 So many of you are always looking for an easy growth hack to get you popular, and let's be honest, there's very few ways to get more popular fast than taking a song that's already been proven likeable and putting your own twist on it. You know, a cover song? And while you won't be as financially rewarded for it as you would if the song were your own, and it doesn't come with the artistic integrity and respected original it does, but there's no doubt fanbases have been built or expanded with covers countless times in any era of music. But we're not talking about any era of music, and instead talking about now. A world where Spotify, TikTok and YouTube do everything to break artists. So let's talk about how you can use covers today to grow your music. So since everyone who's studied music marketing for one hour knows a great song as the greatest marketing tool, then obviously covering a song you already find great is a pretty damn good start. But it's more complicated than that. See, the originator already found an emotionally powerful way to do the song, and you need to bring something new to it, since why would they listen to you make a, well, not as powerful version? Now I know some of you's mothers told you you're so special, so you say just the fact that you yourself are covering a song makes it special. But um, while we're all unique snowflakes, some of you are the ones we have to shovel the car out from, and frankly, are pretty damn annoying. But truly think about this, the only way a cover works is if you can one, find an emotion that's underplayed. For example, some of the most popular covers are finding an emotion that was president in the original, but wasn't what was the dominant emotion in the originator's version. Two, you put the song in a context that's different. For example, the punk song about heartbreak turned into a slow acoustic ballad can be highly impactful. Sometimes a song was recorded in a genre that isn't necessarily the matching genre music-wise to what the lyrics expressed. Or three, you take a song no one in your genre is familiar with and popularize it. But truly, you're dead in the water if you take a great bedroom pop song and just do another poorly recorded version of it with an inferior performance to the original. Never mind taking a number one hit song everyone knows and making a less well produced version of it without as powerful a performance. You'd have more luck investing your marketing efforts into climbing a building naked with your Spotify URL painted on your body. Okay, sorry, both of those things are useless ideas. But let's talk about actual marketing for cover songs. So we need to understand a dynamic here. So fun fact, Spotify actually doesn't let you pitch cover songs to the playlist, which I know is weird, but let's make it even weirder. I can tell you something, they do add them to playlists since I see them on there all the time. So what this really tells me is if the playlist curator recognizes the song or you put that it's a cover in your pitch, it may get denied. But if you're doing like we said above and taking a song others don't know and putting a new spin on it, then well, you could probably get away with it. But here's my philosophy covers are not what usually excels for Spotify marketing in the first place. So why go hard there? Well, you shouldn't. So let me explain. When I think of marketing covers, I think of what these marketing dorks call a funnel in that all these insufferable losers with entrepreneur or mentor in their bios who are constantly trying to find a way to con musicians out of their money. Talk about funnels all the time only second up to dudes who are making way too much micro brew beer. But if you think of a funnel's purpose is it catches a lot and then when you come out the other side, you go into a container. A cover song is meant to funnel people into checking you out and seeing all your other great material. And while it's cool if the cover gets popular, we really want people to know you for who you are and what you actually do, right? Oh yeah, I forgot some of you are just making music to finally get laid by the girl who you pay all the money to on only fans to only ever ignore all of your pitiful peach emoji comments. Anywho, so to war people in if we don't have the Spotify algorithm there to help us with playlist, what do we got? Oh right, the tick tock algorithm. You know, that thing in the last video I said is the greatest marketing opportunity for musicians of all time. And since we're now in the earworm era of music marketing, and yeah, if you missed that video, definitely hit the description and watch it. Anyway, if you post the hook of your cover to tick tock and follow what I talked about in that video, it could potentially blow up if people catch on to the hook by posting on tick tock reels and shorts, you can use hashtags and at tags to target the artist, your coverings audience, or just the micro genre your cover is in. Meaning, if you took a Frank Sinatra song and made it hyper pop, make sure to use hashtags that get to a hyper pop audience, not a Frank Sinatra audience, because they're going to think you bastardized the song. But really, I'm kind of kidding. Targeting both the originator and a new genre you bring are entirely valid funnels that can get people to discover you and then go in and get to know you better. Anyway, like I said in my 60 day plan video, I made the other week, that's linked in the description. In order to get this cover to catch on, you're going to need to post this to your short form content a lot, and hopefully it'll catch on. But let's remember, posting it once isn't going to do it. Be sure to learn my philosophy on posting that content regularly. But let's pause for a second. I just wanted to take a few minutes to discuss a great new platform that I've been working with. SigFault is a platform where artists get the opportunity to have their music heard in great content across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. They have amazing creators on the platform with huge reach across many categories of demographics. And past and current campaigns have featured trending artists like Jake, The Cooks, Jungle, and Nova Twins. You're able to reach new audiences with your music globally by accessing YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok