 So I know you've probably seen some videos like this where someone teaches you how to go from zero to a million fans, or maybe even the ones I make each year, where I tell you about all the new rules of the game and update you on what's changed, and well, it's about that time. But here's the thing. I've actually done this for work, unlike some of these YouTubers, and worked with tons of groups and they're sent to building a huge fan base, and work on this every single day with DIY, indie, and major label acts across all sorts of genres. But since I don't really want to bore my viewers, if you're sitting here watching this thinking, I am just another one of those YouTube con artists selling a course who's just spouting off with no experience, I encourage you to go to my channel page and watch the video on my biography that's featured. But the short of it is, for well over a decade, I've been a marketing strategist for all sorts of musicians, and worked on the marketing of a Billboard number one comedy record, and in the past two years have marketed and produced two different podcasts that have been the top ten of all podcasts on the Apple charts out of all one million plus podcasts released this year. But really what I think is most important is my heads in the game when it comes to music marketing. I live and breathe marketing in not just music, but comedy, podcast, streaming video, YouTube, even the curse subject of politics. I talk to managers, PR people, booking agents, campaign strategists, and even the people who run presidential campaigns, an A and R of some of the biggest artists in the world in tons of different genres. I'm on the phone every day with people who are building a new artist or building up some of the people with the biggest followings who've also taken artists to platinum sales. I've been taking that information I learned from those calls and putting it into this YouTube channel for the past three years. And whether that's from my experience or my friend's experience, I stay up on what is working and what's changing, and I update on this channel regularly and in these videos every single year. So let's get some things out of the way, though, to make this video way more enjoyable. What I'm going to do here is lay out top line strategy to build a fan base off of. If you think something I'm saying is interesting and you wish you knew more about it than what I just said in this video, well, there's already videos I've made to go way deeper on every subject in this video. So just head down to the description and find the link. Since if a subject is interesting to you, all you need to do is click on it or click on the playlist I made where you can watch all of them in order and become a real expert. And the same goes for if you're not finding a section interesting. There's chapters to this video, so feel free to skip ahead. OK, so let's talk about the first pillar of marketing in 2023 for a musician. This is appealing to algorithms. And now I know a lot of you are going to get real turned off by hearing that, but listen for a second. Appealing to algorithms happens to have a happy ending, unlike what Facebook is doing to our society with their algorithms. Right now, the majority of music discovery and how people build a fan base is because they use smart strategy that appeals to the algorithm, but there's a smarter way to see this. If you deliver music in the way the algorithm likes, which means you don't have to, and nor should you compromise your music and what's within that music. Well, those algorithms will help you build your fan base, because the great thing about music today is songs that are authentic are more rewarded than ever. And I know a lot of you don't believe me about that, but it's real, but the delivery method and the way you release music has a defined way to spread as far as possible. If you follow the rules of the algorithm, and I should say the reason algorithms work is because they're the same as human attention spans, which is why people built those algorithms was to appeal to the way humans consume things. But right now what I see in the majority of artists who get a fan base is been doing effectively to build that fan base is they release a single every six to eight weeks while occasionally peppering that with an alternative version covers, remixes, or hell, even one of those sped up or slowed down versions that are popular on TikTok these days, or they add a feature to an existing song here or there. They do this for a 12 to 18 month campaign while doing something eventful every two weeks is something smaller every single week. This only takes six songs per year to fill up an entire calendar year. And if you release a single screen video at a stream of your song on the first week, then two weeks later, a lyric video, then two weeks later after that, a music video, and then an alternate version, well, you'll fill up those eight weeks really easily. And then you just start the cycle again with another song at either six or eight weeks, but a lot of people want to release a single every single week now. And when you do that, it makes people feel like the music is not important to you. And instead you're just desperate and just guessing at music songs are not a lottery ticket. They need to be emotionally powerful and people don't want to see everything you can do, but instead the best of what you do. Whereas releasing a song every two months and following it up with eventful things keeps people's attention spans engaged too many of you that I talked to on consulting calls talk about how you have 28 songs in the camp, but you don't get what makes so many of your favorite ours, your favorites, is that they know to release their best material and keep messing with the recipe of their less than stellar material. It doesn't mean you