 How often in your life have you thought to yourself, I wish there was a tool for this thing I'm trying to do? And then you Google it, come up with nothing, but then sure enough someone shows you a tool that does what you're looking for and it makes your life infinitely more easy. But since there's so, so many apps out there, what's even worse is sometimes you find an app and it's terrible, but it does the thing you gotta do, but then you find out there's a better version of it that you didn't even know about. Well, if that's you, I have good news for you since in this video, I'm going to show you 10 life-changing tools for musicians to promote their music with that I've thoroughly vetted and a bunch of my friends and I all use and we've done a ton of research on this. So a few weeks ago, I decided to make a public version of a list I've had for years of over 100 apps you can use for music promotion, which you can get free by following the link in the description to my free tools page, since I have a bunch of free tools on my Ko-Fi page that I don't charge anything for unless you want to leave a tip. But anyway, I list off every tool I think is worth owning as well as my own opinion on each tool. Also, over on my members feed, I actually go even deeper on how to use these tools and tons of the other ones on the list so if you enjoy this video, become a member at the link in the description or hit the join button. Okay, let's get into these tools though. So the first one I want to talk about is artist.tools, which is an amazing premium website that offers, well, a bunch of tools for music artists. It's so rare some things properly advertised. Anyway, the most interesting tool to many people is if they have a pretty damn accurate bot detection tool for artists and for players where you can paste an artist or a playlist in and it'll tell you how likely their audience is botted and in danger of getting flagged by Spotify. But particularly what's helpful is many of you want to check the playlist you're submitting to four bots and you can easily do that here. They also have a paint here where you can use it as a playlist directory to look up emails for playlists that you can submit to and this one is a lot more affordable than many of the other options out there. Next, we get to music stacks, a site that relies on tips and memberships that are optional. So if you use it, support Luke, the maker of it since he's an angel for doing this. But I know some of you are like, Jesse, you talk about this site all the time. Do you own stock in it? I sadly do not and none of the apps in this list paid me for this video. But the reason music stacks is in this video is I'm going to show you four ways I use this site that are going to be helpful for you. Okay, let's say you're doing research for your community spreadsheet and if you don't know what I mean by that, it's the backbone of how you build a fan base and you should really watch my video on how to get your first fans by building community which is linked in the description. So part of looking up your community is finding the small artists you are similar to and music stacks ability to see these artists in a really nice visual way is really, really helpful for this. While you could also do this by selecting the fans also like section on Spotify of any artist that you're similar to and see what the other artists they're similar to are the visualization of clicking on an artist and seeing one of music stacks best features which is the tags Spotify gives those artists and what micro genres Spotify thinks they're in is really, really helpful when you're filling out your community spreadsheet. Since you can take these genre names and punch them into TikTok and Instagram searches and see if you belong on those hashtags if it's other artists that you're similar to and those are the ones you should be using. This makes music stacks indispensable for researching artists similar to you. But so many of you complain that you wrote some song like it's your ballad or something it only sounds like the ballad from that other artist who got their hearts thumped on. So you find that when you look at the fans also like of that other artist that has the song that sounds like you to be really inaccurate. Well, one thing you can't do on Spotify is to see the songs that Spotify thinks are most similar to that song. But since music stacks actually takes the data from Spotify's backend and makes it visualized on their site if you click on any song with a certain amount of plays you can easily see the songs if things are most similar to that song by clicking on any songs page and scrolling down. I've also used this as a listener where I find a song I love but is way different than other things and try to find similar ones and often it leads me to great songs that I really love and if your song has enough plays well, it probably already has this data to explore. So hop to it. But before we finish with music stacks you probably know that if you click your popularity score you could actually see how it's changed over time. But I noticed recently Luke changed how this is visualized and it really improved it. So you can see if you did certain things in your marketing for your song if they actually affected your popularity score or if it made it go down. Next we have Beacons which you may remember from my video on Lincoln Biotools. Since I think it's the best Lincoln Biotool with the free tier but since I had just dove into Beacons at that point when I was making that video I wasn't aware of how great a tool this is with so many cool features. In addition to being the best looking free Lincoln Biotool it has all sorts of other helpful tools like a W9 generator for your taxes WIG shortening and a QR code generator. It's a great tool for a lot of creators and I imagine it's only going to get better. Now let's talk about a really helpful freemium app which is Grammarly which is an app where