 So the most obvious thought in music promotion is great songs are the best way to promote your music and equally as obvious is that you want to do everything you can to make a great song. But once the song is mastered and there's no more tweaking, it's time to promote it. What's the second most important thing you can do to make the song cut through the noise of the hundreds of thousands of other people releasing music, try to get the people's attention that you want to get? In this video, I'm going to discuss how you release music so it gets the attention of potential fans, harnesses the power of Spotify and YouTube, as well as human psychology, which will show the people who come across your music that they should pay attention to you. And here's the best part of this. You can do all of this even in lockdown without having to play a single live show. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketer who's teaching musicians how to go from zero to 10,000 fans and this is Muse Formation. So I do a lot of consulting and meeting with DIY artists and their managers and their labels, and we talk about what actually works to get good music heard. And even when I'm dealing with professionals, I'm consistently shocked about how many people don't understand how to get attention to what they're doing. I mean, it's our damn jobs as the suits behind the artist to know this. But then I realize no one is showing people how to command attention, aside from how to do it for influencers who's trying to get a billion followers on Instagram. And music carries within a whole different set of rules, as opposed to people who are just trying to look cute with fitness tees on the ground. I mean, I will admit I drink like 10 of these a week. So let's start breaking down what promoting music looks like to hold people's attention and get you noticed. First, there's algorithms. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that if you perform well on Spotify and YouTube, it presents the greatest chance for you to take advantage of and exploit the system, which will give you tons of fans for very little effort on your part. So what do I mean by this? Since Spotify will only allow you to submit one song every 30 days, releasing a song any more than that becomes a fool's game. Since Spotify editorial playlists allow you the greatest chance of having an explosion in your fan base, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the video linked on the screen now or in the description below on how to write a Spotify editorial playlist pitch that actually gets you on playlist, and I explain everything there. But like I was saying, this is the number one thing you should be trying to exploit since it offers the most chance of reward for a little bit of effort that you can make. But there's also YouTube, which actually rewards uploading more than once a month, or even multiple uploads in a month. And you may be wondering, what in the hell do I mean by multiple uploads, and in a few minutes I will explain the different versions of songs we want to upload to take advantage of this part of the YouTube algorithm, as well as other videos you can make to tell stories around your song. The next thing we want to take advantage of is a term I call attention propensity. Now, if you aren't so into big words, I mean, I know my audience. Propensity means an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a particular way. And with music fans, the propensity is to pay attention to artists that they are reminded of regularly. To go deeper, potential fans' attention is naturally drawn to people who do things regularly and call attention to themselves by doing things that are exciting, different, or what I like to call eventful. This means cool content, different things that people have usually seen, striking images, compelling stories, and of course, great fans. Audience's propensity is to be drawn to things they see that they deem important, and that they are going to need to know about to be able to have conversations with those they admire. Now, those they admire can mean people they want to be friends with, or people they want to be closer to, or people they have crushes on, or people they see who do cool things that they wish they were closer to. There's all sorts of psychology that the way you command attention is creating curiosity about you by people seeing your name in respected places the reason they actually investigate who you are and then become a fan of yours is because they feel the need to know who you are in order to deepen their relationships with others that they want to bond with. Now here's the funny thing. Some people find the value they give others is knowing about that music before other people and they try to find these artists before other people do. But I'm already going down a rabbit hole that I could talk about for 20 minutes. So here's the TLDR. When you do exciting things on a regular basis, you know, not a music video every six months, people feel compelled to pay attention to what you do because they feel it will be necessary to know this, to make bonds with other people that they want to make bonds with. So in order to harness the psychology's power, it means doing what I call consistent sustained promotion or CSP, which if you haven't heard me explain it before, many musicians suffer from absent periods where they drop off the radar of their fans all the time and go dark for no good reason. This inconsistency depletes your momentum. When I'm asked for the secrets of building a fan base, I always point to consistent sustained repetition of promoting your music. And in tangible terms, this usually means doing a small thing like telling a story or making a highly striking visual image every other week and in the weeks in between doing eventful things like