 So if you've watched my channel or listened to any other music markers who have the least bit of a clue, you hear all of us who aren't brain dead zombies talk to you about that you need to tell stories on social media to promote your music. And if this idea hasn't fully clicked with you, judging by the questions in my YouTube comments, you're not alone. I get that this is a relatively new concept and a lot of you are still learning, but I also blame myself as I haven't seen anyone make a video on how to really develop the stories you tell around your songs on social media. So let's fix that. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to 10,000 fans on YouTube. And this is Muse Formation. So since I make a lot of videos around the strategy of how to release your music most effectively, and I'm just saying, if you haven't watched my video on how to do this the most effectively in 2021, then you should watch the video link now or in the description. But as I was saying, when we talk about releasing music effectively, most people are like, Jesse, Jesse, what do I do on this goddamn grand man? I'm trying to show these hoes. I'm real with that. Cool. Very cool way to talk, dude. But I guess I'll oblige this ridiculous line of questioning. So what I always say is everyone who talks about social media strategy is that they're often putting their eyes on the wrong ball. Instead, you should think about how you tell stories on social media, since blasting people with fire emojis begging for people to stream your songs, or talking at people is the saddest thing you could do. This I've signed the DMs of a girl and telling her she's wrong about something. But here, guys, the rub is when I say you need to tell stories around your music. My DMs are filled with Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm not Dr. fucking Seuss. I'm a musician. How the fuck am I supposed to tell stories? Okay, calm down, my guy. Listen, have you ever noticed when you listen to your favorite musicians talk on social media or interviews, how what they say is really interesting and you perk up and listen? That's because most likely some publicist has taught them how to collect their best stories and retain them, and then tell them in a compelling way. But I don't want to go too far down that road, since honestly, I've told this part of the story in a previous video. And at the end of this video, I'm going to have a playlist linked to all the videos I've made on how to tell stories around your music. And if you haven't watched those, you should watch the rest and learn that part of it. Instead, let's talk about what I haven't talked about before. Let's first talk about what you need to do to tell stories well. One of the reasons many of you don't know what stories to tell is you haven't given enough thought as to who you are and what you should be playing up. To do this, I have to plug a video you really need to watch, which is my video on SWAT analysis. But to make it quick, this video is an exercise in recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and then you should make a list of them to refer back to whenever playing your next move in your music, so it always reinforces a smart strategy. But in this SWAT analysis, it's not just your strengths, you should base your stories off of though. The perceptions people have of you that are negative can often be great fodder for what to play down and correct through your stories. One of my favorite examples of this was done by the group Heim. Since people suck for some reason, they assume some young attractive white girls can't be musical prodigies. But the group themselves knew they are actually really amazing musicians. So what did they do to show this off? They made a long video at this amazingly beautiful studio and has all this sick analog gear and they showed them doing live takes of their songs. You seek purely their musical prowess and it helps change the conversation to do a more authentic portrayal of who they actually are. So when we're making stories or even when I'm telling stories, I try to identify what are the things that we need to touch on on each story or episode. I make a Venn diagram of the points to hit in each story that we fill in for each artist. This also identifies what I like to call the boxes we need to check on each story. Here are the topics I try to develop to tick the box of and make developing each story as effective as possible. What is the story that's going to grow the relationship with fans? Now this is the meat of what we do in story time. This is the actual story that's going to change from episode to episode. Whereas the other two may not change each time you do it, you may be reinforcing those over a long period of time. Let's remember fans who are growing relationships with you are fans who are telling other people to listen to you and this is how you grow is them telling friends about your stories since they're getting engaged with them and then they repeat your name on social media and tell their friends all about you. This part of our diagram of what the stories you should be telling is the majority of the story and what you build around and then you put the next two parts into this story. The second part is really important and part of what helps you grow over time. This is your meta-narrative of growth. Your story should have a long-term journey over a year and album cycle or some other milestone that you're growing towards. You should be telling a story that people will see you grow through time and time again with each story and see progress on it throughout time. And then third part is a strength that you can play up. If you know more than most people about a subject, especially one fans are into, if you're really funny, charismatic, or hot, do something that plays up that trait and literally you should not consider the story you're telling