 You've probably heard that you should be releasing more singles more often, but it seems to go against your instincts since you've bonded with the great albums your favorite artists have made over the years. But with some small tweaks to how you release your music, you can grow your fan base faster than anyone's ever been able to before. So let's talk about why this method has been embraced by so many artists who are building a fan base today. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. So if there's one thing I'm constantly telling musicians to do, it's release more singles and not think about albums so much. And by that, I don't mean the experience of an album, but I mean that you need to trickle out the songs and keep your audience's attention now because there's so many advantages to trickle out your music. And when you're a small artist who doesn't build a fan base yet, you need all the help you can get. But some of the musicians I talked to about this are super skeptical when I say this. And I can't blame them because I've also built tons of the relationships I have with the artists I love by listening to albums. But the advantages of putting out albums are far outweighed trickling out singles, especially when you haven't built a fan base. So now we need to see it this way. The early stage of building a fan base, it's not going to be about when you build a deep bond with the fan with the album. It's going to be how you get enough people's attention so that you're able to even build those bonds with people because cutting through the noise of everything that's going on on the internet that you're in competition with is so hard to do without taking advantage of all the advantages that releasing singles gives artists tonight. I know this is hard, but this is the strategy you need to embrace before you have tons of fans. We have to always remember the strategies that work for artists with established fan bases versus those who work for small ones are not the same. And the biggest mistake musicians make is imitating huge artist behavior thinking they are. Think it till I make it bro. As this series of videos here is about building a fan base up to tens of thousands of fans from scratch I have one hard and fast rule for doing this that gives a huge advantage to everyone who employs it and it's nearly impossible to build these fan bases up if you're not employing this thought pattern. The plan is to release a new single every 6 to 8 weeks for 12 to 18 months while doing something eventful every 2 weeks and something smaller every single week. Now you're probably totally overwhelmed by that but I'm going to show you in this video and the next one in this playlist how easy this is to do and I'm not going to say it's super easy but it's probably a lot easier than you think it is, I hope. This only takes 8 songs per year to fill up an entire calendar year if you release a stream of your song then a single screen youtube video then a lyric video then a music video over the course of 2 weeks apart from each other that will cover 48 weeks to the year and 12 songs to cover 18 months. There's two reasons this technique works so well. You're reminding people you exist regularly and create the impression you're an exciting phenomenon that should be paid attention to and can harness the power of algorithmic recommendations as often as possible. We have to remember, all of us, our eyes get glued to the people who are doing exciting things and people who are being talked about and who gets talked about the people who remind other people that they exist and that are doing things that are worthy of being talked about. By putting your music out one single at a time you harness the power of how people discover music today since most new music is discovered via a youtube recommendation or a Spotify playlist. Yes word of mouth is powerful but we have to remember that when you're constantly showing people that you're doing new things they remember to talk about you and recommend you to other people and to listen to you again. All seems to make sense right? Yet so many people are still sticking to album releases and I'm not saying we're going to abandon albums all together but I am saying that you have to start thinking about your plans based around trickling out as many singles as you possibly can. There's a bit of advice that you've probably heard but you may not get how this works or in music. If you've paid any attention to any of the social media people who study how fan bases get built today they always are talking about how you need to be consistent in your releases. It's the same thing over and over again and for a decade I've been saying this I've been calling it constant sustained promotion and that's what matters the most because people only pay attention to you if they're constantly reminded and they want to see something that's exciting and they depend on things to keep them entertained. By releasing singles and videos in a constant sustained method you will appear on the recommendation subscriptions and playlists more often that get exposed to new listeners. Since think of a Spotify if you put out a full album they don't deliver 12 songs over 12 weeks to their Discover Weekly playlist or the release radar they just give you that one shot but if you're putting out a single every few weeks you're going to keep going in those discovery algorithms and you're going to get the chance to be exposed to tons more people. We have to remember let's say you choose on your 12 song record to only release five singles beforehand which is still a lot compared to the old days of what you would do before you put out that record. You're losing seven times the chances for huge growth to happen when you're added to playlists because you have to remember every time you're putting out the single not only are you going to show up in YouTube alerts recommendation engines and playlists you're also going to be able to submit your new single to Spotify to get added to a playlist. Think about how much of a difference seven times growth can be for you. That's insane and when you don't harness this method you're losing the opportunity to grow and that's crazy to do when you work so hard on your music. Think of how many times seven times growth could be and it's way more than seven times because one of those songs could really pop off. You limit yourself so much by not putting out each song individually and letting each one do the work for you to build your fanbase. So I know some of you are already getting concerned about the cost effectiveness of