 Musicians don't even know when things are going well. I love DIY music culture, but one of the things that a lack of mentors and experienced label people brings to musicians is misery and that they don't even know when they're doing well. On so many of my consulting calls, they'll say something like, only two of the last people I reached out to wanted to collaborate with me. Or I wrote 25 playlists and only three said yes. You gotta realize, that's an insanely high batting average and you're killing the game if things go that well. The road to success is paved with rejection. And you need to see rejection as a callus you build up. Except if you're cold play when David Bowie did them like this. Then they should have given up. One hour of planning your releases gives you an advantage over most of the music business. So this dude Warren Buffett, the type of dude, finance bros and khaki pants used to have man crushes on before they discovered their hairplug, Donning King, Elon Musk. But Warren once said this really great quote. An idiot with a plan could be the genius without a plan. And truly I can't think of a much better quote that explains the way the music business works. Since many musicians are often truly absolute morons, but that person on their team with a plan that takes their raw idiot charisma that happens to have some musical prowess and gives it a plan is how they blow up. I recently made a video on how planning helps engage potential fans attention span and how algorithms all work together. And truly just doing this one hour of work that I explained can be a game changer for getting fans. Want to get fans to share your music to their friends on social media? Once you start to have a few fans, find something cheap you could share with them. This could be one of those enamel pins or a cassette of your music. Mail it for free to 20 of your most engaged fans and make them do something for it like sharing your new song. Send the gift to three of your friends before that and have them make a video in their stories and TikToks where they play your song while showing the gift you sent them the day before the packages you sent to your fans arrive. The fans will see the examples of your friends putting your song in their videos and showing it off after you share it on your stories and do edit and you'll encourage your fans who got the gift to do the same thing and you'll get all their friends to hear your song and learn about you. How to find your perfect social media handle? Fun fact, if you're like me and hang around a bunch of big time music managers and publicists, there's this one dumb thing that they complain about every time we're at the bar that makes their life hell that you wouldn't expect. And that's if the artist has a different name on one social media platform compared to another it will haunt them daily with marketing mistakes and opportunities lost when their TikTok name gets tagged instead of their Instagram name and now some random girl in Ohio is getting a thousand followers instead of their face tattooed rapper. So to easily check if all your names are available on every platform, use this site name check which can instantly show you if putting .mp3 or ya boy at the end of your name or whatever the hell y'all are doing these days is going to work on all the platforms. Machine Gun Kelly is right and Kanye is wrong. I find it hilarious that the internet is making fun of MGK for this video of him trying to get a bunch of boring ass major label suits hyped on his song and yet Kanye being defeated and shy in a room and suits walking out is inspiring. I'll take Kanye's music over MGK's any day but y'all are learning the wrong lessons here. As someone who's spent countless hours in those major label walls the people who work at them aren't what you'd call charismatic but boy do they respect those who have that. MGK being cringe but showing how hard he'd sell a song is the right way to play this game in that room as it shows he's going to take it as far as he can whereas Kanye looking as confused in a meeting room as he looks today as to why Kim wants nothing to do with him that ain't it. Too many of you don't get that you need to be an exciting ambassador for your music otherwise people aren't going to give you attention. Bet you don't know what every major label in Big Indie is changing their budget to spend more on. So many DIY musicians have no connection to what is actually happening in the more professional part of the music business and don't get that a huge shift is happening. So many label friends I talk to tell me how they spend all their time now working on features collaborations and remixes with other artists instead of content since nothing has ever offered this big an opportunity for growth for artists than this because once you do a collaboration with another artist and you're both tagged on Spotify you start algorithmically building with that artist and ending up on the release radar the Spotify radio and Discover Weekly of the artist you do these collaborations with as well you have free advertisement for yourself on a song the fan may like that's sitting on their artist page for all of time literally there's never been a greater marketing move than this and that's why everyone is leaning into it and you see so many collaborations right now. Here's three tools to figure out what you sound like. So many of you are clueless on how to promote your music aside from wasting money on useless Facebook ads or playing the same gig over and over but the most effective way is to find your community and research it but even more of you have no idea what you sound like to even begin that so try these three tools every noise at once will show you micro genres of other artists or even yourself if your songs are semi-popular on Spotify whereas friends to the ends genre detector could show the artists and genres including their popularity score as well a lot of users of my Facebook group at Discord love submit hubs hot or not tool where you enable comments since while some of those comments are annoying a lot of people then compare you to other artists which my group finds really helpful to help them understand what they sound like. The album cover is the least important thing in your budget every week when I do consulting calls with musicians we look at the budget and I see some wild budgets for album covers unless you're gonna put physical albums out the album cover is the least important thing you could spend money on if someone is looking at your album cover most of the time they're about to listen to your song anyway or the covers are so small on streaming music they can barely make out what's there I'm not saying to put out trash art but you could reuse the same high quality image by just dropping new text or changing the background color on an image and save yourself time and money as long as it's based on a high quality image you can milk this for countless releases how diverse can you be