 What if I told you that there was one technique that most musicians skip which is why they are stuck with under a thousand followers on every platform and never get a lot of fans or a manager, label or really any attention at all? And then what if I told you this technique is what's helped build most of the careers in the music business unlike what other YouTubers sell you in Facebook ads, paying for bodied playlists and cheap answers musicians do that keep them stagnant for years by looking for vanity metrics forever and never gets you growth or real answers. This is the technique that helps get you out of algorithmic jam all based on how I've seen popular major label and indie artist build their fan bases in my actual work that will also help you make friends with people who are just like you and will support you for years to come. So this video I'm going to show you the time-tested way your favorite musicians have built their fan base throughout the social media era and show you tons of secrets on how to do this that are all new and updated for 2024. So what we're going to do in this video is first help you understand how all this fits together and why you need to be detail-orientated and really put the time in to investigate all these techniques since this is the crux of how you do everything that really moves the needle whether that's exciting the TikTok, Spotify, Instagram or YouTube algorithms to promote you to finding the musicians you should be playing shows with collaborating making features with remixes, split releases and doing other cool things as well as showing you the producers, managers, video directors, booking agents, mixers, mastering engineers, lawyers, photographers, labels and other team members in music that you should have on your radar. So if one hears about you and follows you you can recognize them and know to say what's up and build that relationship as well it will show you the fans who are most passionate in your genre or most likely to like you and spread the word about you whether that's YouTube reviewers or the TikTok accounts that recommend music in your microgenre or the Facebook groups, Discord, subreddit and other message boards where fans and influencers in your community hang out. And since so many of you are lost in the playlists, venues, YouTube creators, blogs, websites and other places that will potentially give you placements as well as what hashtags you should be using to market yourself on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok this will teach you exactly that. And the sooner you learn how to do this the more you're able to learn and take from what you observe each day. This is kind of like how once you learned some music theory you could observe music better and well this is really community theory and how to observe what people are doing to promote their music properly. And honestly this is more important than hiring the right publicist or for that matter anyone to promote your music since the artists that break today not the ones from five or ten years ago do it by doing this. The artists who break are the ones who are students of the game and this is the game. I see this is how the musicians who built a fan base actually got there. I've been the person at a major label who talks to the artist right when they get signed and helps them learn to tell their story coherently. And I've heard the story from the thousands of musicians of all sorts of sizes across every genre that I've talked to over the years. And frankly and this is the best news for musicians these days the fact is after you pay for your song to be recorded and produced as good as you can there's a lot of artists who understand this stuff who spend literally zero dollars on publicity or content who do it all themselves really blow up and get a big fan base these days. The key is when you see how to do your community work you see the right work to be doing and get more from everything you do so it can enable you to blow up using less spending on unnecessary expenses. But so many of you are skeptical of how this work actually helps you. And to that I point to the algorithmic jail you know where your posts only get a few hundred views so many of you get on consulting calls with me from this prison like I'm your one call that you get when you get thrown in jail and what has got so many of you in there is by using silly hashtags and not following and interacting with any of the smaller artists you find doing this technique. So even when you're making good content you are still stuck because you've given the algorithm absolutely no clues as to who to send you to that may like you on the platform when if you just did this work for a few hours you'd know who to go to. So how does this get you out of algorithmic jail? Well your community is who the algorithm sees it should be recommending you to and when you haven't taught it anything and the only people you're interacting with is cousin Anthony who makes videos about his framed autographed hockey jerseys or your girlfriend who's like mine and only watches videos of capybaras and dogs well that's not helping the algorithm to get what to do with your music but if you have a list of 25 smaller artists who have 10 to 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify who make music similar to you where fans would also like you or the algorithm could try you out and what you do on those fans and often be successful. If you recall in one of my more important videos I talked about how everyone I know at Big Indies and major labels agrees that one of the best marketing opportunities in the history of music is artist page visibility aka doing features, collaborations, remixes, co-writes, and split releases with other artists. Since it not only gets you on the artist page of another artist it gets you on the release radar of all their fans and that's the best real estate ever available in the history of music marketing. Since you'll be on a song the fan will potentially like of that artist and then they