 Now more than ever, there's a whole lot of clowns spreading bad advice on how to grow your music's fanbase. So I wanted to counter that with showing one of the groups I think has done the best job of growing a fanbase over the years in the smartest way possible. That group would be LA's Health. We're really hard to classify music-wise since they have really high-impact heavy parts and then really light, pretty ambient moments. Seriously, listen to their music, it's kinda hard to place. They presently boast over 1.5 million monthly listeners in a genre that's nearly impossible to do and I'm consistently shocked at how well they serve their fans what they want, which is why they're rewarded with such a huge fanbase. They've been one of my favorite groups for over a decade and a half, but in addition to making great music, they've done genius marketing for years. And luckily I've gotten to know them so we sat down to talk what they've seen while promoting their newest record, Rat Wars, which dropped two months ago, which many of the big heavy music websites have called the record of the year and a record that has shaken awake a really stagnant genre. So let's get into this. One of the things about Health is I can't think of many artists I've seen who've done more remixes and collaborations than them. Each record they release has a follow-up collaboration or remix record. Over the years, the group has done around 80 collaborations and remixes with different artists, including 9-inch snails, corn, Danny Brown, and Lamb of God. In addition to that, they're a part of a handful of video game soundtracks which have given them algorithmic ties to that community. In the last four years, they've put out over 50 songs, which is crazy considering how great the material is. But here, they're going to detail some of the lesser known ways that all has helped them grow and really show the details of how that pays off for groups. Here's Health's creative director, Joseph McKinney, and the band's bassist and producer, Johnny Health. Uh, so this is, I mean, this has been amazing for us. It just, I think it's the only way social media right now. You can't even message anything. And you can't even, so, like, people listen to Spotify. People listen to artists. If you do a collab, you guys can both unlock for both. That's a simple version, but it's definitely true. And it really, really changed things for us. And it wasn't simple for us. I used to be the guy who hated that there was features on a fucking record. We had to get a lot less precious and we really had to figure out how to do it. And us, the way we're doing it with other bands where it's really mixing two band sounds or something is a full band, it's like a math problem. Especially for us, what we're going to add, the production, you know, like it's, it's a fucking math problem. But we've gotten, we've gotten good at it. And we also, our sound, it's just very possible to do with us. If we had a different sound, it might be harder. So we're weirdly suited for it. But in terms of opening the doors and connecting the dots with streaming or with other artists, it's been immeasurable. Because it's really hard to, you can see the data from your social posts, like there, Zuck is gatekeeping your ass to death. And obviously that's why we're listening to your stuff a lot. We still have not cracked the TikTok code, but even TikTok, I can't message any specific TikTok. I can just make something that someone can see. But just one of the things, main things you talked about was that, that you saw the algorithmic growth being bigger than the playlist, Spotify editorial playlist growth was what you initially said to me. We saw something sort of organically happen with excess, right? Oh, because it had the Synthwave sound palette. It was getting recommended. And Perda Bader is a listed artist on it, right? So the algorithmic playlisting, or really just like the play next, the one where it fills in after you're done listening to whatever song you picked, that had a pretty significant pop. But getting on a playlist anymore, it isn't just getting on a playlist. You need to get on a playlist. You need to be on the top five. If you're not like the top five-ish, especially on these bigger ones, you're not really going to see a whole lot. And even when you do, it isn't this life-changing trajectory of the song-changing event so much. If you look at the collab songs, it's just, it's way more valuable that you've got this other artist's name on there doing work behind the scenes algorithmically, for sure. Yeah, it is interesting because what I do see is that when you get on those playlists, I think almost some of the work is that now your other people are listening to those similar artists and it's breaking connections to you, and then it's going to do the work and release radar and discover weekly and radio. And that seems like the most way people find music. I do, for when I try and find more tracks to DJ, I'm putting on the songs and I let Spotify do its thing, and I actually discover a lot of tracks that way, you know, which is probably the best feature of Spotify, you know, in terms of getting music out there. I have a nearly 500 song playlist of every one-off song I've liked in years, and letting that autoplay off of that is like the greatest I've ever had. Well, I think our number one playlist right now is actually just user-generated Cyberpunk OST playlist. Oh yeah, well, that's the thing. For all your listeners, you can't beat a great sync still. You know, I don't think Indie Days is all about that, even though syncs don't pay such money now, syncs are really important, especially if it's really on-brand, and obviously Cyberpunk, Edgerunners, anime, video game, like that's... Well, what's interesting about that is that, so we do have the opportunity to see some of this data and be able to look at stuff as apples apples as we can, and so that song is actually on an editorial