 So I spent a lot of time talking to you all on my Discord, Facebook group and on consulting calls and I've noticed a pattern. A lot of you are very proud of your artistic depth but are concerned that an audience won't get what you're all about with just one song. And with good reason, one of the things we discuss so often is that in a playlist dominated world the audience really doesn't form a relationship with you or music unless they go deeper. So many of you want to release bigger releases instead of just a single to show your audience your depth and try to form a deeper relationship with them. Even worse, many of you can't figure out how to get them to simply follow you on socials or Spotify or to stay in touch with you. So in this video, we'll discuss how to build relationships with fans after they hear your music. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to ten thousand fans and this is Muse Formation. So I know sometimes musicians think that the only way an audience will like them is if they see all their depth and talents and that can stem from their own self-consciousness or often delusions as they think their songs that have influences of Blink-22, Newfound Glory and Yellowcard just won't be appreciated unless the world cares how diverse their influences are. But aside for the fact that musicians are, surprise, surprise, way too far up their own ass, it can often be true that if you've worked hard on making your artistic persona filled with a ton of depth, it can help you connect with fans and get people talking about you if you show them more of that depth. A few weeks ago, I had a great talk with Charlie Harding of the amazing podcast Switched On Pop which you should really be listening to. Anyway, he wrote this article for Vox that's a must read and is linked in the description about how the big complaints of musicians today when they blow up on playlists is they can't make the jump to having fans who actually care about them as opposed to just listening to that one song they like on the playlist. The fans don't buy merch or come to the shows which I know a lot of you are concerned about now that we're back to trying to play live again. But truthfully, this isn't new and I've been having conversations about this for at least three to four years. So I've had a lot of time to observe which artists make the jump from being just another song on a playlist to an artist that has fans who are actually engaged with them. Let's talk about why many of the artists don't become an artist all these fans who clearly like their music are engaged with. The most common reason that a fan doesn't stay engaged with you is you don't feed them. Here's an example. I keep this playlist I call Now Now Now on Spotify and it's basically every song I've loved for the past five years from an artist who doesn't have an EP or an album that I can listen to. So I throw them on this playlist and then listen when I want to hear a shuffle of songs I actually enjoy. If I looked through this playlist and tried to figure out why my relationship died with some of these artists and sure enough the number one cause was often close to a year until they would put out another release and since I've talked to tons of friends about this subject over the years they say the same thing. I imagine you even probably feel the same way which is yet another reason to utilize consistent sustained promotion. If you don't know what I'm talking about I highly suggest you watch the playlist on the screen or click on the link in the description below. When you're using CSP and constantly feeding the audience they are inherently reminded of your existence and growing the relationship with you and the curiosity usually gets to them and they will dig deeper on your socials or your videos on YouTube. But there's obviously more to it than just hoping for the best with curiosity. I mean obviously you want to make things easy for your fans and link your socials and your Spotify bio. You did that right? If not please make sure you didn't fuck anything else up and watch my playlist on how to promote your music on Spotify that's linked now or in the description below. Anyway one of the reasons we talk so much about telling stories on this channel is they give your fans something to tell their friends about you but stories also inspire curiosity that keep fans thinking about you and talking to their friends which is why this is so important since the more you're on their mind the more likelihood the relationship is going to keep growing. We have to remember these stories give you the chance to show that artistic depth that you want people to see in you. They can finally see why your friend group should have a reality show or see how much you think about your music or understand what a thoughtful and interesting person you actually are. Whatever it is the stories you tell on social media and in your visuals are how you get past the gap of a fan who listens to you on a playlist and doesn't think more about you and one who does. Since if you aren't telling stories and they check you out they have no reason to follow you especially in a world where they aren't staying tuned to get merch drops or see when you're touring. We have to remember at some point if you're always telling stories and getting other fans excited about you they'll see your name on social media and dig deeper. So it's so crucial that you tell these stories in a consistent and sustained way or you're never going to convert fans from casual listeners. If you don't know what I'm talking about watch this playlist on how to tell stories around your music which is linked on the screen now or in the description. Let's