already like that song so they get the hint to check you out but you'll also get tagged on social media together with that artist so this teaches TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube along with tons of other algorithms to recommend you along with this artist and allow algorithms to build your fan base while you sleep. And if you haven't watched that video it's linked below or on the screen now. But anyway you can't be effective at doing that work unless you have a vast understanding of your community. And since we got on the subject of TikTok I have to say a thing that I see every time someone blows up on there is they understood their community well enough to know who to target and collaborate with and the language to use and the hashtags to use to make them blow up. It's a detail not the top line thing a lot of people focus on and so many articles about it in how two videos are so wrong but I can tell you it's actually what matters. And there's a thing so few people understand about algorithms that I'm going to go deep on soon on this channel which is they can only see the connections users and music genomes make. There's a marketer who I really respect named CocoMoco on TikTok who says the more niche you go the more you grow and she makes a great point that by the time you see a lot of the more famous people you don't realize this person start off by making really huge gains in a small niche but that niche lifted them up to where they are now and they understood their niche and the smallest corners of the internet talking about it and then grew outwards from there and that's where you need to start and so many of you try to build without a niche. So when you're a part of a community the algorithm is looking to see the fans of other similar artists and see if they should recommend you to them because that's how they keep people glued to their platform but so often many artists I know doing great work aren't making those connections because they undervalue community but there's another reason I find the community work to be some of the most important work you will do as it gets you to the right people and as I've said a million times I absolutely hate Facebook ads and much of my hatred towards them is they don't bring you to the best fans to build a fan base the fans who are actively consuming a genre daily and tailor everyone what to listen to because those fans don't click on those ads. It also often pollutes your algorithm by giving you connections to musicians you have little in common with and instead connects you to the ones who run Facebook ads instead of the musician Spotify sees you connected to in their genome and to other artists who are starting to grow in your genre and when you build with community work it gives you the best algorithm possible which will build your fan base for you for free for years to come is not dependent on when you stop having money to run ads because one of the things people who doubt me about this often discount is not all algorithmic connections are created equal and I'm sorry I've been doing this enough years to know that if you're doing what I talk about here's you create a much healthier algorithm to grow than the polluted cesspool ads and all the artificial bot bulls brings and it keeps becoming more and more true that if you simply associate and make connections with small artists and show the algorithm that you're similar to the other ones who are up and coming by genuine interactions collaboration and there being a common bond since you research that you're similar to this artist then that other artist's audience often vibes with you and well the algorithm will build your audience for you for free while you do other things like create music but there's one more hidden part of why I think this is important and it's a hard pill to swallow most of you aren't making exceptional music yet at least but the nerds in your community really love your genre of music and are addicted to the mood that your genre brings to them and need to fix all the time and frankly are willing to accept a lot of music that's a little more rough around the edges with a lot of potential so when you find your community they are the most likely people to be your early fans and most easily persuadable while you grow and get better this is why you need to find the small artists who makes music similar to you who have some traction going already since their fans are likely to be the same ones who will welcome you into their regular music listening playlist but there's more when your head is in your community part of how you grow is you beat the fans who will forgive you when you have potential but it isn't quite realized yet and you learn who's doing similar things to you and see the details that make them good and learn from them and level up the musicians you love and their team understand the dynamics of their scene genre and community and have probably done this in years before they've been students of this community and they're obsessed with it which is why you see your favorite artists acutely aware of the other artists around them and this gives them that distinct advantage over everyone else but don't take it from me here's igloo ghost who's one of the most influential producers making music today i think he's one of the sickest producers of the game and he explains here how he got signed as an unknown artist with no fan base who was just making sick music with no following and yet he got signed to flying lotus's brain feeder label which led to huge things for him like before i got signed it was i mean i was just like kind of mucking about on the internet and like i had like a lot of friends who also made music like i'm sure like a lot of other producers do but it kind of happened just through like a degree of like separation like how people say like everyone knows someone who like knows someone who knows someone so like just somebody i knew kind of eventually like neither right people like flying lotus and like the brain feeder