playlist as well, but it is listened to far more on these user-generated ones, and Jesse, that has something to do with our fan base. A thing that I don't know that our fans, or fans that are like our fans, look like fan base's audiences, I don't know that they're going on to Spotify and looking for the kick-ass metal playlist and then hitting play from the top on that, right? If you're a gamer and you're trying to put some music on, because you don't like the soundtrack for the game you're playing right now, you're searching the name of the game up. Hateful, it's number one playlist right now is user-generated Ultra Kill playlist, and there's many of them, some of them are huge, some of them are small, but they get a ton of plays because people are just playing them over and over, right? So it's really remarkable who your fans are and who your proto fans are impacts where you find success. So like we could look at the numbers of the editorial playlist, like the performance of those and be a little bit disappointed, but if you drill down on it further, it's actually pretty fucking tight because you can only reach those areas organically. So part of the genius of the marketing of their amazing new record Rat Wars is the band evolved their sound to a band that's more in the heavy metal lane. And in doing that, they really needed to understand their fans. A big thing that changed for health is, you know, we've made such strange music and we were always, I don't know, some rogue samurai or something. We're always the guys like, how are these guys in the party? How do these guys get booked on pitch work? There's stuff we were doing with take this huge chance with Death Magic and all the stuff. We kind of these conversations were like, who is this music for? You know, we're like, who is this, like, who the fuck is like, how are we going to grow? And there was this, now with Rat Wars, now we finally know, but like the thing over time, it's like, you got to know who, and now this probably isn't an issue for most people working genres, but for us, it's like, who the fuck is the health fan? Like we need to make music for this person and we need to find this person. And that's what we've over time, like we found the health fan and just want to grow and cater to those people grow more health fans. We don't need to do these crazy moves. I know the old days that you might do to rope a bigger wider net. I don't even know it's possible now. So we're just finding our people and we want to just find our people and grow those people, you know? What a hell saw their superpowers is that they really get their fans. And early last year when I talked to them as they were putting together their album rollout, they sent me a deck to understand the group. Even though I've been to shows and streamed them hundreds, if not thousands of times, I learned why they really, really understood who their fans were and did a lot with that information. I'll let them explain. The amount of decks I've seen where I've wanted to absolutely kill myself reading them, this was the exact opposite. You had this slide in here that I've thought about what and so for the audience here. We now have it on the screen. This ranks so true to me of who I see at your shows. I obviously am a much older guy at your shows. But then I'm like, oh, no, this is like my friends who like your band and who are obsessed with it. This describes them to a T. Can you talk to me about how you came to this and then what you've done with this information? Back to just paying attention to your fans. Obviously, most people in business are not in music. Music is a young person's game. So of course, you always meet young people, but that's also who is resonating with the music. If we were just killing it with military wives, well, fuck that's what we'd be doing. But we, so this is just very much. That would be way better. Financially, that'd be substantially better. If we can figure that out, we will come back and let you know. I'm thinking, I'm thinking Dependicore after Come Metal is personally what I'm thinking. Dependas. But yeah, so those things are just all true. 95% of our fans are gamers. The people we are resonating with are young and they are depressed because all these kids are fucking stuck on these platforms and they're making you fucking miserable. It's like we're really making music for the time and for our fans. And then the horny, I don't know, man, all our fans are just fucking, just everyone's just a little degenerate and that's great. And I love it. And that's just who our fans are. You go for your fans. You go to war with the army and have another army you want. And the only other thing missing is, I guess, just the greater heavy metal rock world. But we're considering that normal. This is sad music for 100 people like these are the health. These are the core health fans. This is our elite. I don't know. See, there's 13th Legion or some shit. Well, these are the people that we want to hang out with. 10th Legion. 10th Legion, I think. These are the people that we want to hang out with and we do. Like we, John's got that community text program set up. And when we were in Atlanta for DragonCon, we just sent out a text. Hey, we're going to do karaoke tonight. And we had a bunch of people show up. They check all the boxes. And we had a great time with them. You know what I mean? Like we were fortunate that we have the fan base that we see ourselves in a little bit. Like I certainly see myself in our fan base. I know John does. That helps a whole lot. So a little bit of what you're showing in that deck is looking in the mirror. Yeah, that's the thing. I think it's very real to everyone. It's like we really love our fans. We're not cynical about it. We're just like, how do we find our people? Let's find some more people. Let's think about it. Let's strategize. Let's be smart about it. How do we get this? It's less cynical and more in our case. So you can't