you install it into your web browser and it will suggest how to write better so you don't sound like an idiot in sending messages. Since trust me I read some of the emails that you all send me and I'm shocked at the confidence you all have to send emails that are written like you just got a head injury. Now there's many people who are much snobbier than me who will throw out these emails but I have sympathy since frankly I'm terrible at grammar and I have used Grammarly to help me for around a decade so I don't sound like a fool. The free version does an amazing job. You really don't need to pay for it and whether you're typing in your email app or Google Docs or wherever it can help you sound like you actually have two brain cells that talk to each other. Now you will notice I don't have ChatGPT listed in this video since I find it really overdone and I think a lot of people are recommending it for things it does a pretty damn bad job at but one of the things I love for it is to write GrammarCheck as a prompt and then have it spit out a fixed version of your writing and ChatGPT really is great at that and it's also great for asking it to make your writing more confident or things like that since a lot of you have problems with sounding well proud of yourself and not like you're bugging someone on the street but trust me, if you're having it generate your Spotify pitch or your bio well you're losing but what's nice about Grammarly is it actually teaches you so when you don't have it around you're more confident at writing which ChatGPT does not do. Speaking of bad writing the next app I want to tell you about is Audio Pen which converts unstructured voice notes into texts that's easy to read and ready to share so for those of you who really hate writing but can talk off the top of their head if you want to tell a story for your Instagram captions but are afraid of how dumb you'll sound because your writing's bad record it into Audio Pen and then output it. In the paid version you can even imitate other writer's styles it'll use AI to figure out the way that writer talks and turn your poorly constructed voice note into their writing. I usually find when I use it I have to touch it up a little bit but truly it's amazing for talking off the top of your head and making it so someone else can read it and people who can't write can bat way above their average in writing now with this. On to the next one. One of the most common things those of us who are too incompetent to use Photoshop need to do is to remove the background from an image whether it's for making a TikTok or a flyer or whatever. The site Remove.BG is a free site that uses AI to perfectly remove the background of any image and it's truly a godsend. I've used it for so many years and it does a better job than some of the paid apps do. Next we have Later which we talked about a bit in that LinkedIn bio video I made and I actually use it for my LinkedIn bio. What I've discovered since I started paying for Later is it saves me one of the problems you all ask me about all the time. So many of you want to post a TikTok and then Instagram one week later or vice versa like I advise in my 60 day plan on how to promote your music. Well, Later allows you to simply schedule them both and have them post for you on its own. It's pretty amazing and I've only just begun to unlock how great a tool it is and for $17 a month I don't flinch at how easy it makes my life. The next tool is the absolutely free utility the Canva color wheel which allows you to find complementary colors. Many of you have probably tried doing some design work and you noticed your design doesn't pop or look pro. And this is often from being well bad at color theory. Finding colors that create contrast and well pop is important to helping you make striking images and with this color wheel you can easily find the complementary colors that are going to provide contrast so that your image really looks great. Simply input the color number you're already using then choose which mode of colors you want and there you are with a palette that you can easily choose from and import into your graphic design software. Import the color number back into that tool and then you probably have a much better looking design. Okay, the last app I'm going to recommend is Instagram short form text app Threads because honestly not enough of you are using this to promote your music when it's really helping a lot of people I know. We know there's been a rash of new short form text apps ever since Elon Musk started burning Twitter or X to the ground because he has to post crazy conspiracy theories and race theories while taking a bunch of ketamine. The other short form text app that everybody's into actually launched this week to the public which is Blue Sky and you should sign up for it so that you can claim your name. But I think Twitter is going to eventually die and if it doesn't Threads seems to have traction and frankly, artists I work with have success making friends, stimulating fans and telling stories there. So if you're not using it take a few minutes and make some posts. I invest in threads because frankly we don't know how this is going to shake out and I bet you can find some people who are more active Instagram users since it aggravates posts to Instagram when you use it and you'll probably ignite some new followers who were not following you in other places. Alright, like I said if you find this interesting I go way more in depth on a lot of these tools on the member feed and there's a link for the free list I made of all the tools musicians should use to promote themselves in the description. So hit that description for both of them. So while you just learned all about these tools if you really want to grow your fan base you need to understand how to blow up on Spotify which is on the video right now. So make sure you to watch that next if you really want to level up. Thanks for watching.