 So a lot of you are baffled at the fast growth of some artists. I mean it can be real depressing when you've been kind of playing with puddles and then some artists is all of a sudden going off like this gorilla. Well there could be a lot of reasons your growth is stalled but one of them I see far too often is the artists aren't making the connections between other artists that tell algorithms to connect and recommend you to the fans of those artists. So in this video I'm going to show you how to make connections to other artists so algorithms start to recommend you on Spotify, TikTok and Instagram and other apps. Hi I'm Jesse Cannon a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from 0 to 10,000 fans and this is Muse Formation. So let's get this out of the way. Some of you may be watching this video and wondering why this is important. If that's happening I imagine it's due to you having missed my recent video on the biggest music marketing opportunity in music today which is that features, collaborations, remixes and split releases are the greatest music marketing opportunity ever in music. As they get you what I call artist page visibility aka people see you on the artist page they already like and see your name next to a song they're enjoying and when they're loving that song they can have an easy hint to go deeper on you as you're already a part of a song they like and in the community with an artist they enjoy. And if you missed that video I highly suggest you watch it after this is done it'll be linked in the description and in the end screen since it's super important. But to get this more fully and why this is so important is it has a compounding effect and for those of you who don't get what that means it's the benefits of doing these collaborations is the effects are numerous and add up the more you do it as your audience grows. And if you recall from that other video everyone I know at major labels and big indie labels is going in on this technique and some of this is because artist page visibility and the labels seen the power of an artist becoming a part of another artist community but it also comes down to the compounding effects of what it does to algorithms. And I have news for you one thing everyone who has big numbers will tell you algorithms are usually driving the majority of that whether it's getting on the browse page of YouTube Spotify radio discover weekly recommendations or recommendations on Instagram or TikTok serving up your video. I know some wise ass is going to ask for my sources for this video if you simply look up the algorithms of any of these sites there's articles on sites like The Verge Tector or the book Spotify teardown but most of all I live in Brooklyn where many of these startup employees live to and boy do their lips get loose when we're out drinking so go off in the comments if you must but let's get into specifics let's first start with Spotify. So Spotify has one advantage that social media doesn't have is that they have what are called music genomes which are this thing Pandora invented where you can have computers analyze the sound of a song and it can tell it's similar to another song in some ways but while those help the thing that Spotify waits in their algorithm is the connections you have to other artists and those connections are largely for things like Spotify radio in that what gets recommended in Spotify radio after an album gets done playing where someone clicks the button on it or they make a playlist with that artist is being the artist that has a huge overlap with that artist and listeners and this is easily observed y'all next time your playlist or an album of an artist finishes I bet within the next three artists it'll be someone the artist has collabed with or toured with and this is of course because doing those things together makes you have a combined audience with that other artist now of course if the people they serve that song to continually click that button you know the one that says don't ever play this terrible song again this one well your song is not going to be recommended very much anymore this is also what I see in my discover weekly playlist is so much of the collabs that an artist has done before will get the other artist into my discover weekly playlist but if you want to get on that coveted release radar those collabs are the exact connective tissue that gets you on another artist discover weekly as you're both going to get on each other's release radar and then more people will inherently be listening to you both showing the algorithm the common fandom and you will now be in all the before mentioned algorithmic recommendations this also goes for the youtube algorithm as youtube gives no folks about making any music genome since they just observe user patterns and what people click or skip but again one of the many reasons these collabs features and split releases help so much for music marketing right now is listeners are less likely to skip you if one they recognize your voice or songwriting style or two they've heard your name a bit perhaps from collaborating or playing shows with another artist or being tagged on social media with their favorite artist and they're familiar with your name enough to let the recommendation go i find about half of the new songs i get into from what youtube plays me after i listen to a song i like when i'm relaxing at night reading but let's get into how this compounds with social media apps let's say you do a collaborator with another act instagram is looking at who at tag and follow when they see you following one artist but not the most common at tags that's how you get put in the discover recommendations or when you click down to see who else you should follow on those little tabs on instagram and tick tock literally since instagram only has user data of what people follow and click on to go off that's what they base it off of if you are of the top few mutual follows of an artist that's when instagram is cycling through when it does recommendations and you know how you become one of the top follows is clubbing or playing shows with that other artist but the way this compounds is when people are tweeting and instagraming and doing at tags about your collaboration or the shared show that is not only telling instagram to recommend users to see your name that are the most susceptible to liking you but it's also the most adamant music fans are the ones who give you your early listens since they are such addicts for this genre they see your name and listen to you and you get that important new fan who's a taste maker and yet again this is why i think facebook ads are the dumbest thing to waste your money on is it does none of this work and gives you the illusion of growth in numbers increasing but they are unengaged fans with no influence on anyone else whereas the at tags of fans seeing you play a show with someone or do a collab are the adamant ones who are going to tell other people about you on reddit discords and get the word of mouth recommendations which are the most effective recommendations in music up to playlists and collabs and i know a lot of you hit on twitter and say you don't get it but this is the type of promo that does great on twitter which is also every music journalist and playlist influencers favorite app to be an addict on and when they see your name intertwined with an artist it's their literal job to go deeper and to do the thing they love the most in the world which is to find a new artist before there are other dork friends and brag about it for the entire duration of the artist fame that they were onto them before everyone else but as it's sufferable as that is these people can really help you get fans so playing the game on twitter and interacting with your community helps compound these algorithmic recommendations but i know you are all very concerned with tiktok and the same thing works here in that you getting tagged with other artists gets people looking for you but also tiktok can do so much work of linking yourself to other artists since tiktok doesn't have any music genome either and instead is spreading to people who engage with similar behavior patterns on the app and those patterns are what hashtags and tiktok tropes they like to engage with which is knowing why your community's tiktok hashtags in instagram ones are so important for linking together doing those hashtags will put your content in front of the people of the eyes who like that hashtag and who interact with that hashtag the most in other words in front of the eyes and ears of people most susceptible to liking you at tagging the artist you collab with teaches them to link you two together so in doing clubs having multiple tiktoks about your club whether it's footage of you working together from the music video or whatever you may not get the most viral numbers but the algorithm starts to know the work to do for spreading you around making videos where you do that thing where you say if you like this artist you'll like me every few months and tagging them can help do this work too by bringing you into the algorithm of those bigger artists now remember the smaller you go the more chance of it doing that since the algorithm has thousands of other artists doing that for the big artists tiktok does want to have one more element of stitching you to other users and sending content to users the songs in your background of your videos are like hashtags and that they regularly serve people who use the same song to make videos to users who watch the video with that song so bearing this in mind with the combination of a hashtag this can help you get you in front of the fans of your micro genre so to tie this all together now that you get this ecosystem even if you aren't making songs with these other artists you've hopefully done your community work and are making artist playlists and music talk shows and tagging the artist on it on twitter tiktok and insta and yet again drawing more connections to you and the artist similar to you in time if you keep doing this you'll have so many connections to you in such a big community you will be algorithmically favored and connected to so many artists so you really are going to have to have some terrible songs for it to not work out come back here and thank me later or maybe just share this video with a friend now in advance