with your music before it hurts your music promotion one of the most popular questions I get in my YouTube comments is how diverse you can be in sound before it hurts you so this is a complicated question but here's a simple way to look at it there's a bunch of artists who could do a country song then a dance song and still have their audience love it all but if you haven't built a fan base up yet the algorithm will often punish you if you go too diverse and sadly this makes it a hill that's steeper for you to climb in your promotions since Spotify judges putting your music in their algorithm by how many people skip it and when you're extremely diverse the likelihood that you're pleasing the fans of your hip-hop songs with your ska song goes down greatly with that said the only way you make great music is if you make the music you want to hear but if you want as many people to hear it as possible it sometimes helps to do different genres under different artist names and support the musicians they feel the closest bonds to one of the things I think some DIY musicians miss out on is that fans spend money and share the posts of the artist they feel closest to there's been so many studies that have shown this dating back to the semital one by MTV in 2012 and countless since that proved this feeling close to an artist comes from a connection yet so many musicians spend their days plotting how to avoid those connections by being anonymous or working on songs that they think will make them look cool instead of writing about their authentic emotions and showing them to the world but I got bad news for those musicians for years we've lived in a world where even the dumbest music fans can sniff out the musicians who are faking it so you have to remember your time on social media should be spent showing parts of you fans could bond with as well as in your music making sure you're also being vulnerable and guided by making as an intense emotion as possible since that makes the best music and what excites fans the most stop caring about view counts on YouTube so many musicians freak out about the idea of having a video of just their album cover that comes out first then a lyric video or a visualizer and then a music video because they worry about the plays being spread between all of them and not have a big number to impress grandma and show her how you're doing big things while I'm sure grandma is real sweet you really need to get past gatekeepers and they're gonna look at your Spotify and look at how many streams your song has monthly listeners and if things look impressive they're gonna make sure all those plays aren't fake and from Bot Farms in Russia in New Zealand since I know some of you think you're being sneaky but you're not concentrate on engaging real fans and the enthusiasm will be easy to see by anyone who's worth working with here's the easiest way to get streams for your song that actually works one of the dumbest things I see musicians miss doing is they should always link to a playlist of their music instead of an individual song when you look at an individual song on Spotify once it's done it starts playing the Spotify radio of that song which then plays other artists when you play one video on YouTube it could start playing a tutorial on building a desk afterwards so always have a playlist of the best experience a fan would have listening to your music with similar songs as they won't hit stop until they hear a bad song most of the time and will keep listening and driving up your streaming numbers music stacks can help you market your music you may know music stacks as the site that will show you Spotify API information about your track like its popularity score which you know is the metric of whether Spotify is gonna put the song into its algorithm but it can be used for more than that if you scroll down a bit on your song's page it will show you songs your song is similar to you can then put the most popular of these songs on your artist playlist next to yours and if fans engage with that playlist it will continue to up the level Spotify sees to connect you to the songs that are most similar to you and help the algorithm further strengthen the suggestions it will make for your song to be recommended when the other artist song is played on things like Spotify radio four weeks a year you shouldn't promote your music and what I mean by this is if you're planning your biggest events on certain weeks they're gonna do way worse than they would if you just waited a few weeks for example the level of consumption of new music drops greatly in the last two weeks of the year especially as the end of year list seem to now come out the week after Thanksgiving but just as bad the internet seriously slows down the last week of July and the first week of August as it's hot out in one of the most popular vacation weeks oh yeah and never release music near a presidential election since your posts just get buried with all the news Spotify canvas boosts your streams so it's time to make one seriously people half the time when I stream your Spotify songs there's no canvas now I know a lot of you think why do they work but here's the thing when people share them in Instagram stories or have something fun to look at they feel the song more when they see the visual and this is one of the simplest things you can do to get your song a little more juice and Spotify confirms this and they say you're a hundred and forty five percent more likely to get track shares 20 percent more likely to get added to playlist and this is so easy to do since they are three to eight seconds and you could do the same canvas for your song as another one just change the color or filter a tiny bit pre-saves don't do what you think they do fun fact Spotify can't see the pre-saves you get on your song until it's released the pre-saves are stored inside the tool that does the pre-saving which is not in Spotify system so Spotify only sees the save on the day that your song actually comes out but here's the thing you all think this helps get that song on Spotify playlist when it doesn't do that how to get more streams and connections in the algorithms on the night after your music video drops announced an Instagram or TikTok live depending on which works better in your music promotions schedule everyone who worked on your song to come on for 15 minutes and talk about making it this includes all the musicians who played on the track producers mixers video directors actors hey even someone who is just a good vibe that was hanging out this will alert all their followers who are online that they are doing a live and you could have them come promote it which will in turn promote your song and bring your awareness to what you're doing with the people most likely to enjoy it since they worked on your track this literally puts you in front of the eyes of all the people who worked on that track who have followers who are most likely to be interested in what they do