people like i didn't really go and like try and beg it and like really got looking for it but it definitely helps to create like not have it contrived but definitely have like a big circle of friends who you actually like think are cool and yeah if there's like a bigger sort of like gene pool of like the amount of people who your stuff can reach that can that definitely helps so i wasn't like i didn't have like a manager or anything i wasn't like some creepy like industry so what is the work as you can see on the screen now i have a spreadsheet for my fictitious band in sell hype beast which is a hyper pop act and that micro genre will be what we focus on and i have good news for you the spreadsheet you're going to see throughout this section i made available so you have a place to start for free so if you want a copy of it there's a link in the description where you can just give your email and i'll send it to you for free so with this spreadsheet we're going to write down every artist who's similar to you musically in fact i don't care if they have a hundred monthly listeners that's helpful if you only have a few hundred yourself if they have a hundred thousand that's much better and if they have 10 million cool but i really want you to keep this list with mostly the artists who are similar to you in size or a little bit bigger than you really around the 30 to 60 thousand are some of the most helpful artists you can find here but all the way up to a couple hundred thousand is still really helpful if you have a hundred monthly listeners this list should only have 10 artists with 10 million or more listeners and have 90 on it that have thousands to tens of thousands of monthly listeners this is why what we're going to be doing here is trying to understand every part of your community from the artists to the mix engineers video directors and who they use for a lawyer or booking agent onto who writes about them and playlists them and you need to understand where the fans of these artists are and how to find the people who work with those artists since they're more likely to work with you so let's fill out this list what we're looking for is artists or what i like to call targets since these will also be micro genre names which we will fill in under the tab called terms we need to figure out what your micro genre community is and if you don't understand how to do that i made a whole video on it which i'm not going to go over again so you should watch that video that's linked in the description below but you're going to want to put in some of the acts in your micro genre you can find these by going down a breadcrumbs trail by clicking on an artist who's similar to you then go to their Spotify fans also like section or another helpful site is every noise at once where you can look up your favorite artists and then you see these tags under their name those are often good micro genres and hashtags you could then put in your spreadsheet and look up on tiktok and instagram and see if you can get a good audience by using those hashtags but you can also use this to be a detective and if you click on those genre names you get a whole list of artists who are a part of that genre and you can investigate and see if they should be on your sheet then you should go to those artists spotify page if they're a good match investigate their Spotify fans also like even more and in fact if you have a fans also like on your profile already that's a great place to start but a good time saver during this is also as you find those artists go down to the section that says discovered on on their Spotify page if you look at the screen now you can see this tab that i have in the spreadsheet i made and you should enter those playlists into that tab because we're going to scour those and try to find targets too and get to know those playlists even more but all these sections are great leads to be filling out this spreadsheet in a place you can continually come back to to keep filling it out since it changes all the time who's on these playlists and these fans also like lists now a lot of you are probably wondering how big should this list be and honestly at first hundreds of artists can be helpful because if you do this work each day eventually you'll find what is helpful and what is not and we can retire a bunch of artists to the bottom of the list and unfollow them but i want you to lean into this at first having a hundred or so artists on this list is more helpful than 10 whittling this list down over time and getting to who really helps you it gives you good information is important but casting a wide net at first that you continually whittle down is what makes it effective one note is there's something i like to target aside from those who sound musically similar to you i call these local targets since we're putting these targets into a spreadsheet i have a separate sheet for targets that are not as similar to you musically but are from the area you're from so if you have an element of hip-hop anybody with an element of hip-hop is acceptable here if you're a rock band this is helpful because you'll see where rock bands play and other things culturally around rock music the reason we do this is we want to identify artists who may not be that close to you but because they're in your local area they may show you some leads that only apply to your local area this could be a venue to play a place that will do an article about you hell you may follow them and see a new music store rehearsal space you may utilize or a place to bring a date for that matter anything's possible i would put any artist of any size that's local as long as they have something similar to you by location in this list also on a local level why i like to make local targets is those can be really helpful as they teach you so much and let's remember you can find local acts by searching your local area even if it's a small town on bandcamp or soundcloud and who knows you may find your new best friend true story i found one of my