 This week, this YouTube channel turned two years old, and while I spend every minute of my life discussing marketing with other people, let's be honest. Personal reflection often brings on the grayest revelations and reminders of what is actually going on. So this video, I'm going to discuss a few lessons of building a fanbase from scratch that I was recently reminded of upon looking back at building this channel. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennett, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fanbase from zero to 10,000 fans, and this is Muse Formation. So the first lesson I was reminded of I want to discuss is similar to the one I started with last year in the video I made just like this. If you recall last year, I pointed out that when I started this channel, I made an agreement with myself that I would post two videos a week the entire year and then decide what I should do from there and if I should keep going with this channel. And for musicians, I suggest doing the same of committing to eight to 10 months of consistent sustained promotion and then really giving what you're doing a hard evaluation since just releasing one or two songs isn't enough time to see the effects of pushing out your music constantly. So last year, I'd set out with a goal of 10,000 subscribers by year's end, but I came up short with only 5,000. But the agreement with myself was I would keep going if it was showing benefits to my life since putting a number of followers or views as a goal is kind of dumb. Since if you watch this channel, you know tons of artists have tons of streams on Spotify but no fan engagement or they get some other great benefit from their music that makes it worth it to do. I felt amazing about the community I'd made so there was no question I would keep going when I evaluated this last year. But I think it's important to have that temperature check with yourself. For musicians particularly, if you're doing my release strategy of putting out a song every two months, I think particularly every three songs, you should have a check-in about what's going great, what's going on, maybe what's going bad and particularly if you're having a great success with something, you should really get under the hood and examine it and figure out how to make it an even greater success. I'll talk about what happened with my great success and what I learned from it this year, but it's also important to keep going for long enough for you to possibly grow and not check in too soon. But let's talk about this check-in I had. So last year, I got to 5,000 subscribers right about this week last year and this year I'm at just about 27,000. So a little over five times growth. And while I'm super proud of that, last year I had about 15 times growth. And now, if we talk statistically, that was easier since the distance between 300 subscribers I had on day one to the 5,000 of year one compared to 5,000 to 27,000, well that's a lot more people. 22,000 people in fact. All of this to say though that I know so many of you are frustrated and I know I talk about that the first 10,000 fans all the time. And a lot of this is because those 10,000 fans after you get them it becomes so much easier to build if you maintain consistent sustained promotion since those fans help spread the word about you and give you a platform and you start having people ask you to do things as opposed to you always having to ask them. And that's the distinction I always make about when you hit the 10,000 fan mark is that people will start giving you opportunities instead of you having to chase them down all the time. But what also makes it so much easier after you have those 10,000 fans, as I talked about in the last video there's just more data for algorithms to see who they should recommend you to as well as an audience who will boost you up and just get so much more easy and fulfilling as things go forward. So remind yourself that when the hard gets hard. I also crossed a million views on this channel which is a really cool metric but really doesn't matter much if people don't stick around so I haven't really focused on that in my building. But I fell short of that 50,000 subscribers goal I wanted to get 10 times growth from last year but I fell short by just a little less than I did last year so gains. So I've decided to do a less modest goal of getting to 100,000 subscribers this year since that's only four times growth. We'll see how that goes but I think it's important to have something to keep pushing for and while I won't stop doing this channel if I fail I will reassess my strategy heavily if I don't get there and since I didn't make my goal this year I want to talk to you about the lessons I learned about how I failed and how I'm going to change. So lesson two is one of those lessons and I'm sure you've had this in your life where you can give the advice to someone else but you know damn well you're not taking the advice yourself. In like half the music marketing calls I do with DIYRs I have to tell them they should have at least two singles of lyric and music videos done in all the content and then four more songs mastered and finished before you even start promoting song one. So if life gets the best of you your director takes an extra month to finish their edit you won't slow down your consistent sustained promotion and lose momentum. I know very well consistency is one of the most important things but since this channel is the fun I do outside of work it doesn't always take priority. So somewhere in 2020 I stopped being eight weeks ahead on these videos and truthfully as I've mentioned before I work in politics as part of one of my day jobs and let's just say from the end of that election last year to January 22nd some weird things happened that I had to work on and frankly I was pretty burnt out afterwards. I had lost so much sleep my doctor told me my physical health was really bad. I stopped exercising it was all too much and after this channel had its biggest explosion of viewers and things really started