 We all know you need to find fans for your music, musicians to collaborate and play shows with, and be friends with. But the problem is so many artists don't know how to do this or do ridiculous things like sliding in DMs with links to their soundcloud or fire emojis. In this episode I'm going to show you one of the main techniques I use to find community for artists and build up their fan bases by finding where they belong. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is MuseFormation. So with the intro video to this playlist, the first thing I talked about was finding community. Since I see it as one of the most important parts of building a fan base in music. But finding community can sound stupid and cheesy, like it's just making connections. But I want to talk about actual deliberate things and practices and techniques I do to build up an artist's fan base and the people they connect with. There's a reason I lean so heavily into this. I'm lucky enough that I'm constantly making these cool audio documentaries for Atlantic electoral records on how their artists built themselves up. And what I always see is that some part of their origin story is that the community around them came together. I've also seen it in my own practice as a manager. I've worked with so many groups to build them up to a big fan base. And the key of how they get from zero to hundreds of thousands of fans is finding the community that nurtures them and builds them up. We have to remember that whether it's artist endorsements, connections or fans just telling other friends of theirs about your music. That is how you actually build up a fan base. This is why I go so hard on talking about finding the like-minded people who you will team up with and the fans who will boost you up. It's so important to find the right place where you belong because those people are so much more likely to build you up rather than just randomly DMing people and taking shots in the dark all over Twitter all day. Like so many of these idiots do in my DM box. We have to remember that when you're going through Reddit subgroups or Facebook groups or any other message board or Discord chat or whatever. This is where you'll meet the cool people you'll do collaborations with and cross promote and they'll announce your songs when they come out and you'll announce theirs and you'll build each other up together. I know so much about this. Since the bands I managed back in the day Man Over Board and Transit had such a tight knit community that people still talk about it to this day. In fact, we still have a message board that's thriving today with 30,000 people on Facebook that I literally started building in 2010. I even think about other ways that this really helps people out. You know the group the chain smokers. Oh, sorry, there's some awful taste in my mouth now. In a video with Future Music magazine, they actually talked about a really smart technique that they used to do. They would go on the hype machine and constantly listen for inspiration but they'd be scouting the artists who were smaller and up and coming and then they would do collaboration tracks with them and that's what built them up to where they are today. This is Finding Community and this is what you should be doing. So that's what we're about to get into is I'm going to show you how I would do this and how I would find community if I was a brand new artist starting out. So you're probably wondering how do I actually do this and what does this look like while you do it. So I'm flipping over the screen because I'm going to actually show you what I do when I first start working with a musician to find this community that's going to bolster you up. The first step is what I like to call Identify. So what do I mean by Identify? We need to identify what type of music you're making and what are the acts that are similar to you. So for an example, we're going to use my awesome band that doesn't actually exist which is called In Cell Hype Beast because I'm an idiot and I like dumb names. We're going to say since I'm wearing my Sick Defend 100 Gecks shirt that the group sounds like 100 gecks because I feel like that's a good place to start from an obscurity standpoint of that. It's not a lot of groups sound like this. So it's not like we're doing something that's super broad and it'll give us some good answers and show you what it's like when you're making music that's not the easiest to define. So if you look here I've started a spreadsheet. So first off we got artists, we got the sound and then we got locations and all those things are going to be things we're going to try to think about when we identify acts. So we're going to want to identify other acts that are under the genres that we fall under. So we're going to say that In Cell Hype Beast is kind of hyper-pop-deconstructed club or whatever these dumb genres people are talking about on the internet are. And we're going to say I'm in Brooklyn, New York and maybe we'll make another obscure place like let's say Evanston, Illinois. Actually let's back up. Let me show you how I found these targets. So what I did is I'm like alright In Cell Hype Beast sounds closest to 100 gecks. So I went over to Spotify and I said fans also like and I put all of these ones into a list. I listed some of them and made sure that I sound like them and some of them I don't. And so then I added those all to my list over here and that gave me a start. Now here's a fun thing. If you sign into your Spotify for Artists page you can actually go and look at who other people think you sound like and who other people are listening because it'll show up right there at Spotify for Artists or just on your Spotify page right here if you're not in Spotify for Artists. So that's a great way to start. But there's some other ways we can identify this stuff. For example we can go into Bandcamp and we're going to say while we'll probably search for all those bands and we'll try to find their other collaborators and stuff like that. We'll first go in here and say music tagged with Hyperpop. Now if you have a two word genre I would also encourage you to take away the space sometimes and see what happens. Every one of these searches has different little weird things that they need from you to make sure that you get the right search results. So as you can see though Bandcamp is very excited about Hyperpop. It's even telling you some other things that are commonly tagged with it. PC music makes a lot of sense. Bubblegum bass is definitely a thing I've heard. Post-pop absolutely. So what I would do is the first thing I would click around these and see if these people sound like you. If they do sound like you I would start putting them maybe on another list in another column of like the people you found. And we're going to probably target them too and do further searches on them. But these will also probably be people that you're going to contact to collaborate with. Trade shows with just in general try to see what's going on with them. So I would listen through these things see what happens. You know if we click