song releases, tour announcements, music videos, or other eventful promotions. But let me make this real blunt for those of you who are a little too slow for metaphors. It's the irrefutable law of how music promotion works is that if you are consistently promoting your music, if you're doing cool things on a regular basis, people see you as someone to pay attention to. But if you go dark and just write stream our music bro, in a caption with a picture you posted for weeks on end, they see you as an annoying clown who's not really putting the effort in. So why would they want to pay attention to you when they could be paying attention to all these other ours who are putting a powerful content for a long period like 12 to 18 months. Now if you're doing the CSP method of promoting, your name will be coming up all the time, it's getting recommended in algorithms, you're telling stories around your music, popping up on social media, and people are going to finally click and learn more about you. But the key to do this is you need to do eventful things. Eventful events demand attention since it gets fans talking. And for all of you who wonder why press isn't covering you doing eventful things that get fans talking eventually gets the press talking indoors opening. So when I plan this while doing release strategies with artists, what I always tell them is they need to ask themselves, is this the most eventful music video they can make? And what are the most compelling stories they can tell around their music? And if you don't know what I'm talking about here, it's probably a good time to watch my video on how to tell stories around your music, which is linked now or in the description. But let's go deeper. Let's think about how all of us discover music. Sure, lots of it's on playlists, but much of it is being reminded constantly of it via social media and seeing a name come up over and over again, or features or other people talking about that artist. Now, if you just make posts all day that aren't deemed eventful by the public, you just get muted and won't actually be taking advantage of attention propensity since when you're muted, you can't get attention. Take note of that reply, guys. But when you're doing eventful things, you stay on people's mind and they keep turning you on to ingest things when they need to be entertained. Then they deepen their relationship with you. But you may be wondering, what does this look like in an actual release strategy? Give me one more minute and I'll get there. Now let's think of the other way you discovered music, which is that when one person is constantly reminded of you and feels a connection to your stories, they talk about you to their friends and on social media. They tweet and share a story. It's a something like, man, when incel hype beats said that he was radicalized by a hulu doc, I felt that. And then someone who amires that person, who's a fan of incel hype beats, wonders who the hell incel hype beast is. And then they go down the rabbit hole and if your track bangs, they hit play and you now have someone invest in your stories. Since that person wants to go deeper with the person they admire and make an emotional connection with them by knowing who incel hype beast is. And hopefully they become a fan of your music. Friends and buyers try to explore the people they bond with's interest. And this is how your music gets spread. But to be deemed eventful, you need to be doing things that get people talking continuously so that they'll talk about you when they see their friends. Hence consistent, sustained promotion. So now let's talk about what my release strategy is to harness all that. And yes, it's a slight modification for the one I have mentioned in the past. It's on week one, you release a single screen video. And then the next week, you tell a story around it. Then the next week, you put up a lyric video or a visualizer. And the week after that, you tell a story around it. Then the next week after that, you post your music video. And depending on how well your song's reaction is, you will promote it for two to four more weeks and tell stories around it until it makes sense to move on to the next song. There's one invariable though here that I like to do, which is if your song is blowing up, you should release an alternate version two weeks after the music video. But we'll get to that more later. And then when that's done though, it's time to repeat it again consistently for as long as you can sustain it or until it works. And it's time to move on to something else. Now I know some of you are asking for how long and the answer is often a year or two. And to make this abundantly clear, I mean release a song every eight weeks for 12 to 18 months while doing something eventful every two weeks and something smaller every week like telling a story. This only takes six songs a year to fill up a calendar. And if you release a single screen YouTube video and a stream of your song on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube the first week, then two weeks later, a lyric video or a visualizer. And then two weeks after that, a music video you'll cover all the weeks of the year. And it'll take 12 songs to cover the next two years, which really adds up to about a full length's worth of music. And there's lots of things you can tweak around that. But let's boil down why this Stray Release strategy is the best instead of going down that road since I've covered that before. And you can watch that in a video I'll link at the end. So the reason this release strategy appeals to the algorithm is it allows you to take advantage of what Spotify and YouTube like and seeing as these are the two biggest music discovery channels that dwarf all the others, that's a really big fucking deal. And yes, Apple Music is barely 15% of