to take off because I didn't have a ton of content banked I lost momentum and all the big views I was getting and my peak growth it died down and honestly it really hasn't come back and it's been a lot of months. Sure this channel is still growing at a great pace and things are going well but man after I released that video on NFTs being the future of music so many of you saw what I was doing and went down the rabbit hole through my content and so many of my videos got into the algorithm and I just saw explosive growth. In one month I tripled my subscriptions and within 90 days after that instead of posting weekly I was only posting once every two weeks and just like that my channel growth went back to the speed it was going before I had that big hit of a video which is cool but I want that high of when I was really killing it and to keep growing off that and have massive growth and while I tell everyone you got to stay ahead on your content since some weeks life's going to hand you heartbreak, covid or a move or an injury if you're weeks ahead on your content no one will see your consistency break and unfortunately these algorithms are everything and they love consistency seriously the reason I had that big win with the NFT video was because the algorithm picked it up and that's the case for most of the time content takes off so here's the point what I'm doing with my life this week before I head out of the country to relax for a while is I'm going to get 12 videos ahead so I'm never faced with this problem again I learned my lesson and hopefully you can learn from me and the countless musicians who've told me because they weren't ahead on their content and they had a song blow up but they took too long to follow it up they never got that momentum back well you don't want to be that person. Lesson three so like I said that NFT video was a big win for me it has almost 120,000 views and it's changed the channel's reach in a huge way and one of the lessons I learned from it was that video happened right after I got this room I shoot in I had been looking at other youtubers who did what I did and realized I really needed to level up my look now it's not like my old sets were that bad but it didn't help we were in a pandemic and I moved where I shoot three times in like nine months so my set options weren't always ideal but a big lesson that I learned that I see in music all the time in that so many of you are writing great songs you're kind of ignoring some of the quality differences that would really level you up like mixing and mastering or maybe you need a better vocal mic so I employed a photographer friend and got this place well set up and continued to buy a lot of equipment since I feel my content was great in fact I'm confident my content's much better than most people who do what I do but it wasn't hitting the views I wanted and sure enough right after I started filming in this room my numbers went up considerably and if you feel your songs are banging taking a good look at whether your mixes or masteringers can be improved is really one of the more crucial things that you should be evaluating from time to time it's important to continually check in with yourself and figure out what's your weakest link and then invest in making it not weak anymore lesson four was another one I was pretending not to know we have to remember it takes a few times of hearing your name or your songs before people get tipped to checking it out never mind becoming obsessed with it which could take a few more times I think of this recent experience I had where I found my new favorite artist of 2021 underscores I got their songs played for me a few times on Spotify radio wasn't loving it then one song clicked and I heard another song on a tiktok trend and liked it so I hit play on the LP and then after that I never stopped listening and they became my favorite artist of late 2021 while the button to go deeper on them was right there on Spotify all those times radio played me them but there's something about hearing someone in another place that makes our brains feel like we should go deeper so I left tiktok and went back to Spotify and then listened to their LP even though I could have done that the numerous times Spotify radio played me them we all know that seeing a sticker around town or a shirt could be the thing that finally makes you check out that artist I took this to myself and realized my other disdain for promoting my work on other social media has to come to an end I realized I could do a lot of things I'm interested in on tiktok since I don't always have 10 minutes of thoughts on a subject and sure enough it's off to a great start and as an aside I've told you all there's no platform that offers growth and listeners faster than tiktok and a great example of that was that it took me 30 days to get a thousand followers unlike the 90 days it took on youtube and then two weeks after that I had 2000 since one of my videos took off by the comments I get a lot of people are finding my books and youtubes from tiktok and yet again remember this is where people are going to be entertained and find their tiny genre niches and if you could find your community here the time is now right now for big growth and that window will inevitably close my only regret is not joining tiktok sooner since I'm seeing the benefits of tiktok introducing me to new people every day and the lesson I've learned here is is being on other platforms as long as you don't spread yourself too thin and be on every platform with all the same content can really bring back a lot of traffic to what matters most to you okay that's it I hope you all have a happy holiday if you enjoyed this please like subscribe and leave a comment below I answer every comment so feel free to ask away any thoughts you have if you enjoy this video you will surely enjoy my more exciting content so click on one of the three playlists now on how to go from zero to 10 000 fans or how to get your music noticed or how to blow up on Spotify in 2022 thanks for watching