throw it away. It doesn't mean it never gets released, but they play with it until it gets better and as good as their best material. So you need to hint to your audience and the people who are going to discover you that what you're doing is exceptional by putting in the effort to make content around it and continually remind people that the music you're putting out matters because putting out music more often than every six to eight weeks. Well, it just doesn't feel eventful and people care about eventful things, which is what makes them think they should pay attention to it. I want to remind you, you're also competing with a lot of people for attention. This is why when little Nas X rose from being a completely unknown artist to having the longest running number one song of all time, he continually reminded people of his song and that it was something exceptional by over and over again, showing them memes and reminding them to build a relationship with the song. Now, a lot of people get really bummed when they hear me talking about releasing singles constantly as they love albums and EPs. And you know what? So do I. I was listening to some while I wrote this video, but you have to see EPs and LPs and mixtapes as what builds deeper relationships with fans who start to like you. It makes them think about you more and more and feel close to you. And the deeper that relationship is, the more likely they are to come see you live, buy your merch and engage with you on socials. And most of all, never shut up to their friends about you until they annoy that friend into listening to you. And then they become a fan of yours too. But we need to see it this way, that singles are what lures people in. Much like that sample of the chicken at the Chinese food stall that they give out for free in the mall courtyard, they hope to lured you in at the counter to buy a pound of it. And then they hope you'll keep coming back and doing that each day after you've tasted how good it tastes from that one free sample. We have to see albums and singles as two different things. Singles offer the opportunity to bring in enough people that they're going to go through your album or back catalog and get to know you and develop a relationship with your music. But if you aren't releasing as many singles as possible these days to bring people back to that album, you're basically not allowing your music the chance to get discovered by sending out the samples that will intrigue people and have them come and hear more from you. And this is because singles are how people first taste music and decide if they want a full meal. And right now, algorithms spread singles because the way Spotify is designed and people's attention spans work in a similar way is that the more singles you release of quality material, the more chances people have to take in your album and back catalog, which brings me back to what appeals to algorithms appeals to human attention spans. OK, so let's go over this. The top ways people discover music are Tiktok, Spotify and YouTube. And while Tiktok is doing a ton of this work these days, we are concerned about where people are going to repeatedly listen to your music and make a relationship with you, which is YouTube and Spotify. Because when it comes to DSPs and listening to music without video, if you open the majority of artist analytics of where their listens come from, if we bar YouTube, it's usually eighty to eighty five percent Spotify. And then the other fifteen to twenty percent is distributed between Apple and all the other DSPs. So like it or not, Spotify is really where you need to focus your energy and they give artists tons of tools to promote themselves, whereas all the other DSPs give you virtually none. And because we have to focus at Spotify, we have to remember why singles are important because Spotify only lets you submit one song at a time to its editorial playlist submission tool and they recommend you submit four weeks in advance. This means releasing singles more than once a month is a wasted opportunity, as your single greatest chance to have your music get discovered by a lot of people is through editorial placements on Spotify. So you're basically failing yourself if you don't go through and give that lottery ticket a chance. And let's also keep in mind it takes weeks for some songs to spread on TikTok. So pushing out different songs constantly doesn't benefit from doing it too often. And while editorial playlists are the biggest ones, we have to remember Spotify puts the artist who get on user playlists on their editorial playlists. So it's important that after your song is released, you can then pitch it to other user playlists as well as using hyperfowl and pre-save tools that encourage fans to follow you on Spotify. But there's an important part of the Spotify game to keep in mind. And that's trying to get into the algorithm so you get on Discover Weekly and release radar. And to do that you need to keep your popularity score high. And that happens by driving as many ears that will potentially like your song as possible as early as possible to your song. So getting attention from your community and driving people from your socials or especially an email list is crucial to this. I have a lot more to say about this in other videos that are linked in the description if you want to learn more. But truly your mission when you first release a song is to try to get as many ears to your song as possible that are familiar with you and already like you or have the potential to like you because they like your genre of music. Not a bunch of strangers, not a bunch of randos and definitely not a bunch of bots. But there's another platform we have to consider, which is YouTube, which not only helps with music discovery, it's also where you can build relationships with