always do this. Sometimes you need to be cynical. And you know, there have been times where we need to do something a little bit more cynical. And but in this particular, the deck that you're looking at, like these, these are the people that we want. And here they'll explain why identifying this was so important, making this album roll out so huge. One of the things we care about the most is who is showing up at health shows. And we want it to be the kind of people that are there having fun that we want to see, that we want to hang out with too. It's working out. So part of identifying them, you could read it as cynical, but also just in practical terms. Now that we've identified them, where do we find them? How do we reach them? How do we go out and get more of them? And that's what that that deck goes on to sort of do, like where are we finding these people? They're on Steam. They're on YouTube, not so much Spotify. You know, they're not really so much even on TikTok. They're on Twitter. But you're probably wondering what they did with that information. And that's where things get really interesting. They went to the video game platform Steam to partner with the game Ultra Kill. Part of why it was so important to me in particular looking at the metrics and shit is Steam doesn't have the same kind of squashing algo that Instagram or Twitter or Spotify has. If you attach yourself to a game that has an install base of over a million people, it's going to hit those people straight up. And there's nothing really between you and them. So that was really important. And if you look at the releases, that one has by far been easily the biggest hit. Right, John? Like in terms of just like hitting. And also, we're also mean the right people. Fans of Ultra Kill, they got the weirdest perfect base. It's perfect. Everything's got to work. It's like, you can open for a huge band, but if it's not the right band, it's going to do nothing for your band. It's got to be appropriate. From where we're sitting, we see that the Ultra Kill fan base and the health fan base that Venn diagram is a circle. We just need to make the Ultra Kill people aware. Hey, you're also a health fan. You just don't know it yet. Also, a conversation that John and I had before this record, like how are we going to do this? It's like trying to market on Steam, trying to market places that aren't the socials, because Zuck is going to make it impossible for you. So like how like we should market people through Steam. You know, we should do more like those are our people. They're living in a social media platform. Just before the album released, I worked with folks on our Discord to make a Vampire Survivor clone game. And we put that up on itch.io, which is you got Steam and then you got itch.io being like the web version of that and reaching a lot of people through that as well. And you don't want to just look for random other like Twitter competitors. You want to look for specifically, you know, where are our fans hanging out and and reach them, even if it's not a traditional way to reach them. And they definitely found other non-traditional ways to reach their fans. This idea we're about to discuss here based on their song Feel Nothing got them all the way to the top of Reddit. So the condom idea, man, someone's just someone just made the joke in the Discord. Yeah. That's amazing condom. And we're like, that is so good. And I had this being a graphic designer. I download mock-up templates all the time. And one one of the places I went through Black Market, they have just this killer, very realistic looking condom template. I made it up, put it on Instagram and it looks so real. People are like, where can I get it? Maybe two weeks go by. We keep seeing all this feedback for it. We're like, we got to make these fucking things. And we did. Yeah, we give them out for free. But truly, one of the more interesting things is I rarely see groups who are focusing on YouTube as much as they have. And they really have been killing it there. And I'm consistently shocked as I see them doing live streams all the time on there and tons of other smart things, including shorts and releasing concert footage. I'll let them talk about what that's done for them on this record cycle. So one of the other aspects of you guys that I think has been incredibly smart and the thing I've said in so many videos, but seems to go very unheard by my audience, is that no band on earth is using YouTube to its full potential. We are not, we've not even seen what people will be able to do on it. But you are one of the few acts, I think that is using YouTube best and really has been rewarded from leaning into it. Well, you can start by patting yourself on the back on that one. That's a lot of you. I mean, yeah. And I still feel like we haven't fully cracked it and we're like, we're making the moves. We're there. We're going to push it farther. We need to cut that. But boy, oh boy, it's already paying off like significantly. We've nearly doubled our subscribers just in the past year or so. And I mean, we've always, we've always struggled on YouTube historically. That's really where I feel like the recommendation is the best, you know? Yeah. Even when I kind of came on board, we were so focused on Spotify streams. It was tunnel vision, 100% tunnel vision, especially for me because I'm not trying to figure out how I can help. And over time, I don't even check Spotify so much anymore. Now, some of that's privileged, right? Because we have 1.5 million listeners. But it's like, it's more important to me that these YouTube videos do well because you're reaching, some of this has to do with our target audience. Gamers are on YouTube listening to music because you can do it for free. And it's just an easy way to find stuff. You're already on it for other reasons. We found great success. If you enjoyed this video, I have great news. 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