how music is discovered compared to those two. So get out of my reply since I'm not going to try to appeal to an app that the biggest company in the world makes that they barely develop. Yeah, I'm a hater. With Spotify is biased to only allowing you to pitch one song every month, it's clear that they only want you to upload every 30 days. And this allows you to take advantage of that and have each song you upload go as far as possible on that platform if you follow this release strategy. But since YouTube wants more uploads, we're going to first release the single-screen video, which will hopefully bring in streams from all your excited fans and start some momentum. And then after that, you'll appeal to YouTube's algorithm by releasing that Lyric video or Visualizer two weeks later, and then the music video two weeks after that, and possibly that alternate version, as well as using YouTube to tell stories in between it. But since all this is messy, we need to talk about attention to so many people have busy weeks or perhaps they went online to see the single announcement that you made and then they forgot about it because things got crazy. When you tell stories about your music and then they come out with new content like a Lyric video every two weeks and a music video two weeks later and allow the algorithm to remind people as well as having your eventful stories to tell fans around your song, it makes it so you actually get noticed and you seem eventful. Say stream my new track each day is annoying, but every two weeks having a big piece of new content to promote is eventful and makes people feel like they need to pay attention to you since you're feeding them so much content and really taking your music seriously. But back to why this feeds the algorithm properly. If someone watches your song on YouTube, there's a good chance YouTube is to try to feed them that song or another again since they enjoyed it, especially if they listen to it so uploading multiple versions of your song or video helps with that immensely. And let's remember you can tell stories on YouTube too by posting other videos, playthroughs, life updates, talking your hobby behind the scenes or vlogs all help you connect with an audience and help the algorithm serve you to more fans. Just be sure you're following YouTube's best practices and to learn how to promote your music properly on YouTube, I highly recommend you watch my playlist on the subject, which is linked on the screen now or in the description coupled with how all this plays into attention propensity and the potential fan you want to have being constantly reminded to take your relationship deeper with you allows it to help you build your music up. If you're letting the algorithms help you and doing what works for compelling fans to be drawn to you on your way to taking songs as far as they can go. And if they are great songs in that connect with the nonates, things are about to go very well. But let's be clear, this doesn't work if it's not consistent, meaning you hit your deadlines by putting out this content regularly. It also needs to be sustained, meaning you don't give up after two songs. For many of the artists I see this working for they gain momentum with each song, but the bigger gains come from sustaining it for a long period of time. And by promotion means you actually work hard every day to get your music everywhere, meaning you also need to find your community and really make sure you're getting your song spread as much as possible. But wait, dude, don't face this video, you mentioned a crucial detail in here about alternate versions. One of the things you see big indies, smart DIY acts and major labels all do is pour some extra fuel on the fire of a song that's really blowing up, which is why you see when a song starts to break for a nurse, all of a sudden you see tons of remixes or a new version with a feature vocal from an artist or even a second music video that flips the song another way. They may do an acoustic version or one with an orchestra, but what's great is alternative versions remind people to go deeper with the song, whether it's the alternate version or the main version. And in some cases, both the alternate and original do well, and they feed off each other. The alternative version allows you to tell more stories, demand more attention, get people to think they really need to pay attention to this song, since you devoted so much energy to it. And if you're seeing that the song is doing way better than all your other songs, it's worth it to devote that energy to it. Now this doesn't work if you cry wolf and do this all the time, or if the song doesn't bang, it's going to fall flat and people won't pay attention. But if you come through with something great that's eventful, and what gets people telling their friends about you and spreading your music, it's going to work well. Now to draw this to a close, if you don't believe me this works, about a year ago I made a video on how this has built the careers for artists like Billie Eilish, Kim Petrus, and Pale Laves. And if you're also wondering about how this works with releasing albums, and how that all figures into it, and when you should put on an album, if you want to learn more about that subject, I suggest you go back and watch this video I made on it last year, which is on the screen now, or in the description. And if you enjoyed this video and came this far, please shoot me a comment and ask a question. And most of all, get subbed, because we're going to be going deeper on this, and I wanted to do right by your music. Also, put questions below, since I'm going to answer them in a part two to this video very soon. And if I've already made that video, it's up on the screen right now if you want to watch this and learn more. Thanks for watching.