this. Yes you can still go to the studio and record a bunch of songs at once since that's often more cost effective. You can also use DistroKid's subscription service to release as much music as you want every single year instead of paying per release like many of the other rip-off services that put your music on Spotify, Apple Music and everything else. And no DistroKid did not pay me to say that but I sure do hope they will one day. Even if you insist on still having albums and there's many reasons to still have an album I would plan a long rollout that includes as many singles as you possibly can to take advantage of the benefits of today's algorithms and subscriptions give you. I would release singles and then bundle them all together on an EP or an LP at the end. Think of it this way if you've been gaining all these new fans they're not going to be that upset that they're now in an easy to digest package and all the fans that have never heard of you before that you're gaining from the way you release this music they're going to be psyched about this. You can also use this as a big event maybe before tour so you have something to sell or if you know you're going to be in the studio for a while you wrap these songs up so people have something to tide them over for a little while while you pause and content. I mean after all putting out a physical release or making it a big event can help fund your next release. But by now you're probably like okay Jesse I've heard enough of you talking so let's hear about all the artists that have actually used this to make their career work. The first artist I want to talk about is Kim Petrus. If you don't know Kim she's an amazing amazing pop star whose music I actually really enjoy in the pop world. But let's look at her youtube because one of my favorite things you can do on youtube is go to uploads and then sort by it you can actually see how the videos have trickled out from an artist. So as you can see here she's been releasing a song at least every month right here is a little compilation she did called turn off the lights so that all came out at once but what I want to focus on is what she did before her debut full length clarity. So as you can see here there's two videos every single month and if you scroll down through all the tracks on clarity you start to see this in fact some of them even came out every week. What Kim did was every week to two weeks she put out a single from her record and it got her music to a serious fevered pitch for a long time and it really made her have a big splash and keep her on top of mind for everybody as she's been building up as a very new pop artist in a crowded sphere and it really worked to build her fan base. The next artist I want to talk about you may not know as well since they're not as big but they've been doing huge huge things and you know they have a half a million monthly listeners when their record's been out for almost a year now that artist is pale waves. I love pale waves and you probably noticed I'm wearing their shirt in this video but here's why I want to talk to you about pale waves. They did an interesting thing so this is their first EP and what they were doing is they slowly trickled out singles and no they didn't come out every two weeks but what they did do is they put out these singles every month or so and then they wrapped them up on this release. Now the funny thing is it says all these things I never said there was even more songs on this when it originally came out but then they threw those songs on their LP but every one of these songs was released as a single and then at the very end they wrapped them up but then we get to their full length my mind makes noises and I want to say I watched this band go from the 150 people at their Mercury Lounge show to Brooklyn Steel which is 10 times bigger than that if not more in literally under 12 months because they were using this technique to build themselves up. I will tell you on this record of these songs that are on here here's how many were released as a single before this record ever came out 18 there's a honey noises one more time television romance and Kiss were all released before this record ever came out so that leaves only a handful of songs that were unveiled of the 14 that they put out when this record came out and no fan cares that they were served a record of a bunch of songs they had already heard they were happy to have new songs and I was really happy when it came out and I streamed this record a ton and as you could see they've gotten a lot of streams over time. Lastly let's talk about one of the biggest stars in the world Billy Eilish. Billy has obviously shaken the world of pop like no one else but if you take a look what is she consistently doing consistently right as she was going to put out her debut full length she starts putting out a song every month with a big long rollout before her first LP comes out which was obviously one of the biggest events of the year and as we can see right now she's putting out a video sometimes even more than once a week. I think one of the most interesting takeaways though that you could see that both Kim and Billy are doing is that they care about keeping their momentum going and they know the power of releasing a single so Billy's already put out a single that's not on her full length Kim put out a whole other set of songs that aren't on her full length and that's really what's going on now is that you will see all these artists even though they put out a full length this year Ariana Grande did it in 2019 too they put out new singles because it gives them huge huge momentum and the power of the single right now is the biggest thing to grow an artist even when you're one of the biggest artists in the world just like Billy or Ariana Grande. So that right there shows you a few different methods of how people have built up their fanbases by releasing singles instead of favoring the album drop. In the next video in this playlist we're going to talk about how you plan this and how it works out so that you stay eventful and on people's minds all the time. That's it and instead of my usual long spiel at the end of this video I want to ask if you can share this video if you enjoyed it. Like everybody else on YouTube I really want to build this channel up and while tons of you are giving me great compliments on it I really need you to share this and tell other people. So if you appreciate this video you can take the time to set it to someone else. I would really really appreciate it so we can keep this going. Thanks so much.