ready to publish whether it's a Twitter thread, Instagram caption, instead of stories on Instagram, YouTube persona video, unless as all those boxes checked, you're not ready to hit send on it. Since if you look at many of your favorite artists, they are doing this, but you may not be seeing behind the curtain quite yet that this is what their publicists and them have developed. So let's go a little deeper on all three of these points. So what exactly is a story? So the most important part of telling stories is to ask yourself what is the story you can tell that builds deeper bonds with fans. Now while that can sound real serious, it doesn't have to be serious. The story that builds bonds can be you goofing off or showing behind the scenes of you fucking up takes in the studio in hilarious ways till you finally get something right. An effective story for building your fan base is a story that one of your fans would tell another one of their friends because they witnessed it on your profile and then spread the word about you. Think of it that way and that's how you reverse engineer each story you tell is why would this fan tell other people about the story you just told? A great example of this type of story I just told is if you've ever watched Metallica's Some Kind of Monster who hasn't repeated the story of how hilarious it was with Kirk Hammett fucking up that solo so many times or how bad he was at writing lyrics during it. But let's talk more about what these stories can look like. The most potent form of a story though does involve a little bit of vulnerability. Particularly if you are vulnerable and invites curiosity to listen to a song, if you tell that vulnerable story of lyrics or something that inspired the emotion of a song, since that invites curiosity to actually hear what that emotion sounds like. Since the people who felt similar to you will let me curious to hear and bond with the song and I'd argue even helps people be more susceptible to enjoying the song. Whether you write it in an Instagram caption or talk about it into the camera or microphone, tell the story and let people bond with it. Let's also pause to talk about vulnerability real fast. If you want to go deeper there's a video linked now or in the description where I talk about it, but let's also remember being afraid to say who you are or tell your truth is often why these stories fail. You do have to go deep inside yourself and not be afraid to tell the truth in all its ugliness, beauty, and most of all, realness. Trust me, if you watch this video and then study the artist you love and the stories that spread from them, this is often the key ingredient. But back to development. There's a few easy templates to tell these stories I see work well to get this type of story out of them and often when I'm working on marketing with the musician I will simply send them a google doc with these sayings and have them write about their songs from these perspectives. If one of them is good we tell the story from that perspective and if all three are good we'll use them throughout the promotion of the single and alternate between them. These three prompts are, have you ever, I often feel this way, let me tell you about the time. All these are perfect ways to express a feeling others can connect with. All three immediately allow people to feel a special connection to you even if it's a common occurrence it won't feel that way if the listener doesn't know a ton of people who've experienced something similar to this. The most basic story is behind the scenes footage though, which have many forms of storytelling. Filming what you do when you hang out, the filming of your video or the creation of the song on to play through videos or unboxing videos where you show the elements of the song in a DAW. I even think of a podcast like one of my faves tape notes or song exporter that just tell the story of a song or an album and take you on a journey through how those songs happened. That's a story and if you study these podcasts you can start to hear the stories that get told on the growth of the songs or records now you can tell them yourself. Let's say you're doing a bunch of play through and unboxing videos. What you really want to do is be talking about what your mission is and whether that's you're trying to be the fastest sweep picker or you're trying to be the next generation of songs to shoot people to in video games of course because oddly enough that is a genre of music for some reason. Talk about the journey that you'll make and progress on and take the audience on that journey with you about how you're developing and going further and what you've learned along the way. One of the things you can do is observe comedic tropes. There's always new ways to tell a joke and you can find the form of it and how to tell it yourself and work your own story into it. I will often take a meme trope and push that into these videos because memes can be how you introduce a story to people in comedic formats often work well that way where you can see the template of how someone told a story and then apply it to your own story. Another great way to tell stories is using the prompt why is that. Observations that are witty funny or see what others don't see are absolute gold and these can even be as silly as why is your favorite band always go right when it's about to get mushy or why is it that all the guys who love hyperpop have to tweet mentions of Apex Twin to show that they're schooled on the background of the genre. Whatever it is share a unique insight that people will appreciate and then they'll come back to your content to look for those insights from time to time. The second box to check is meta narrative and this is the story you're telling over the course of a year or an album cycle about how you're trying to grow and what type of band or artist you're trying to become. This