6 Pro Tips for a Raving Spotify Fan Base

6 Pro Tips for a Raving Spotify Fan Base

by | Jun 30, 2021 | Spotify, Tips

Some songs become earworms, while some others fail to impress and push listeners to skip them immediately. Music enthusiasts are often on a quest to find their next favorite song that will lead to a new favorite and another one.

You and I need to admit that our music taste has evolved since we became Spotify users. Because most of us, in our streaming journey, found that one unknown band who stayed forever in our ‘Heavy Rotation,’ the remarkable artists of whom we became huge fans of, or maybe that groovy beat we played on repeat during the whole summer. These songs often lead us to another artist who takes us to a third one, and when we realize, we are emerging in a new musical style.

These experiences result from Spotify’s algorithm matching music lovers and music they will love. At the same time, it helps us expand our musical knowledge and evolve our taste every day.

However, growing a fan base and standing out on the most popular streaming service in the world are not easy tasks. Independent musicians from all over the globe are fighting for the same ears, developing strategies to

leverage Spotify’s algorithm and get more exposure and organic traffic. In order to help your music stand out and expand your fan base on Spotify, we listed six precious tips that will help you find your fans on the platform. Check them out!

1. Submit Your Music To Playlists

The best way to reach out to new fans and increase the number of people listening to your music is to submit it to playlists on Spotify. Most streaming services  base their music discovery system on playlist engagement, and Spotify is no different. A large percentage of the universal streams on the platform come from the most popular playlists, being those Algorithmic – created automatically by the app and tailored to our music taste; Editorial, the ones curated by a team of Spotify curators; User-Curated, the ones curated by the users. Even though editorial playlists tend to be more significant as Spotify highlights on the platform, user-curated playlists can also have a broad reach. Some of these playlists – curated by brands, artists, influencers, and regular users – fall into the category. 

There are three main possibilities for getting your music featured on Spotify playlists:

A – Submit your track to Spotify editorial playlists via the Spotify for Artists app. The process is smooth and quick, but you need to submit your songs at least six weeks prior to the release. (essa frase ta incompleta)

b – Look for appealing user-curated playlists. Search for curators online and find ways to get in touch. There are services such as curators databases and playlist pluggers if you prefer to have professional help.

C- You could use services like IndieMono, Submithub, and Soundplate. Some of these are free to use.

2. Create Pre-Save Campaigns

Pre-Save campaigns are a great way of generating awareness and creating expectations prior to your music release. These campaigns help artists build momentum before a new music campaign, keeping them warm and ready for more.

When a listener decides to pre-save an album, they receive a notification on Spotify as soon as the expected single, EP, or collection is out so that they can listen to it immediately. Amazing, right? 

3. Create Your Own Playlists

Creating your playlist and highlighting it as your “artist’s pick” on Spotify can bring positive results when promoting your music and fostering fan engagement. Your music selection will also help your audiences to have a deeper connection with your work.

By presenting your music to your fans through a well-curated selection—side-by-side with different artists from the same genre—you can set a great mood and shape your fans’ perception of building the proper branding around your work. When curating your own playlist, add some of your songs together with music from similar artists, your influences, and inspirations. Promote this playlist on your social channels and send a message to the artists you featured so that they might do the same.

But remember: keep your playlist fresh, with constant updates and constantly add new songs. Regularly sharing a list of songs will direct more attention to your music and increase listeners’.

4. Make Sure You Have Some Budget for Online Ads

Integrated digital marketing campaigns are vital for the success of any independent musician. You have to reach new fans where they are hanging out, and it’s most likely this place as social media.

If you are a starting musician without a substantial audience yet, or already an established performer with several thousands of fans, creating paid ad campaigns on social media might be a no-brainer. These campaigns are perfect to immediately boost your reach when thinking about promoting your releases and starting a conversation with your listeners.