on the first one. Well look at that it turns out they're in the same city as me Brooklyn so that would make it really easy. Now the one problem is I doubt that Emo R&B is actually going to be what I sound like. So I have a feeling this is not going to go so well with a match with these guys but you never know. So regardless I would go through this tag and then I would also punch in the artist. So like if we punch in 100 gags let's see what happens. There we are. Okay so they have a nice thing for their record. So then another thing we can do is as we can see they've collaborated with AG Cook. So maybe I'm going to add AG if that's not an injury reserve. I'm going to definitely add that to my targets and see if this sounds good. And this is all how we start to find who's in the community. So I should say particularly the reason we put Evanston Illinois a small town in is that you can search towns and find clues on band camp and all sorts of other places about who else is in your local community because we have to remember it's not always about being a perfect genre match because sometimes your audience is going to overlap with people enough that it's worth it for you to reach out to them even though you don't sound the same as long as you feel like you got some sort of connection with them. So I would constantly keep searches and watch local venues and follow the places people play on social media and start investigating those groups and add those to your targets particularly that's a super super smart thing to do and yes that's hard to do in Brooklyn but you start to learn where like in a big city the groups like you play over time especially your Google alerts and stuff like that will tell you that over time and you can find those artists and you can find more people you should be reaching out to particularly around you because that's going to be your real friends you actually hang out with and collaborate and you can see. So then I would probably do the same thing on SoundCloud. So we're on my SoundCloud page I'm going to put in HyperPop. Now I am going to give you some bad news SoundCloud really sucks at this but you are able to see a few things is like for example Playlist. Okay well Slater was one of the people compared to Hundred Gecks so this might be a perfect thing for us to look at. I would list this playlist and see who you find in there. Another crumb on the bread trail here. I would be scrolling through these and trying to find who is in your genre and who is going to have the sounds like you. So next we can go over to Instagram same idea. So as you can see I already searched for HyperPop and I can hit follow right there and that's going to give me posts from the HyperPop hashtag. I can scroll through see who's following following people start to get to know what my community looks like. Next I'm probably going to go over to YouTube. So let's do that. So YouTube can be important not for just finding the music but you know as we see there's some people making playlists of this so we can find more artists. But also a great thing that can often happen is that you know let's put in yet again Hundred Gecks. I bet you if we scroll for a little bit so for example they were on Fish Center. So you know that you could probably try to approach Fish Center and my echo good they were reviewed by Anthony Fantano. Now there's probably tons of other vloggers who have reviewed them but I would be starting to make a list on my sheet of I'd go further down and start putting in people who are vloggers and make all sorts of different thing categories in here. Maybe this is better to do on one of these verticals like vloggers. Anthony Fantano is probably not going to review you if you have no fans since he's the big dog and amazing at what he does but for a good example this is a great thing to have. I'd keep scrolling through see who else is right. You know this guy did a reaction video maybe they'll do one to you and laugh at your music like he's clearly doing the 100 Gecks. And yeah and you could go pretty deep on these searches like sometimes you can go 10 pages in and find tons of vloggers and yes they may only have 200 views but those 200 views can be potential fans and a way you build this haystack of a fan base. So another thing we should talk about is I mentioned before the chain smokers with Hype Machine. Hype Machine is a great place to look but instead we're going to probably look for actual artists. So let's put in Hannah Diamond since that's one that I was targeting. So the main thing that we're looking for on here is if Hannah Diamond's been posted about for some blogs because what Hype Machine traditionally used to do is it would aggregate the blogs that are talking about certain artists and then you start to know who may write about you. So for example this Hannah Diamond thing was written about on Tiny Mixtapes which is a great blog. So then we see Tiny Mixtapes thing and they tell us their web address. So I would be going back into my spreadsheet and writing blogs. So this would be one that you're going to hit it with a pitch for your next single and put on your press for list. So now we have some clues there. What about Reddit which is an amazing place to make friends and meet people in your community. So let's do 100 gecks. Well they have their own subreddits so I would definitely be joining that if I was signed in. PC Music sounds exactly right that they're there. I see they're getting posted on hip hop heads, indie heads, pop heads, Fantano Forever. All these little Reddit subreddits are people talking about so it's probably places that you should be participating if you want to start to be a part of that community. I would also do this search on Twitch but I'm going to admit I'm an old Brooklyn hipster not a gamer so I don't know quite much about doing this. Whenever I try to do Twitch it doesn't work out so well for me but I would do it if you know what you're doing on here. Next, Tweetdeck. So Tweetdeck is a product of Twitter and what's interesting you can do with Tweetdeck for example is you can go, let's do hyper pop. Let's put it in quotations too because I think that's going to give us a better result but I may be wrong. So what Tweetdeck will do is it'll show you everybody who's writing about hyper pop. So this is a cool thing because you can just open this from time to time when you have it and then you can either one start following people who write about it. See, give us some experimental hyper pop. Well you're like hey I got experimental hyper pop so either one you can follow this person or two you can go under here and you can add them to a list of potential fans and I would make that private because I know you don't want to embarrass yourself and then it's going to ask you to do this and there you go and now it has this person's tweet so you're going to see this all the time. So let's say you find a vlogger or a blogger you can make other different lists for all those people and you can watch and scroll and start up conversations once you have something to say to these people. What about Satan