fans. Since we all know a great music video could be what tips you to be so blown away by what you're listening to and watching that you send it to a friend. In fact, today I found this group called the Northern Boys that are probably the best hip hop group I've heard out of Britain and forever. And yeah, they're a bunch of old geezers. But honestly, these lyrics are incredible, probably wouldn't have glommed on to it as well. If I hadn't watched the video accompanying the song, but I sent it to 12 different people today because that's the power of music videos. It made me understand who they were as an artist feel the songs more. But YouTube rewards those who are uploading weekly or bi-weekly, which is a little bit of a conflict with what I just told you about Spotify. So putting up behind the scenes videos, playthroughs, vlogs, lyric videos, and single screen videos of your song helps the algorithm favor you. It's served you to more fans while feeding the attention spans of fans who are starting to grow a relationship with you. This is also why doing first that single screen video, then the lyric video or visualizer, then your music video and then an alternate version helps you so you serve another video every two weeks. So maintaining consistent sustained promotion by posting to YouTube not only helps you algorithmically, it helps audience to see you're regularly feeding them and you're an eventful artist who they should be paying attention to. And when you regularly entertain your audience and stay on top of their minds, fans inherently tell their friends about you as they remember you. And then they talk about you on social media. So it's by nature humans seek out commonality in others and want to bond over what they enjoy. Doing this not only appeals to the algorithm, it reminds fans to grow relationships with you. So they are thinking about you more and more and want to go deeper with you. But I know what a lot of you are thinking. Oh, Jesse, what is the matter? Don't play the touch to me anyway. What's the matter if I can find some playlists? So the greatest thing about algorithms is instead of some gatekeeper choosing you, if you use smart strategy, you can draw connections between you and other artists algorithmically and then have the platforms push you to one another. I made a video on how collaborations, remixes, features and split releases are the greatest marketing opportunity in the history of music. They should really watch it as it's linked below. And these not only introduce you to another artist fan base, but they live on another artist page and are tied to you for years to come continually growing your fan base. As that artist also makes new fans. But there's an added algorithmic benefit to this. You end up in the release radar and discover weekly of that artist. I've talked to the managers of some of the larger artists who say this can help a lot more than getting on the biggest playlist, especially those artists who are regularly doing collapse. But the benefits of this don't stop at YouTube and Spotify. One of the things musicians seem to forget is the way Instagram and TikTok algorithms learn to recommend you is the algorithm that looks at when two artists are tagged together and mentioned together. And when it happens regularly, like when you're playing shows all the time with another artist or do a song with another artist, the algorithm ranks how often this is happening between the two of you and then recommends you to one another's audience. This aside from some music genome methods, the streaming services have is just about the only way an algorithm knows to link you to someone else. So if you're one of those people who's always complaining that the algorithm doesn't pick you up, this is what you need to be doing. I mean, Spotify radio, all it's doing is just playing the artist that the majority of people listen to from that other artist that you just got done listening to. This is why not being an island to yourself matters. You need to be regularly tagging and doing things with other artists to help you grow. But what does that mean practically, though? Doing features, collabs and remixes as well as split releases and making sure you tag properly on Spotify and YouTube, you will link to those other artists to get you on Spotify radio playlist as well as discover weekly and release radar playlist and then doing music plus talk DJ sets on Spotify or radio shows and tagging the artists on Instagram and Twitter can help those sites spread you and link to you algorithmically as well as messaging other artists and socializing on Twitter can help you get you seen by their fans. And the same goes on TikTok. Now, before you get any big ideas, the key with these algorithms is they work at scale, meaning if you're just doing this with Drake and tagging him all day, it's not going to tie you to him. There's too much other competition. But this right here is why knowing your community and working with other artists of your size and doing this with artists who are just a bit above you in fan base size is the key to growing, which is why you really need to know your community, which I emphasize over and over and over again on this channel. So you're probably wondering how you find your community and use it to leverage your fan base. So instead of getting into the details of that, I instead want to show you how it plays with the other pillars of this. But let me put this into frame for you. I just explain why knowing who the other smaller artists in your community are is important. Since these are the people you should be doing collabs, remixes, split releases and features with and playing shows or even tours, but also putting them in your Spotify artist playlist. Since this helps the algorithm think you belong together as more people listen to you. The