 So in this video, I'm going to give you a strategy that you can use to build a fan base in the city that you live in. Now, I am a big advocate for getting fans wherever they come from, right? I don't care if they live in another city, another country, or in a place that you've never been to or didn't even know exists. I like fans coming from wherever they want to come from. I just like seeing the process of an artist gaining fans. But I do understand when artists do want to build fans in their own city. Maybe they want to build up their local clout. Maybe it's for resource reasons, right? Like they can't get to other places. They want to build their fan base in a place where they can actually touch the people. Whatever your reason is, I completely understand. And once again, I'm going to give you a strategy that will allow you to build your fans in the city that you live in. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Kory. I'm co-founder of Country Brand Agency, a content consulting and music marketing agency that's worked with artists like 24k Golden, Macy Gray, Alexis Capelli, Tony Melman, and a bunch of really dope artists. And my goal here is to give you all the music marketing sauce that I can so that you can make your dreams into a reality. Now that being said, let's go ahead and get into the video. I do want to once again preface that this strategy will work assuming you have good music and you have good content. Now, some of these things aren't content specific. They don't necessarily all revolve around like great content. But it does help in a lot of these cases. And good music is good music. If your music sucks, then this isn't going to work for you. So fix those two things and then come back to this video once you do. And you'll be ready to start building that fan base in wherever city that you live in. Now, tip number one is to run ads to the sea that you live in. And this is going to be paid advertising on whatever social platform that you feel the most comfortable with. This could be Facebook. This could be Instagram. This could be TikTok. This could be YouTube. I personally would recommend running TikTok ads. That's the whole story for another different video. But once again, start with running ads on the platform that you feel the most comfortable with. This will allow you to start to build some brand awareness in your city and start to pull in people that may not know you personally. But still live where you live and can become a potential fan in the area that you're trying to build in once again. Now, tip number two is going to be to connect with local influencers. Now, every city has influencers that kind of control the culture in their city. This could be DJs. This could be other artists. This could be local celebrities. This could be local influencers. These could be the bad girls that everybody in the city is trying to get with, right? Every city has local influencers. And these people are going to be the way that you can tap into your local culture and get in front of more people in a bigger audience. Now, working with them is going to be like working with any influencer. What you need to do is reach out to them on their platform of choice. You know, deem them respectfully, ask something or say something like, hey, my name is such and such. I'm an artist. I live in the same city that you do. I came across your profile and I would love to use you and some music promo if you don't mind. From there, inquire about their pricing, their rates and what their terms are for getting promoted and then work with them. Work with them consistently, right? If you find five or 10 good influencers in your city, they have good followings on taxing you on the prices and seem to get you good results. These are going to be long term people that you want to build with whose platforms you will want to use consistently. And once again, these don't have to be massive influencers. They don't have to have millions of followers of tens of millions of followers. They just need to have pool in your city. So once again, that could be a DJ. That could be girls that everybody's trying to get at. That could be the guy that owns a really cool clothing brand that everybody knows about. Whoever your local influencers are, connect with them, build a relationship with them, work with them consistently, and this will help you to start to build that local fan base that you want. Tip number three is going to be to collab with other artists in your city. Now, I don't care if that artist has 20 fans or if they have 2,000 fans, you need to be collaborating with other artists in your city that are making a name for themselves and are actively working on building out their own fan base as well. What this is going to do is it's going to introduce you to other people in your city that have not heard of you for whatever reason and give a reason for those artists and their fans to come and rock with you on your platform. Now, I'm not saying that you have to shoot to the top of the artists that are in your city, right? Like you don't have to work with the biggest artists in your city. For example, if you live in Atlanta, I'm not saying go work with Young Thug or go work with Metro Boomin. You want to start with artists that are relatively close to where you are in size and then build from there. Then if you do have the resources and the connections to get a bigger feature from a bigger artist in your city, then make that happen because it will help you out. But you don't have to start there. Once again, if the artist has 50 fans in your city, they have 500 fans in your city. However many they're going to be useful in terms of helping you build out your local fan base and build out in the city that you do live in. And because you don't have to work with just the big artists in your city, this massively expands the pool of artists that you can work with. Now, finding these artists may be the