also remember one of the principles we often discuss is the only way fans talk about you is if you do eventful things and if you just make the same video as everyone else where you wrap up the camera in a warehouse in some shitty supreme gear well that's not eventful it's just what all the other fuckboys do. Eventful things are the stories you tell but they also are the conversation pieces that get fans talking about you. The way I often think about music videos or shows or any other marketing we're going to do in a marketing plan is I think about what the fan would tell their friends about it are we doing something so eventful that they'll want to tell their friends and then I would think about what they would say about your marketing move and then I work backwards from there. This technique is somewhat stolen from Amazon was a mandate that you can't ask for a meeting at the company for a product unless you write the press release for what Amazon would announce about it in advance so everyone could think of how to make the product as eventful as possible. But we're talking about relationships here right? Well yes I've told you a thousand times that the consistent sustained promotion is the main way to make that happen but so many of you are impatient and want people to understand you from the jump of your project and while that impatience I think lacks a lot of logic we will discuss that in another video but because I'm a really thoughtful and nice youtuber I'm going to indulge you for a minute here. So we discussed that you need to marry an eventful promotion that people will find remarkable enough to tell their friends with a strong story where people will get to know you well enough they will form a relationship with you where they will think about you more and become a casual fan. So if you're trying to do this I have one example of something that I keep seeing employed more and more. One of the most eventful things you can do is a big narrative video where you tell a longer story or string a bunch of songs together in video form. I like to call these videos a big splash in that since they are remarkable you can make this big splash people turn around to see as opposed to when you release regularly you have more times people may see the ripple you're making since you're spreading it over time throwing rocks in the pond and if you're doing it often enough that last stone is still rippling you could throw another one in the pond and it'll make the last ones rippled even more. The long form video though makes this big splash which sometimes can make the huge difference of people taking you seriously and helps solve the problem people are going to see this as really eventful as opposed to just another music video. This occurred to me recently as two different artists who were on my radar put out these longer form videos and suddenly I became a huge fan of both of them and now I'm totally obsessed with them and they took me from someone who'd maybe give a listen here and there to them to now listening non-stop and texting my friends to check out both of these artists. The first was the hardcore group Turnstyle who I've probably given a cursor you listen to on each of their releases but they never really hit me since when I hear hardcore cliches I'm brought back to sitting through tons of terrible sets of boring hardcore acts all through my teens. I mean I didn't think I would ever even like a hardcore record again but damn what Turnstyle's done here is wild and while it's undeniable that Turnstyle are writing some of the catchiest songs in the genre while also being innovative and has way more depth than anything I've heard since Refuse made The Shape of Punk to come I wouldn't have realized this if I just heard one song but since they released this four song video called Turnstyle Love Connection with transitions in between each song I was able to hear their artistic depth and become more curious and intrigued. I was able to take in how much artistic depth they had and coupled with the impressive visuals I kept coming back to this video again and again and it got me absolutely hooked on this band which is even more impressive as the singer directed the whole thing and if you watch the video it really is impressive. The group telling a story coupled with an incredible visual made me excited to share it with everyone I know who would enjoy it. Now I should say this this was the perfect time for a group like Turnstyle to do this. They've long been that band with the great buzz and doing decent numbers but this is not one of those steps that will cement them in the upper echelons of the genre but since we discussed promoting when you have zero to ten thousand fans on this channel it's important to make the distinction that this wasn't a technique to make them do that type of jump but instead solidify them as a genre leader. So this is a good time to talk about coming out of the gate with these larger statements. Tierra Wack came right out of the gate with her video and album Wack World almost as a mission statement and what made it eventful was a really well-directed 15 minute video with 15 songs all under a minute which as TikTok was beginning to boom got tons of press trying to diagnose this as a trend that we'd all be writing shorter songs for TikTok and if memory serves me right we may have even been calling it bite dance then or something else. Anyway I think that trend was forecasted a bit wrong as songs have needed to exist both in TikTok and outside of it and the fact is one thing hasn't changed about songs in 70 years is that hearing a chorus three times seems to be the most effective way to deliver songs into people's