best friends by searching aolim profiles for the small town i grew up in and the word punk it's often shocking what you find in these searches so after you have a bunch of targets in the spreadsheet it's now time to do some research so i want you to do each day is pick one of the artists and poke around get into their socials and start observing are they friends with other artists you see them clobbing with should you add those artists to your targets hit their instagram bio website contact page youtube about page and facebook about section and look for if they have a publicist or a lawyer or a manager listed and get them into this sheet in bandcamp and soundcloud descriptions you can often find producer mixing and mastering engineer credits as well as which studio they recorded at you can also find credits oftentimes on spotify by clicking where i'm showing on the screen right now on spotify you can see if they're on a label on the bottom of their page you can even do a youtube search for these targets and find people who do reaction videos video essays reviews or video channel curators who may premiere your video to their audience just like we talked about in the last video but do more than just take in their contacts observe what they're doing that's smart and take note of it we want to even look at their spotify bio and see if there's something smart they do that you should be doing something similar to this is going to be what makes you a better version of yourself and with every bit of this community work you do you'll get more inspired and become a more authentic artist this is a little lot of artist development is and this is why you can't hire someone else to do it let's remember you could also enter all these targets into reddit and see the subreddits where these artists are discussed and same with the facebook groups and you can do the same on discord in their search and so many of you think this is all about posting your music in the group when it's really about learning the community and talking to people but also learning what happens in your community here's a good example let's say your great at flipping samples and you hear about kenny beats one of the top producers randomly doing beat battles on twitch well this story kenny has here about him doing just that and what happened to one of the participants he told on rick grubin's podcast tetragrammaton could be you if you wisen up chief totally a kid got signed to xl records who was 17 years old who had four t-shirts to his name who got the demo version of ableton and learned to make beats from watching my stream signed to xl records his name's dvr a kid named not charles got a publishing deal after he won a beat battle and there was an a&r watching the stream and hit him up got a publishing deal and if the big picture isn't clear i'm making a bunch of videos that make all this more clear so you should really put your notifications on for every single video i make after you subscribe so you don't miss them okay but while you're doing this you should also follow all these targets on socials as you find them now if you're like me you don't want to read a bunch of desperate musicians begging for presaves all day i know i got in the wrong business right so make a separate account just to follow the musicians that you target and flick over there once a day and do a little homework i've one of those burner accounts on every social media app where i just follow smart and savvy musicians and observe them on twitter you don't even need to make a separate account since you can make lists and i love doing this on tweak deck because i could also make multiple lanes for different types of artists i follow by doing this i can observe so much of where the targets play who they're friends with what they do to market and promote themselves and how often they're posting it's just great research particularly this is where we're going to populate the other sheets since as you can see here we have sheets for venues playlists press and communities at any time you're going to find tons of cool stuff here's an example in doing this i found a playlist i really like on spotify called music at midnight they run a small but influential playlist i listen to all the time so here's a funny thing i originally found them on tiktok since they are an account that promotes artists but then through the posts i found out they have a playlist i follow and check in all the time since it brings me into the hyper pop antipop world so if you find a playlist like them you belong on i'd be sliding in the tiktok or igdms and saying what's up big dog i love the artists you post like aries if you're on that vibe you should really get on the in-sale hypebeast train because choo-choo this train's going off the rails okay maybe not exactly that but you get the point as you follow your targets you will probably find things like this if you see an artist your size playing a venue enter it in for a future touring possibility if they tweet a playlist make sure to enter it in later and look and see if you can find the curator if you see a target share an article that was written about their music put the writer's name in and put them on your press list when you're on tiktok look at the hashtags artists are using by clicking on the description which can often contain genre or community terms and log them under the tab i made for that if you need to get out of algorithmic jail follow and interact with the artists in this community spreadsheet then whatever hashtags you find that you are trying to be on go into those hashtags and reply to videos and comments under those hashtags and sure enough you'll start showing up in them and get out of algorithmic jail and yes this also goes for instagram when you observe these things you'll see all sorts of things like for example here's a great one for my consulting calls danny rachow the manager of one of my favorite artists break ins does live streams where he listens to unsigned artists on tiktok live and with one of my