itself, Facebook? I would be going in and let's see if there's a hyper pop Facebook group since the best way for Facebook to help you is usually pages and groups. So as we can see this might be something this might be something this might be something I would follow these things maybe I would and I'd click around see if they're worth following. These pages don't look very pertinent to what hyper pop actually is as a genre but now we got groups. Not seeing anything good but not every genre or micro genre has a Facebook group but you know you're from Brooklyn maybe Brooklyn DIY groups NYC DIY music that's definitely one I would be joining I would look around your local area I would also put in obviously we're going to put in at some point 100 gecks so they got a group for discussion truck posting there's a truck in their video so I'm sure that's something I would be joining these and starting to get to know people so we're saying this getting to know people thing we have to remember what this actually is this is genuine interactions no goddamn fire emojis no spamming people with the links to your music please please please try to make genuine connections with people because that's the only way they listen to your music you are wasting your time plugging in fire emojis onto people's posts that never worked in the first place and it especially doesn't work in 2019 so we're going to collect all these communities you know we're going to write down all the places and we're going to regularly go to these so now that we have all this stuff identified what about how we keep collecting all of it yes we're going to regularly visit Twitter and we're going to do all the searches for all the different artists we've identified and we're going to put them all through all these different filters we just discussed and also things like Google Alert so what is a Google Alert Google gives you this free service where you can get alerted every time something happens so here's a bunch of the ones I actually have it's an old record label I used to consult for my books name is my name I used to manage this band Man Overboard and here's a good trick is you can put minus things link way to as a song called Man Overboard I didn't want to hear about that definitely don't want to hear about oceans or boats it'll take all that out well when that works at least I'm going to say deliver it to useformation at gmail.com since I want to know it and then they will email me every time somebody mentions that and then I will know about it which is really really helpful since what that's going to tell you is all these different vloggers who are posting when there's posts in different reddit boards and then you can still keep building up that spreadsheet of all the community and I would just keep adding all that stuff to it now a pro tip is you can make a separate gmail address just for those google alerts if you don't want this to annoy you all day or you can filter that in gmail so that you can just read it and skip the inbox I'll make a video about that some other time anyway I would be adding all that stuff into google alerts there's another free alert system that you can do called talk walker that picks up totally different stuff than google I would be doing that too what these talk walker and google alerts actually look like are things like this as they'll email you whenever somebody is writing about the things you put in so here's a group I worked with called the setting for mashes that is writing a press release that got on a blog about working with me this one mentioned as you can see is very very expensive but I will tell you this is the best one for this but as you can see it's not the cheapest and it's not really worth it since you can't put a lot of different alerts in that much money which is fucking ridiculous but if you're running a big label or management company this could be totally worth it because this tool is awesome and there's tons of more expensive tools and in fact if you have a good google alert tool that you really like please hit me in the comments because I love trying these out so we're going to regularly go in and you know when you start to run dry with this some of the stuff you do is search again and you're not going to run dry very often you're going to go and read it you're going to always have these communities to go into each day and start meeting people reading and finding more places that groups like you played that there's blogs and blogs and people you can collaborate with another thing you'll find in these alerts is discord chat addresses that you can join you'll find message boards that exist as bulletin boards as well there's so many different things in these alerts feel free to be broad in your searches and trying to find communities since people are not limited in what they listen to so another thing with all these artists you're doing make sure you follow them on instagram, facebook, twitter all the things soundcloud and watch what they're doing you're going to get a lot of your marketing inspiration from looking at what these other people do and you also want to make sure you're participating in the communities that they participate because there's probably a reason that they're participating and going so hard on those is that's probably where their fans are especially if they're successful you want to watch for the new emerging places that they're starting to use like if you see a service and you've never heard of it that might be a good hint to check it out because they probably know something about that service growing really fast since they probably have a team that's hip and wise I would devote at least 30 minutes to this a day 300 days a year and make this a very high priority since if you listen to interviews about how most artists get breaks today it's for the people they meet in these communities and you've got to make sure you're devoting the time since this is where so much of your growth is going to come from this is so easy to do while waiting in line while you're in a car going to a show whatever it is, whatever you have a boring moment in life while you're watching some terrible tv show that you shouldn't be paying much attention to or whatever that's it, if you like this video though it's just like this but first, am I missing anything? did you see anything in this video that I didn't explain or that you might notice something about? if so, please head to the comments and let me know and as well, I'm always looking for comments on other videos I could be making on what you need to know please like and subscribe and do the notification thing and all the other things since I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with as well, I have a facebook group that's linked below that is only helpful information no one trying to sell you anything playlists or conars only artists having helpful discussions allowed if you want to learn more about me make a record with me or check out any of my books podcasts or anything else I do go to jessecanon.com or jessecanon on all the socials see you in the next video