5. Use a Download Gate Strategy

Download gates are link aggregators that allow you to give away a downloadable gift in exchange for a requested action, usually social platforms interaction such as follow, like, or subscribe. This tool is often accessible via a website. It allows artists to rapidly accelerate their fan base growth when offering something as the download of an unreleased track in exchange for one or a few actions.

Follow-to-Download Links or simply download gates foster two important dynamics; expanding the reach of your music and improving the quantity and the quality of your following. Most gateways will allow you to add multiple gating steps, such as combining two or more of these social interactions.

In other words, you can make that secret recording available for your fans and only deliver it to those who agree to follow your profile, save your album, or like your playlist on Spotify. These actions can even work together with interactions on other social media channels, such as following your Instagram, subscribing to your YouTube channel, or liking your Facebook page.

6. Share your music with QR Codes

QR codes can be an excellent way of promoting your music both online in the physical space. When aimed at a cellphone’s camera, they are quick response codes that can direct the user to specific addresses on the internet. In this case, drive people to listen to your music! You can send them on emails, post them on your social media channels, print them on your flyers, your promo CDs, or your business card… The possibilities are endless!

Wrapping it Up

Spotify is the leading music streaming platform in the world. Therefore, gathering listeners, attracting followers, and fostering a fan base on the platform is essential for any music artist. The advantages of having your fans on your reach are enormous. The more people play, like, share, and engage your music through your music, and the more people will see your music recommended exponentially.

We hope these six pro tips for building a Spotify fan base will help you create this virtuous cycle and take you to the next step in your music career.

Spotify Popularity Index: A Little Secret to Help You Leverage the Algorithm

Spotify Popularity Index: A Little Secret to Help You Leverage the Algorithm

by | Jun 8, 2021 | Highlight, Spotify, Tips

In a digital age where independent artists are trying to break through the barriers installed by putative gatekeepers of the music industry, the golden key to becoming a successful artist is data. Without data, successful campaigns cannot be recreated and the unsuccessful ones cannot be learned from.

Spotify for Artists only gives  basic information regarding listeners’ demographics and track performance. The information displayed on the artist dashboard only includes the number of streams, listeners, followers, top playlists, and top songs.

This approach, however, fails to take into account other key factors for measuring your songs’ performance. From track attributes – such as danceability, liveness, positiveness, key, loudness, energy – to data regarding how listeners interact with your music. Yet, these hidden indicators are used by the algorithm to rank, recommend, display, and playlist songs on the biggest music streaming platform.

But keep in mind: when it comes to the Spotify algorithm, no song is rated in isolation. 

What is Spotify’s Popularity Index?

The Spotify Popularity Index is a 0-to-100 score that ranks how popular an artist is relative to other artists on Spotify. As your numbers grow, you’ll get placed in more editorial playlists and increase your reach on algorithmic playlists and recommendations. Some say that the magic number is 50!

The Index can be used to monitor and influence the progress of new releases. Each track has its own SPI calculated influencing the artist’s overall index. Yet, while the Popularity Index is majorly determined by recent stream count, other factors like save rate, the number of playlists, skip rate, and share rate can indirectly bump up or push down a song’s popularity index.

How to Influence the Popularity Index in your Favor

To successfully influence your Spotify popularity index, you need to understand that every stream, save, share, like, and playlist recommendation counts. All ways lead to Rome.

Do not forget that the algorithm is the major player here and the index is just one of the factors it considers when recommending booming songs to Spotify’s ever-demanding listeners. 

Spotify Algorithm - BART

Running a pre-save campaign weeks before the release days would give your track all the juice it needs to appeal to your first listeners. The algorithm will have no other choice than to keep recommending your songs to your perceived audience and lookalike audience. If your campaign success is consistent during the first week, there is a great likelihood that you will be placed on several algorithmic playlists.

Your pre-save campaign can give you all the traction you need to “convince” the algorithm to give you a playlist boost. According to Chartmasters: 

“A song is not successful because it is a part of a large playlist. It only gets into large playlists when it’s successful”.