consulting clients he listened to their music but danny wasn't personally feeling it but another manager was watching and now that artist is set up to take a big next step with that manager who is watching the stream all this can work in unexpected ways but one of the things is so many of you think it's all luck but this genius dude arthur schopenhauer once said chance favors the connected mind meaning that what a lot of people see as luck is really that you can see more than others and while those people think it's luck because they can't see it what it actually is is that you're now seeing connections other people can't see and it's not luck it's a connected mind making good moves but you need to go deep in this research this means opening up youtube descriptions and look at the credits for directors producers mixers and mastering engineers that different artists will have and fill in even if you're not using those right now you may grow into needing to know that and then this will be there for you when you're much less busy like right now this could even sometimes be the dumbest nooks of the internet like facebook about or in the bottom of an artist's website but why does this matter when you need to level up your mixes or masters so you sound as good as the other artists you were trying to get on the same playlist as this is the list that will lead you to work with but it's not only that the managers labels and booking agents of all these talented people like the mixers master engineers and directors and photographers who do photo shoots those managers will see you getting re-shared by them when the song comes out and that's often how you get on the radar of these managers and get signed to them i've seen it happen more times than i can count and i'm pretty damn good at math this work helps the answers become clear on what you should do it gives you the best answers possible on how you're going to keep leveling up so many people do so little research and go with their first thought they have and wonder why they keep falling flat on their face this work prevents that this work though is what gives you the unfair advantage over lazy artists who think they don't need to do it and here's the example of success from it from one of the biggest groups in the world oh god horrible taste in my mouth here's the chain smokers on how they found artists to work with which helped build their fan base wow whatever we even begin i guess where we started and found roses and yeah started with vocal and all that stuff so um basically junei came up on hype machine it's this blog aggregator on the internet that shout out to the machine shout out to the hype machine a lot of like great indie artists and a lot of songs kind of start there um a lot of huge pop songs nowadays like all start on hype machine so basically we always are on there looking for new songs uh and roses the singer had this track called limelight on hype machine that we were big fans of she has a really unique voice and the song felt really cool um so we usually what we do is just make a list of all these singers that we wanted to hit up and uh she was on there and june would make these demo sketch ideas that essentially were like half finished tracks or even less than that kind of just melodies and really stripped down things that kind of let people do and go wherever they wanted and i would send them out to these different singers that we were uh interested in and she was really cool and nice and she was super pumped all right this video is getting long but before we go i'm going to leave you with one last thing and that's that this work also pays off years later too in bigger ways listen to the story of how madion and porter robinson two of the biggest artists in electronic music meeting on a message board when they were teenagers really helped them and how it contributed their career growth years later when they collaborated together and this is how community work pays off dividends over the years yeah basically i me and madion so he's from france cougar we did the song shelter together which i think is the biggest song either of us have done to date but he uh him and i met on like a music production forum when he was like 12 years old and i was 14 so we were both like into you know we were both awkward kind of smart kids on our mom's computers trying to learn how to produce music and we were almost like rivals because he was like crazy wicked smart crazy good for his age and i was the other like young guy and so the two of us would like bounce things off to each other and then kind of happened that we went our separate ways and then a few years later like he had this video that went viral which was called pop culture where he's playing on this launch pad and it was like the first like launch pad mashup video and he just became this big artist and i did too and i was like you know big by the standards of dance music world and then we kind of linked up and we're like like it's really crazy that we knew each other back then and we sort of became friends again and yeah we were in touch the whole time but it was it just felt like a really unlikely story that like felt like a little victory lap there so go find the artist you'll do cool things with and become friends with for life and have so many good times with here's the idea as you get to know a few of them introduce them to each other make a group chat and drop a link to a video like this one and use it as a helpful way to start a conversation and hopefully you'll all help each other out and as one of you grows so will the rest of you isn't that way better than getting bummed out every time you don't have money for stupid facebook ads or get dropped off a playlist i think so too so here's the thing while you just learned about building your community if you really want to grow your fan base you need to understand how these algorithms help you grow which is in this video right here so make sure you watch that next if you really want to level up thanks for watching