trick. Personally, the best way I found to find local artists is using platforms like TikTok where you can look through hashtags, Spotify playlist. I know a lot of platforms have regional playlists, Spotify has one, Audio Mac has one. Audio Mac may actually be the best place to go look because I know they currently update their playlists with a lot of local acts. But do your research, ask people that you know in your city like, hey, who are some other artists that you're listening to that are from the city right now? Go to parties, go to shows, go to places where local acts are performing and treat yourself like an A&R. Like you want to scout out artists that seem to make good music, seem to be up your alley and once again have some type of pool in your city so that you can reach out to them, make a connection and get some work in. And lastly, do local shows, right? If you're a small artist, you should be looking to do shows in your city. I would say like honestly as much as you can, like when you're in the beginning process and just building out, but as you start to build your fan base more and more, you want to do them a little bit more sparingly once every other couple of months or once a month if you just like performing and want to kind of keep the frequency up. Now getting on the show is probably much harder than I'm making it seem. Now the way that you can make this happen is once again, you want to go network with promoters, network with DJs, network with people who are throwing shows in your city. So if you know, let's say a college organization that books out local acts all the time, go to those shows and try to network with the person that's putting that together. If you know a DJ that does like an open mic at the venue, network with that DJ, reach out and see how you can get put on those local showcases. Now worst case scenario, you can always throw your own show. I won't get too deep into it into this video that honestly needs to be a song video about how to throw shows, but all you really need to do is find a venue, find a DJ, you know, get some sound equipment, find some other artists to perform and you could throw your own show in your city. You can do this as consistently as you want to and it's consistently as your budget will allow you to. And personally coming from Atlanta, I've seen a lot of artists use this strategy. Like I have lots of artist friends in Atlanta that throw their own showcases pretty frequently and they're consistently bringing out a couple of hundred people, probably most of them being new people and adding people onto their fan base, right? Which is one thing that I don't think a lot of artists think about in itself, but doing a show is marketing in itself, right? You perform in front of a crowd of people that haven't heard of you, you do great, they like your music, they go listen to you later and you gain a new fan. So once again, guys, those are my four tips on how you can build a fan base in the city that you live in. I'm going to recap them really quickly. One, run the ads to the city that you live in. This could be on any platform. I would recommend doing it on the platform that you feel comfortable with. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever that looks like for you, just do it. Secondly, you want to connect with local influencers in your city. These could be girls that everyone knows about. These could be DJs, they could be people that have clothing lines. Whoever has some type of pool and some type of cloud in your city, connect with them and treat them like you would treat any influencer in terms of a marketing campaign. Thirdly, you want to collide with other local artists. Once again, they don't have to be a massive artist. If they have fans, no matter how many fans they have in your city, do a song with them and pull those people into your own fan base to know why you have a lot more pool in the city that you live in. And more people will start to recognize you as the person that collide with this other artist that they know about. And lastly, do local shows as much as you can. If you're a smaller artist that's just starting to grow out, do them as frequently as you can, once a month, once every couple of weeks, depending on what your scene looks like and who you have connects with it. And as you get bigger, start to do them a little bit more infrequently, maybe once every other month, once every couple of months, just so you don't kind of lose that mystique and lose that touch, but you're still able to pop out on the scene and gain some new fans when you do your shows and when you perform. And I do want to say this because I know you guys are going to ask in the comments, you can do this strategy for really any city, right? Like if you have the resources to be able to do two through four in any city that you want to build in, then you could enact the same strategy in every single city that you want to build a fan base in. Of course, I made this for building a local fan base because I know a lot of you guys will be able to peep out a lot of this stuff a lot more easily because you live there, but you can do this in wherever you live at. Let me know what you guys think about this strategy in the comment section below. Is this something that you think you'll be doing? Have you done something similar? Is there something you would add to this that you feel like I missed that could be a lot more useful to building a local fan base? Drop it in the comment section below. I'll check it out. And if I feel like I need to do an update, trust and believe that we'll be a part two. Now, other than that, if you feel like you learned something from this video, share this video with one artist that you feel like could use this information and needs to start building their fan base locally within the city that live in. Also, make sure you like, share, subscribe. Once again, my name is Cory, and I'll see y'all next time. Peace.