You do not have to leave the fate of your track in the formulaic hands of the Spotify algorithm since you can also appeal to tastemakers by pitching your music to editorial playlists.

Although Editorial playlists give your tracks more exposure compared to algorithmic playlists, songs fall off the editorial playlists easily and quickly unlike algorithmic playlists. You can remain on algorithmic playlists for months.

How to check Spotify Popularity Index

There are several tools you can use to check your Spotify Popularity Index, namely; Musicstax, Chartmetric, Songstats, and Spotify for Developers. The first three tools are the simplest while Spotify for Developers can be confusing to users with no coding skills.

Musicstax is a simple music analysis tool that allows you to check the popularity score by searching for the artist’s name or song. The free tool can also be used to analyze features of a song such as loudness and danceability. The only disadvantage of using Musicstax is its inability to provide real-time metrics, meaning the database is not always up-to-date.

Chartmetrics provides market-level data to artists who want to up their game and understand their growing fanbase. You can get a panoramic view of how many people are discovering your songs on playlists, popularity rating, and growth over a long span of time, conversion ratio, and playlist reach to followers ratio via Chartmetric.

Songstats is an amazing tool that provides artists with the data needed to effectively manage their campaigns. It lets you observe the impact of your campaign strategy and growing popularity index on your track performance.

Conclusion

  • Improve your understanding of your fanbase using advanced tools to crawl data from your Spotify page. Tools like Chartmetric, Songstats, and Musicstax make it super easy.

  • Monitor your popularity growth in the first week of release and make informed decisions using real-time metrics.

  • Use the popularity score as a currency to bypass the gateways of algorithmic playlists.

20 Music Marketing Ideas to Help DIY Musicians Take-Off

20 Music Marketing Ideas to Help DIY Musicians Take-Off

by | May 12, 2021 | Tips

Between the music industry’s digitization and subsequent democratization of tools and access, more new music was created and released than before. Thus, it is vital to have a proper promotion strategy and marketing plan for music artists. Fortunately, there are some great marketing tips for music artists that can help with their music promotion.

1 – Develop a Strategy and Establish Your Goals

Before you start spending money on promotions, you might want to develop a marketing strategy to assess what you can and cannot do properly. If you plan on releasing new music, new album, or music videos, you’ll need to write an action plan with a list of your goals for any actions you want to take. You’ll need to write down all the steps you need to take to reach your set goals.

2 – Define Your Audience

Before you start your marketing efforts to promote your music, you will need to define your potential audience and see how your fans are. The crucial part of digital marketing for musicians is to know where to place their music. Knowing information about where your audience is based and how old they are can create a music marketing strategy that will accurately reach all potential fans.

3 – Use Social Media to Boost Your Online Presence

People spend around 24 hours on the Internet per week. Almost 33% of that online time is spent on social media, which means that people spend approximately an hour per day consuming content on social media.

4 – Keep People Updated on Facebook

Facebook is a great place to organize and promote upcoming events and concerts. You can easily keep your fans updated about your new events, virtual or offline.And it’s an excellent platform to connect all of your fans in one place -it can be through your page, event, or you can even create an internal Facebook group where you can share and be involved with your fans.

Independent artists can highly benefit from creating private Facebook groups when offering different crowdfunding options.

5 – Create Beautiful and Interesting Content for Instagram

Speaking of Facebook, there’s Instagram, Although the apps are connected (not just by the company, but the integration as well)

6 – Communicate with Your Fans Through Twitter

Twitter is a great platform that artists can use to promote new music in a very casual way. One of the best tips for independent music artists is to be active on Twitter. News travels fast on the platform, and you can easily reach many people with your music. All it takes is to post something and wait for the retweets to start.

7 – Take Advantage of TikTok

TikTok has developed into one of the hottest apps available. The userbase of TikTok users is growing daily, slowly reaching the 1bilion number, making it clear that it can be a great channel to promote music, making it an excellent choice for music artists. And artists are using it – there are many bands and individual artists who have signed up on TikTok and created great content.