brains so it sticks there. I remember reading an actual scientific study on this in the book Stuck on Repeat and we see over and over again that repeating a hook three times is a law just like gravity. It can occasionally be defied under the right circumstances but most of the time it's going to be the law. Okay but back to Tierra while she seemed to have a solid music business team she also had this hypothesis that this new form of expression in the songs would get people talking and with whatever team she had behind her it really seemed to work as I really heard so many rumblings about her and it made a splash that got her on some pretty sizable features for an artist right out of the gate. The next artist I want to discuss is the other one I recently built a relationship with and was calling all my friends about. Shy Girl who put out the four song big splash video blue. In it she shows the artistic depth a different sound she can do as an artist. Now Shy Girl is one of those artists with a decent buzz with under a dozen songs out already and only one EP out and her numbers really weren't that huge and until this video I feel like she was bubbling under with a little bit of a buzz and was an artist people didn't take as seriously but has now cemented herself as a force to reckon with and one that people are really talking about and there's tons of examples of people doing these types of videos. A bit before her unbelievably sad passing Sophie put out a few new songs with a long form visualizer set called Heaven Suspended which kind of seemed like a repurpose DJ set she did since she didn't get to play it out enough live. I saw this material being DJ'd right before the pandemic but it was an eventful mid-pandemic drop that generated tons of buzz and further submitted her as one of the most interesting artists out there. Quadeca who put out some songs I love this year put out his record from me to you with a full album video and I feel like Quadeca was an artist people weren't taking very seriously and then he did a major turn of perception by showing a ton of artistic depth including being smart enough to caption the full video to show off his lyrical prowess and show the viewers how much different artistic depth he had compared to just being another YouTuber rapper. And let's be real here this is why eventually putting out an album after a while is still necessary for a lot of artists to build relationships with fans since if they like your album it's a much longer relationship building exercise since having someone's listened to 12 songs in a row is literally 12 times more of a relationship builder than a single song but more about that some other time. So unless you have an insane budget you do miss out on CSP keeping you in the conversation when you do these big splashes but there's ways around this. I've even seen shy girl release a whole other video treatment for the breakout song from blue BDE which features the Buzzy UK rapper Slowtie and the video allows her to cash in on some further CSP after generating some buzz from the initial splash of blue but really I know a lot of you want to jump out of the gate with a big splash like this but one thing to keep in mind is if you have no platform it could be hard for this to really work well for you since people need to hear about it. One thing all these rs we just discussed have in common is they had some sort of leg to stand on they were ascending up to a bigger level so many of you will ask about doing this for your first songs and it honestly will 99 times out of 100 be a lot of work for less reward than if you already had some buzz and then put out a big splash. So what my rules for doing a big splash would be is this. Make sure you have an infrastructure for people to see it. Do you have publicity and the right people lined up in a team where if you make an amazing big splash project it will get seen? Is this the time in your career where you can really take you to a new level by doing a huge statement? I would also have a CSP plan for after you make that big splash so you don't drop the ball. You need to keep feeding an audience in these days and if you do that and use CSP after a big splash it's going to go all the more further. Since I don't think these videos are the only route to people taking you seriously and understanding you and most artist's careers are built off consistent sustained promotion today where they let people see their depth and growth over time through stories on social media and their music videos. Let's also remember the majority of artists you've loved in your life have not done these big splash videos but the concept here of doing something like that where you really make a big splash and do a profound statement at some point really can help lift you some levels and that's why I find this worth discussing for smaller ours. Big splashes allow fans to take in a lot of you and build a relationship that keeps them interested in you but there's tons of other ways to do it and the key is to remember to tell stories that show your artistic depth and personality in an eventful way and that will make your promotions more effective and hopefully get the attention of an audience that will see you and jump from that playlist. All right if you enjoyed this video please send it to a friend and discuss it as well as liking and subscribing and getting notified since on this channel we're always discussing things like this. If you want more there's a video on the screen now that talks about how to get your music noticed as well there's also a video on how to go from zero to 10,000 fans and another one on how to promote your music on Spotify. Thanks for watching.