only way Spotify, TikTok or any other algorithm knows that you are similar is if the algorithm sees who you are by both of you being tagged. So doing as much research about who your community is will show you the other artists you should be creating a connection together with. So the algorithm knows who to serve you to the fans of. But community work goes way deeper than algorithms. This is actually about people. I know I said the last part was about people too. But this is even more so knowing where people in your microgenre, your local scene, etc. congregate, whether it's the clubs, discord chats, subreds is how you meet the people who open doors for you and connect you to the right people. So often the artists who grow are the ones who are most engaged in their online communities. Since the people who are in those communities are tomorrow's taste makers playlists or A&R at a cool label and knowing your community allows you to know who's the best mixer or director in your price range in your community to make you level up. And if you're just trying to get signed, one of the most common ways that happens is by working with the mixers, mastering engineers, photographers and directors in your community and then they share the work they do with you and all the A&R who they work with and follow them, then see your name and your song. And if you have a great song, well, that's how managers and label relationships often start. You need to be taking time every single day to understand your community. And truly one of the things I see that's the difference between whether people are growing fast or not is whether they've done the work at this. As it makes you a better artist, a student, better student of the game and most of all, those who reach out in their community get propped up by it. And this is how you get your first fans. So many people wonder what the first step to getting fans is. I'll tell you this. It often is that you make friends with somebody on a message board. They post about you to their fans and then you post about them when they put up new songs. And then you have a web of people like that who are connecting you on the algorithm again. And that's the first steps to start to get a leg up and build a fan base. It truly the difference I see when I do consults with artists who do this work for 10 to 15 hours compared to the ones who don't and don't listen to me and watch what I call my most important video are nine times out of 10. The artists who actually are making progress are the ones who did that work and the ones who ignore it. Well, they're mad. So head to the description and watch that video. So the other main pillar of how you connect with people is when you show yourself on social media, vlogs, interviews and whatever I want to say this, the majority of musicians I talk to on a daily basis have made social media far too complicated because they don't realize what they are actually seeing what appeals to you or any audience is not someone trying to be something they're not. We all have authenticity radars that give us cringe the second we see something inauthentic and yet most musicians talk to me as if they should be doing some performances that's not authentic to them and that they're not comfortable doing. It is literally the thing I hear most when I talk to musicians and I got to be honest. That's not what I see blowing up and making fans for artists. Here's what is instead of thinking about branding or imitating other people, think about your authentic thoughts and personality and how you can display them more often on social media devote time each day to thinking about your most interesting thoughts or the most interesting things you're doing or the traits of your personality that are most charismatic and then how you can use them to build relationships with fans by showing them who you are on social media. The honesty and vulnerability you express in your music paired with doing that on social media is what people actually latch on to these days. And if you show them that they want to get to know you better and listen to your music. So many times musicians think something is contrived or coached that they see from big artists when really the huge artist that you admire what they're doing is being themselves because they know how to do this and they've thought long and hard and probably talked a lot about themselves with their team and they've developed so well how to show themselves to the world because it's a muscle that you need to exercise or else you're going to be bad at it. And so many people say I'm not good at this. Yeah, you have and done the exercise yet to get good at it. And by being in the habit of any time something interesting comes to your mind or in line with the artist image you want to project. Well, your favorite artists know how to share that because it's a muscle they're using every single day. The other thing musicians really make a mistake of is they think their personality and social media needs to be the same as their music sounds. They think that their music is dark. They have to be dark. Feed V Bridgers makes some of the more sad and moody music yet her whole social media personality is jokes. Many musicians who make playful music can be passionate about politics. People want you to be yourself. And often the depth of yourself of not just being the person who makes the music is actually the appeal. Now, that with that said, if you're mood and what you want to share is actually a continuation of your music and it lines up with it. Well, that's extremely powerful, but both ways do work. And so that's what I see working is each day thinking of how you tell stories or thoughts in an authentic way that work. If you don't get what I mean by stories, I have a whole playlist and tons of videos on that. Since authentic