across every one of them. And you may think this is important since you see your favorite artist has a different name on different platforms but trust me, if you ask any music manager of a big artist that doesn't have consistent names of the artist across all social media platforms, trust me, this is what they will tell you is one of the things that makes them extremely miserable on a daily basis and I'm trying to solve problems before you have them here in this video so really, let my mistakes not be yours. And here's a hot tip I know some of you who look at platforms and say, I ain't ever using that there TikTok, it's just for kids shaking their rumps. Doug, what a social media platform is today is not what it's gonna be tomorrow. 10 years ago, all everyone said about Instagram is it's where narcissists take pictures of food and selfies or fitness models hocking flat tummy tea. And as we know, things changed fast and now it's where my father takes pictures of sunsets AKA a place where people do really uncool things. These platforms change, claim your profile everywhere as it doesn't mean you have to start using it tomorrow, it just means less headaches for you later when it becomes the it platform and you wanna use it. So here's the thing, in order to own a name you need to make what is called interstate commerce. So luckily having people stream your music does this or if you can't get your music out there fast enough sing a song and sell it on bandcamp to a friend who lives in another city. Most of the things that people talk about with copyright are total BS and not necessary but this is what actually stands up at a court of law. So you don't wanna sleep on this since literally this can be the difference between you making a lot of progress on your music and having it taken away by someone who's smart enough to do this first. So make sure you sell some music to someone who lives in another state than you. And yes, I do recommend you grab a domain name even if you're not gonna buy and pay for a website as it's not very expensive to buy the domain name as the greatest expense of a website is building and hosting it. If you wanna save on that, simply buy your domain and have it do domain forwarding. And I suggest you point it to a free Lincoln bio page which you can design in a few minutes. I actually think a profile on Koji serves every function of a website plus more and you can have a domain point to that profile and give fans an amazing user experience which is also why I felt they were the perfect fit to sponsor this video so I could tell you more about them. Koji is a free Lincoln bio platform but in my opinion it does the functions of a website better than most websites as it could point to all your socials and what you have going on in music and whatever you're promoting. So much of the time musicians websites go way too far and Koji is a simple way for someone looking to find your music to be able to find all the things that you're promoting right now and you can do it for free. Koji is also a Lincoln bio app store for careers. It offers a free to use, free to customize Lincoln bio platform is truly the best Lincoln bio for musicians. I mean, just look at these profiles. They look amazing and that can all be done for free. But here's the thing, you've probably seen ones like Linktree but Koji has this app store where you can do amazing experiences for fans to get to know you, interact with them, build relationships and even make money. I wanna say these are not iOS apps, nothing to download. These are Lincoln bio apps that live on the Lincoln bio on all your socials 24 seven. You could even use your Lincoln bio as a gallery for all your music videos and other content so fans can see everything you have going on. So let me show you a few of these apps that I find to be amazing for music marketing. Music links which is the easiest free way to display all your DSP streaming links in one place is so good. I would suggest putting this in your links and say stream my music. Then you could use their app, Sell Physical Products where you could quickly sell non-sized merch, hats, mugs, picks, et cetera, side photos, LPs, posters, et cetera, directly on your Lincoln bio. And you could also do really cool things to engage your fans like the app Boost It where you could launch a top fan leaderboard ranking your fans by donation amount and try to use that to drum up some funds for your music. I recently made a video that gives a thorough tour of Koji which is linked in the description and my suggestions for building a profile that's effective for you. So go learn more and get your own free Koji Lincoln bio page for your socials and head to the description for a link or to withkoji.com. That's W-I-T-H-K-O-J-I.com. Okay, so back to what you should do from day one. The other thing I really encourage you to do as soon as possible as it takes a ton of time to consider is develop your artistic identity. In the description below is a playlist on how to tell stories around your music. And this is important because this playlist helps teach you who you are as an artist and how to make the creative decisions around everything you do from songwriting to videos to how you dress. So I really can't stress enough from day one to go through to do a SWOT analysis and start asking yourself questions about artist development. This takes time to think about it and the sooner you start doing the methods I describe in those videos, the sooner you're gonna make better music and content. So the next thing we needed to do after you have your name decided on social setup is start getting a logo going as this can take way too long. You're going to need something to represent you as well as some pictures. It's sure you can get artsy here all you want, but just remember this too. If things go well, it's real hard getting rid of a bad picture on the internet. Like I managed this band where we'd have sick visuals but they really blew up fast and all these publications just used the top pick on Google where the band looked like a bunch of 15 year old versions and fits that would embarrass the nerd in a teen movie. So like four years later, those pictures would still end up in articles or even newspapers. Making sure your visuals are tight from day one is important as they don't always die. But anyway, you need these pictures first since you can't set up profiles on Spotify or YouTube and all these other sites without them. Once we have all this done, we begin the process I call claiming which is going on all the social media sites and the DSPs and setting up your profiles. First, you need to choose a distributor for your music. I'm gonna say this without making a whole video about it. I prefer DistroKid to all the other distributors since for the money you pay, it has the best tools. I don't take money from DistroKid and this is my opinion. I know some of you have trouble with DistroKid since they reject a lot of music that uses samples or beats but online but for the 99% of us, they are the best distributor to start off with and usually the most cost effective. So your distributor will get you on nearly every streaming site except a few and I really do mean everyone as they put you on like 20 to 40 sites depending on how many