 With each era of internet music marketing, there becomes new expectations and rules. A decade and a half ago, you only needed to drop your new single on mp3.com and MySpace and post bulletins about it all day. And you could somehow accrue a ton of fans. While I believe this is an era that offers some of the most amazing opportunities for DIY musicians, what you need to do to get that song to cut through the vast amounts of movies, YouTubers, and everyone else vying for your potential fans' attention is just insane. Reddit and Facebook groups are littered in marketing plans that talk about releasing a single or two and then dropping an album. And trust me when I say these are as useless as litter. If they're a little smarter and want to take advantage of the insane marketing opportunities Spotify and YouTube offer, they will even talk about a string of singles. Now on this channel, I've advised you to go further than this and do an audio stream with a single screen video then two weeks later, a lyric video or a visualizer and then two weeks later after that, a music video. But this video is about going even further than that and how you develop what you're gonna do to go beyond the standard default marketing everyone else does now. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. So let's go over one concept before we get into the real life lesson of music promotion. There's this concept I call the mirror and that's not my New York accent saying mirror. It's spelled M-E-E-R and stands for minimum expected effort required. What I mean by that term is whenever we look at something we need to do, we assign it an amount of effort we perceive to being the right amount of effort for it to be an outcome that we're gonna be happy with. For example, taking it back to promoting your music and the example I used of a stream lyric video and a music video for each song. For some, that seems excessive and for others, that seems like the right amount to do and for others, that seems a little too little to do. How you perceive if that is enough effort to put it into to get the result that will work for you is your mirror. Most musicians have a certain amount of hours or sessions they find to be how long it takes to write a song before they consider that song done. That's also a mirror. What I tend to see is the artists who go on to success and do exceptional things is they go beyond the mirror and put more effort in than most into their mirror. They put the extra time into the song or write more songs than most people and then they choose from them. They find a way to get a better video than everyone else and whether that's by putting more time into them than the average person or just talking to 20 different directors so they find one that is talented and works with their budget. They find a way to get an exceptional result by putting in more effort than most people. They go beyond the mirror and work till they have something exceptional. But you're thinking, okay, nerd, what does this have to do with how I grow my fan base? I thought we were talking about releasing singles. Okay, so let's do that. So let's first talk about Lil Nas X. Sorry. Now, I'm gonna be honest. If I never heard about this dude's horse again, I will be so happy. I was sick of that song about the second time I heard it and then if you're anything like me, that was nowhere near the last time you heard it. But Lil Nas X was a masterclass in what I'm talking about and how he broke that song. He exceeded the mirror and was rewarded for it as this song by some measures is, oh God, okay, let me get this out of my mouth. The most popular song of all time. Do I wanna focus on what he did that is exceptional? Instead of the normal release plan, he was persistent in creating new content around this song as much as he possibly could. A lot of people like to say, you know, it was like a kid accidentally got it. He's like, no, this is no accident. Like I've been pushing this hard. Now, you may be thinking this was easy as his song is silly as fuck and it's easy to create tons of content around that. Well, let's talk practically about what you can do to go beyond the mirror of just releasing singles. What I think Lil Nas X did that is exceptional is he kept telling the story of his song more. So what I'm encouraging here in practical terms is to do what I've always encouraged you to do, is put out a stream, then that lyric video two weeks later and then that music video two weeks after that. But what I'm telling you to adapt here is in between those releases is to keep telling stories and try to keep your audience's attention in the days in between those videos. Here's some ideas on how you can do that. Document more. Look around your video shoot and do every cool thing you can do when you're not on set that you need to do. If you are wearing a particular outfit that day, you can get every shot in every scenario possible to keep talking about that day in that video and telling stories about that day and reminding your fans to keep growing the relationship with you by taking the time to watch that video again. If you're a nerdy musician, get more footage in the studio or even fake it and make something and pretend it was from the recording or just explain the way you did something if you're not comfortable with that but go in the studio and make content and tell stories around that song. Speaking of, tell more stories. If you've been watching this channel, you've heard me talk about the weight of stories since my first video on this channel. The fact is stories around your music and talking about what your songs mean or what you love in music or even your music creation process or the gear you love or other stories that fans bond to is one of the most important things you can do. For the millionth time, let me bring in attention to this MTV study that says fans support the artists that they feel the closest bonds with. So if you wanna grow relationships with your fans, you need to bond with them and that happens through stories and shared commonality and vulnerability. Think about how you tell stories. Everything that is interesting that you have ever done is a story and a chance to bond with someone. Think of how you put that story in a visual and write about it in the caption of your Instagram post, make a tweet thread or make a video in your stories about it. Look through old photos, find visuals that could talk about a story you have in your life and talk about the growth or whatever you learned or whatever else and let your vulnerability connect with the people in your audience so that they feel encouraged to spread your message. Now let's talk about retention. Get better at retention. Every time you say something unique, you haven't heard someone else talk about before, make sure you write it down in your notes app and then figure out how you tell a story around it on the internet. Did you just observe something cool about an artist or a song you love? Talk about it and then bond with the artist's fans and then find how you bring your music into that conversation you have with them and talk about how you made someday try something like that in one of your songs. Then if you do try on your song, go back to that thread and tell them that you made a song influenced by this conversation. That's a way to build a bond with the fan. Next, keep the song going with alternate versions, whether it's those vertical videos that are getting popular, live performance versions, visualizers or whatever, keep making more content around the song that you're pushing. Now, some people doubt that this works for artists with small fan bases, but let me tell you a story from my own life recently. My favorite band in 1975 does not need to keep me thinking about their music because I think of how significant the most important musical relationship of my life is all the time. If they do a fourth version of their video, I'm gonna watch it because I'm a super fan and I watch everything they do. Since you don't have super fans in abundance yet, let's talk about how this alternate content does work to build up your fan base. Recently, I got played on Spotify, this small band called Courage My Love, and I thought the song Slow Motion was decent. I didn't think of it much again because when I went to their profile, I didn't really like many of their other songs, but I thought that song was cool. But then one of the users in my forum friended me on Facebook and they were in my feed and posted a live performance they did that was an alternate version of the song and it just sounded incredible. And I clicked it and now this is a song I've listened to a hundred times and texted my friend who's a big A&R person about it and gotten half a dozen of my fans into them because a stranger saw an alternate version and reminded them how much they love that song, they shared it and then I upped my relationship with the group. If they hadn't done that with that song and kept pushing it, I probably would not have grown my relationship and all these other friends of mine's relationship with the song. Alternate performances give your die-hard fans a chance to build bonds deeper when they share it and they're reminded of how much they connect with you over and over again and get somebody else susceptible to liking your songs to hear them. Think about all the ways you can constantly tell stories around your song and all the content you can make around it. It's so important to continue to go above and beyond and keep pushing the songs you believe in over and over again in different ways and make as much content around them in a short time period since that makes you seem important and like someone who should be paid attention to and that this song is important enough to be paid attention to. Thanks for watching. That's it. Am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlists or con artists, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing. If you liked this video, there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.