story driven content is really what makes artists spread on social media. I also want to say this, but note, you also need to remind people regularly about your music and making stories that involve your music. Just saying your song is out now is the weakest cell of a song possible. Tell the story of how the song makes you feel and makes others feel or how you felt when you made it. If you do that, you'll see your song streams increase. If you're regularly telling people this with an understanding of community, you'll build relationships with fans and grow their relationship with your music. But I know what you really want is a cheat sheet on which social media apps you should be using. So let me leave you with this. Instagram is where little discovery of new artists happens, but it's where many people go to keep up with their favorite artists or to investigate the artist's vibe when they first hear them. Twitter is where people keep up with artists they like, but it's also the best place for you to deepen relationships with people, especially in your community. It start relationships with the people you want to know and build relationships within your community. And TikTok is where so much artists and music discovery happens today. It's nearly immeasurable, but Facebook now hides your posts so much that unless you pay, trying to update fans there has basically become irrelevant from Facebook's own bribery schemes, making them that, which brings me to that in nearly every genre of music. If you want your music to get discovered, getting good at TikTok yourself or paying for TikTok influencer campaigns is the best way you can get your music discovered for little money or effort. Now, it's much more complicated than that, but luckily for you, I have an entire playlist on everything you need to know to blow up on TikTok in 2023. But trust me, there's so many different not cringe ways to do TikTok creatively today. If you're not at least looking around and finding how you fit them into your music, you're not doing your music and your dreams justice. TikTok's an evolving creative medium. And if you think you knew what it was six months ago, it's already changing. There's so many avenues for creativity and what you can do there that works to spread music. OK, so the last pillar of how you grow in 2023 is to understand the cheat code technique for your genre. So I can't get super specific with this since each genre or microgenre has their own cheat code. And what I mean by this is there's often a trick happening at each moment, a practice or an aspect of music promotion you can focus on that will get you more fans if you understand it and allocate more time to it. Think of it this way. Right now, hiring a radio campaign, if you're a DIY pop artist, well, you'll find somebody who will take that money, but you may as well set it on fire since there's no chance you'll ever get played unless you have a ton of streams that have created momentum around your music. But a moody and D rock artist doing this for college rock radio or serious XM could really be a small amount of money for the games that you see at a total cheat code. If you're making songs that sound like the Beatles and you're buying TikTok ads, one might be reminded that the people on TikTok's parents weren't even alive when the Beatles were together. Each genre has a promotion or marketing tactic specific to it that could lead to explosive growth. One of the reasons we watch your community so closely is that you start to understand what the cheat codes are as you study it, understand and research the cheat code technique of your genre and then exploit it as much as possible once you see it. Since if there's one thing I see over and over again, so we'll say this artist blew up from TikTok. But when I actually look under the hood of what they were doing, I often see there was this other cheat code technique they were doing that is not as clear to the eye as TikTok views. It's very rare an artist's massive growth comes from concentrating one place. It's often an accumulation of a few smart strategies. And I just laid out all the top lines of those for you here. So let's review really fast. To distill this video into a few small rules, they'd be this. And the more you follow these rules, the more your music will spread. Appeal the algorithm by releasing a song every two months on Spotify and pitch it to editorial playlists and then follow up by pitching to user playlists. Release a video of just the album cover, the two weeks later a lyric video or a visualizer, the two weeks later a music video, as this appeals to people's attention spans, as well as YouTube's algorithm. Learn to do your community work every single day as the time spent doing this sets you up for a greater understanding of what you should do and finds the people who will elevate your music career. Whenever I speak to the artist who got huge fan bases without fail, it was their community that lifted them up and their understanding of their community, not that they just bought a bunch of Facebook ads. Create connections on social media and on Spotify and YouTube between you and other artists were similar to you or that are equal or just a bit bigger than you in fan base size. So the algorithm understands how to recommend you or connect you to the fans of those artists. Instead of thinking about branding or imitating other people to vote time each day to thinking about your most interesting thoughts or traits and your personality and how you can use them to build relationships with fans on social media. Okay, so this video here kind of sums up what we talk about in this channel. Hit the description and learn more as I have so many more links below and watch this video on the screen now to learn about the cheat codes for music promotion that I just mentioned.