exist at the time but they don't get you everywhere. So you need to set up profiles on Bandcamp and SoundCloud and then get to do the really annoying thing to be able to set up your streaming profiles. Now is the time to listen up too. So in order to get a profile on Spotify for us, you have to have a song out but that means you can't set up your profile before it comes out and pitch that first song for playlist consideration. This means if you're trying to pitch your first song to editorial playlists on Spotify, it ain't gonna happen unless you do what I'm about to tell you. What many of us do is put out a song we're never going to release and then set up our profile then delete that song before the release of the song we actually want to release first. Then you can set up your profiles on Spotify, Amazon and Apple for artists. If you wanna learn that, be sure to watch my guide on how to blow up on Spotify that's linked in the description below which reminds me, you should be subscribed and get notified since this is what we talk about here and you don't wanna miss this stuff anyway. Okay, let's talk about what I know you all really care about. The number one question I'm asked about is do you need to be an LLC? Now, this is a complex question but I'm gonna give you the TLDR. If you're dipping your toe in music and just seeing how it goes, you do not need a LLC from the jump especially if you're not playing live or insulting people in your music. An LLC basically does two functions of making it so the government can see how to tax you and two, it covers you from lawsuits if you do something bad like go all Travis Scott at Astral World and get opened up to a ton of lawsuits. It protects your personal money from lawsuits as compared to the money your business generates. Anyway, so the issue in obstacle for LLCs is they can be a lot of money to start like $700 in some states per year and they also require you to pay a minimum in taxes to the government. So I tell everyone is there's no need to do this from day one but if things are going well and you're gonna be out in the world playing concerts well, you better get on it sooner than later and I should say I'm not a lawyer so don't take this as legal advice. Things are different in different states so please consult with a lawyer before doing any of this but this is what I've been told over the years. Another thing a lot of you ask about is getting a new bank account and yeah, honestly it can make your life a lot easier to set up a new one for your music project even if it's solo as it's easier to track. With that said there's no law that says you have to do this and as long as you have clean accounting if Uncle Sam comes knocking well, you're gonna be fine. Just remember if you make any real money you have to be organized with it or those IRS dogs are going to make your life miserable. So I'm not an accountant but I am someone who has had to do this a lot. If you wanna get a business account and not do an LLC, you need an EIN which you can get online through a website by just Googling it without an LLC but it does require a filing with the state a lot of time to get a bank account to get that EIN and in many states you also need a DBA which is a doing business as which is annoying as the system to get these is often slow and requires getting rubber stamps and can take 30 to 60 days. Like it's unbelievable how dumb this is still in 2022. Okay, but now let's talk about what you do to set up your fan base to get built. So a lot of you don't know what you sound like. You're making music but you're too close to it and can't figure out what you sound similar to. Luckily there's some tools. SubmitHub has this hot or not thing where people can rate your music and they can comment on it and while you'll get some really dumb comments a lot of the users of my Discord and my Facebook group say that they get really, really helpful comments here and it really has helped them learn what other groups they sound like and what their micro genres. Then there's every noise at once which can give you a grasp on genres as you punch in artists that are similar to you and it'll tell you the tags that come up for their music. You can also do this for your own music once you're up on Spotify and have some listens and you may be wondering why this is important and this is just the way you get your first fans is by being active in your community and if you don't know what I'm talking about you should really watch my video series on how to find community that's linked in the description. Since I guarantee you this method is way better at getting your first fans and building a fan base than anything these griptors you watch on YouTube tell you and it's especially way better than using Facebook ads. The video on this will also be on the end screen and you should really watch it once this video ends. And lastly a lot of you wanna know what content you should have done before you get started. You may have heard me say before on this channel that many labels won't give an artist a release date until they have the art videos and masters for three songs. So that way if things go wrong, momentum won't die and they have plenty to release since consistent sustained promotion is one of the most important parts of blowing up. If you don't know what that means hit the description of this video and click on the link about that. But here's a way to look at this. If you know your life is hectic this is the best time to bank a lot of content before anyone knows about you. So you can set yourself up to win with consistent sustained promotion. Having six songs of music videos and other assets in the bank is a whole year of being able to develop other content so that you never have to be that stressed about do you have stuff to promote. You could always shuffle up the songs and switch the order along the way if you don't wanna wait a year to put out a song. But being ahead on this makes it all so much less stressful and easy to do. It sets you up for a really good success when your promotions are consistent. And of course the last question I always get about starting out as a new artist is instead of following my release strategy of putting up one song every two months is whether you should put up a whole bunch of music at first. Artists with a bunch of back catalog have a way easier time building relationships with fans as when someone finds your music and goes deeper there's actually something to go deep on and ingest and they're able to build a relationship with a lot of songs. So many of you have a ton of songs ready to go. And I think yes if you have more than six songs and you wanna dump a few of them from the jump it can be great to do that and give people who find you something to chew on. But just remember your biggest chance at success is often through Spotify editorial playlist and once they're up if you release a bunch at the same time you can't pitch more than one at once to Spotify for artists for editorial playlist consideration. Okay, that's it. On the screen now is a video on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans or how to find community for your music so you find your first fans or how to blow up on Spotify in 2022. Click and keep learning. Thanks for watching.