creators. We've discussed on this channel countless times that influencer marketing is some of the most powerful marketing breaking musicians today, and this is a perfect way to access it with your budget. SigFault is completely free if you want to get your music out there. Their targeted campaign started $1000 and go all the way up to bespoke plans that can be tailored to exactly your needs with a dedicated account manager who can help you. All the campaigns include live reporting and smartlinks. The service also offers distribution to the major streaming platforms and content ID services for when creators make content with your music. You can even apply for an artist advance and have your campaign funded with SigFault. If you have more than 15,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, you could be eligible for an advance to help take your music career to the next level. Own your masters and stay in control. So head to the link in the description below and submit your music. If approved, the first 10 creators get a free $50 credit on their first campaign. But aside from hashtags and tagging the artists you're covering, there is some other cool stuff you can do to market a cover song. Obviously some of the covers that people do that really blow up are when the artist shares it because they love it. But you're probably smart enough to know that tagging the artist is mostly to link you in the algorithm so it sees you as connected to them. So it surfaces your cover of them to their fans. Not so that the artist will actually see it. But what if we wanted the artist to see it? How would that happen? From my experience, the best way to get artists to see it is to follow and tag in the comments of the people who worked on the song, who aren't even in the spotlight and inundated with a million ad tags all day. I've sent tons of artists cool covers of songs I've produced, mixed or mastered or worked on in other ways that someone has tagged me in. And the same goes for session player songwriters or even their managers. I've been on group threads countless times where someone involved in the making of the song said it's the rest of us who were involved. Now, if you're going to do this, you have to have the song up on more than social media, aka YouTube or Spotify. And if you did that, you better hit a service like Sounddrop to secure a cover license. Otherwise it may be trouble for you, especially if it starts to get popular. But that's another subject for another time, because if you're not paying your royalties on a cover and the artist finds out about it and it's really blowing up, well, you could owe a lot of money. I really find this technique works best though, if you get another account to tag those people in the comments, because then it looks like the fan is alerting them to it, it seems more authentic. And think of it this way, when you're a producer or a session keyboardist, it gives you a reason to text the artist and keep up that relationship. If the cover is good, it starts a conversation, which may get you in the conversation to do the next song. So this may give your career a whole shot of life in just a few minutes. And if you have trouble finding who worked on the song, well, you could buy the CD or vinyl, check Spotify for credits. There's also sites like All Music or Discogs that list credits pretty extensively, though those sites are kind of getting worse as time goes on. But there is another way. Some artists do those cool credit posts on social media like Instagram, so you can check their Instagram if you see that, if the song is from the past few years. But all we've talked about so far is posting short little hooks of your song, not the full length version of the song. As we discussed previously, Spotify likes to be fed new content, less often than YouTube does. And for a lot of you, your Spotify is a curated place of your best material. And SoundCloud Bandcamp and YouTube are littered with your lesser content you've released for the fans, no matter how few of them there are. Those sites are also often where many of you test out what material to post on Spotify as I have invited us in the past. And I think this is a great idea, so I really like to put the full cover on YouTube. Since the way YouTube works is as it sees being shared, it recommends it to more people that thinks they like it. As well, it trades the algorithm to recognize you as being associated with the group you covered, and may also serve it to users who watch covers of that song or watch that song a lot. And if it starts to blow up on YouTube or TikTok, well, it's probably best to add it to the other streaming services like Spotify. But really, that's a personal call and an artistic one on your part. If you're not precious about what you put on Spotify, there is an advantage to having it there that when people hear songs on TikTok, Reels or YouTube shorts, they'll often go there to hear the rest. And since we're trying to build relationships with fans, this is a perfect way to get that relationship to be built. But truly, this is all an artistic choice, just like doing covers at all. Everyone has a different barometer, and I'm not saying you have to do any of this, it's just strategic options for you. But I've avoided discussing one of the trappings of cover songs is that you do risk if you do covers regularly, that may be all your audience likes about you. And if you don't regularly release originals or use similar hashtags or create it in the genre you're doing the cover in, well, you're probably going to lose the people you funneled in and not convert them to fans of your originals, unless you feed the audience to those originals regularly. So here's the thing, and trust me, there's a lot of people I do consults with who've had this problem before and are stuck in it because everybody just knows them for covers because they did too many in a row and love the growth they saw. So here's the thing, while you know how to market your music through covers, if you really want to grow your fan base, you need to understand what you should be posting. So watch this video I talked about before on my 60 day plan to promote your music, which is on the screen right now, or in the description. Since if you really want to level up, you got to know that. Thanks for watching.