can be intellectual growth you're pursuing that can be everything from some new age shit like reading tarot onto the always relevant getting over a traumatic event in your life or growing stronger onto just being the most rocking good time band that shows the people of Missoula Montana how to fucking party and how much better the party keeps getting. I've often seen that audiences respond to a youtuber's journey which stems from the hero's journey that Joseph Campbell coined and that you want to see growth in someone so what you will often see is your favorite musicians are talking about what they are doing and growing or the story they're developing and have dedicated this period of their life to and it should show growth over time and as you release each single you should talk about where you are in this journey since the story keeps people gripped. Here's some examples of this meta narrative in some of the bigger artists of today. Grimes talked about futurism and understanding the collision of climate change on her latest record and our own hedonism around the character she made for that latest record called Miss Anthropocene. She clearly was showing she's obsessed with understanding futurism and where this world is going in this collision of tech and granted she may have taken it a bit too far with having a baby with the psychotech billionaire who tweets about how big his dick is all the time and gets fined by the SCC for being a little too into the W33D but that's another story for another YouTube channel I guess. Anyway meta narrative. Cardi B's meta mission is clearly trying to show everyone that she's the funniest realist person in the game and she will take the excess of her bad bitchness to making what many have called the song of the year about her wet-ass PR. God what a fucking dweeb. She also will talk to Bernie Sanders about politics and laid-truth bombs. She knows her meta narrative is to be bigger, badder and greater than everyone and defy the expectations that she's a fucking idiot which she shows in every story and blows people's minds. Whereas the 1975's Matt Healy is constantly showing he's on a pursuit to understand the human condition whether it's being bold enough to name one of the biggest albums of the year notes on a conditional form onto watching a podcast series where he talks to modern classic composers like Steven Reich and the godfather of all great modern music ideas, Brian Eno. He's proud to show us he's on a quest to explain the world as it stands today to us. Okay but let's now talk about the last box in your story should check which is exploiting a strength. The strength is a quick box to check in videos and like I said if you've done your SWAT analysis you should know your strengths so here's some ideas on how to bring these strengths into your stories. If you're hot make sure to lay a thirst trap get good lighting makeup or whatever and take the time to show you how hot you are since it really helps people watch videos. If you're funny get in as many jokes into the content is super helpful and take the time to do post-production and make sure the jokes time well and do everything you can to make sure you're as funny as possible. If you're a prolific musician use some of your unused song ideas in the background music and your personality videos and point it out from time to time. If you're a really good writer be sure to lean into the written word and even consider parts of your video content as pre-written teleprompter scenes. The key here is to acknowledge your strengths and make sure to play them up in every single story you tell. Every piece of content should check these boxes but let's also remember there should also not be so much formalities. While all these videos should include these three points I'd like to think of this as the building blocks for a great story but randomness is the spice of life and the personnel you have as well some chaos or style or what will make these videos special so feel free to deviate from time to time but use this as the basis for most of your stories. One last tip too ask a question that engages people in your stories. If you're telling a really vulnerable story ask people to also share those vulnerable moments that they've had as well in your captions since this can build bonds. Ever noticed in all the YouTube videos you watch people tell you what they are looking to discuss in the comments? Well you should be doing the same damn thing in your IG captions or Twitter if you could think of a question that will engage people you can really get some mileage on your stories by having your audience share their own. Now as we wind this video down some of you are still going to be feeling frustrated I have trouble with this it's while I do think I'm one hell of a YouTube explainer type dude there's more to it than just me opening your eyes since they're clearly like this when they need to be like this. So let me tell you what the work is from here you need to become a student of this I actually use my incel hype beast Instagram to follow ours just to study the way they're telling stories I have a Twitter list to do the same thing you can make a new account or a list and watch a wide variety of ours and take notes on the way they tell stories or take notes on yourself and how you can tell the stories you have with the way they tell them now that we've reached the end of this video if you're interested in this subject I highly suggest you click the playlist on the send screen on how to tell stories around your music or in the description that is way more videos on telling stories around your music and the other playlist is my continuing series on how to go from zero to 10,000 fans without spending all your money on Facebook ads I hope you watch more and keep learning with me and please let me know what else you'd like to see me do thanks so much for watching