 You'd have to be a fool to not accept that some part of building up a fan base, especially early on, all comes from maintaining relationships and playing the game of keeping up with contacts that support you. For many of us creative types, especially the introverted ones though, that thought can be exhausting. In this video, I'm gonna talk about how to be effective in making sure everyone you meet knows what you're up to and that they should give you opportunities because you're working hard. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, this is Muse Formation. So this week's episode is gonna be quick because I'm working on a really, really long and in-depth one for next week. But I also think this is one of the most important practices I never hear discussed, yet I've seen so many popular musicians build a fan base doing this. So it's absolutely stupid to pretend maintaining relationships and keeping in touch with the people you meet isn't part of building up a fan base, especially early on. I know tons of fools who disobey Cannon's Law and say all you need to do is write good songs. Here's a refresher if you don't remember Cannon's Law. I derived Cannon's Law from Godwin's Law, which is an internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Now for Cannon's Law, the difference is, is that if there's a discussion of any artist, someone's gonna chime in with a tired old saying, all you have to do is write good music and then everything will work out. That is the main ingredient and there is no better marketing tool than great music, but it takes tons of strategy to break through all the people who are making great music today. Now that we got that out of the way, let's talk about the piece of building a fan base that douchebags like to call networking. But I like to think of this as maintaining friendships and reminding yourself and the people that you meet and build bonds with that you're doing cool things. Throughout your time in music, you're gonna get emails from people asking about your music or saying that they like it. You're gonna bond with other musicians and make connections, collaborate with people and get to know each other. And so much of this is about remembering that you had that moment and not getting lost in what you have to do each day. But as you do this with more and more people, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of everybody you've met and who you should keep up with. In order to combat that, there's a way to keep track of all these contacts and make sure you do this effectively. Here we see a fake spreadsheet I've made of my joke band Incell Hypebeast. What I have here is a list I enter into from the spreadsheets app inside my phone. I regularly keep updated as people ask me about my music. Every time somebody reaches out and it emails me, I have this list sitting handily on a pin tab in my desktop and I enter it in so I remember to keep in touch with them regularly. What you can see here is in this spreadsheet we have a bunch of names. This is each person who's gotten in touch with us. Then we have their contact and how they got in touch with us whether that's their email text or their Insta or whatever. And then we have notes about how we met. So sometimes you need a refresher if you haven't talked to this person for a while. As well, especially if you're a touring artist, you wanna have the city there and so you remember to invite them to the shows when you're in town. So what I have then here is a bunch of my song names and I'm gonna remember now to enter in on this access all the events. So if there was a tour coming up or something like that or a music video I wanted them to see, I may enter that too. And then I'm gonna put an X every time I've contacted them. Now some people you may not wanna contact with everything if this track isn't your best track, you may wanna hit them only with the bangers that you're releasing, but you wanna enter in each time you make contact with them and check through your phone or your email and see if you've been making contact with them regularly and use this as a way to catalog all that stuff. So why do we do this? If your music is even halfway decent and somebody sees that you hustle this hard and they have opportunities, they're gonna wanna give it to you because they know you're on top of your business. We have to remember most people in the music business are hacks. So they're looking for people who are gonna do their work for them. And when they see that you're this good at maintaining relationships and keeping people updated, they're gonna wanna help you out. People are attracted to other people who work hard and value their interactions and this practice shows that that's you. Great to be discouraging at first, you could be doing a lot of work for very little reward, but this is one of those practices that pays off after time. I think I wanna remind everyone that I say regularly is I never said yes to a single one of the bands I managed when they first asked me. I instead gave in from their persistence because I saw that they were really working hard. They kept me up to date with what they were doing and I saw they were making progress without me and I knew that if we united that we could be an unstoppable force and that's what happened with all the bands I managed. And I ended up saying yes around the third to fifth time that they asked. These people you're gonna contact regularly are gonna remember to keep you in mind for shows, other opportunities, tours, placements, et cetera and doing regular reminders by keeping in contact with them and showing you value their connection and making sure you ask about what they're up to and you have a nice conversation, you try to make a bond and be friends. This will help get you places and keep you organized and making sure everything works out for both of you and that you trade off and keep building the relationship together. That's it, am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them so leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna 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 has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlist or con artists, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at Jesse Cannon on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video, there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.