Since young people enjoy micro-entertainment and short and straightforward bursts of distraction, TikTok marketing can be an excellent tool for any brand or individual to engage with an audience and promote their business, or in the case of artists – music. It is a great way to market your music independently and engage with your fans with simple and fun content you can make without any planning.

8 – Document Your Daily Life

The best way to use your social media channels as a music artist is to give a sneak peek of your life for your fans to enjoy. Document your rehearsals, walks, daily life situations, thoughts by creating videos, posting pictures, using stories on the platforms you can, engage with your people. Keep your fans updated and involved so that you can remain relevant in their lives.

9 – Involve Followers and Fans

A great way to use your social media is to involve your fans in some decisions and engage with your followers on your social media. Ask your fans questions, get them to leave comments, and engage with your posts by involving them in a process. Or just ask them to share their thoughts on your songs and albums. Keep your audience engaged, and you can build a loyal audience that will be there for any event you have.

10 – Create a Cool Website

Nowadays, everyone has a website. And why should artists be any different? A website is a great platform to promote an artist or band and their art. And it’s a place that’s fully controlled by the artist that makes it. You don’t depend on platforms and other websites to post about you – you are the content creator of your website.

However, your website should be a dynamic thing. It needs to adapt and change to reflect you and events that happen in your career. A new album comes out – you need to update the website. The new tour announced – update. Your fans want to go to your website and get informed by seeing the news, happenings, ticket sales, merch, and other things about you and your music. You can set up landing pages that raise awareness, promote a specific song or album, collect email addresses, sell merch, or just keep your fans updated with news or blog posts.

11 – Sell Merchandise

Who doesn’t like to have merch? Merchandise is a must today. People want to celebrate their favorite artist with the world by showing off a T-shirt or pin from their favorite artists. But make sure you have an ad budget and a little sales funnel set to attract new fans and sell your branded products!

12 – Create Compelling Content

Everyone is online, and everyone wants to read something while they are browsing the web. You need to reach people in different ways if you’re going to get them to listen to your latest stuff. Create content for your website and create content you can use to reach out to websites that can feature your content or arrange an interview to talk to you about what you want people to know.

13 – Get Press Coverage

Blogs and online magazines about music are a great way of attracting new eyes and ears to your music. Make sure you contact anyone you can to try and get featured. Work on having compelling content on any platform you can – you never know who you can reach!

14 – Share Your Music on Digital Platforms

One of the best tips for upcoming music artists is to use digital platforms like Spotify and Deezer to share their music to reach new audiences who will potentially love their music. Being on a streaming platform ensures your music is available for fans everywhere. Yet, just being there is not enough.

15 – Get Playlisted

Since streaming is the most popular way of listening to music, platforms like Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music have implemented new ways of curating music for their listeners with playlists. With playlists, people listen to songs they like and discover new music similar to their taste.

As a musician who is just starting, it’s best to start getting your music placed on playlists. 

You’ll need to get verified on any platform and build your profile. Then you’ll need to reach out to playlist owners and pitch your music. When choosing the playlists you want to be featured in, keep in mind that you can pitch to lesser-known and unofficial playlists. Many unofficial Spotify curators have playlists with a decent number of followers you can reach out to and be featured in.

You can find owners of these playlists on social media to let them know that you love their playlists and ask and point out why your song can be a great addition to it. Be polite and don’t spam them. And of course, as soon as you get featured, make sure you promote the playlist on your social media and website so that people will listen to them.

16 – Create Your Own Playlist

Apart from reaching out to be featured on different playlist, to promote yourself on Spotify or any other streaming platform you can also make your own playlist. It’s always best to have something of your own that you can monitor and be in control of. As a musician, having your own playlist means you have full control of your music there, but you can also associate yourself with other artists and feature them on your playlist.

17 – Establish a Mailing Group And Send Newsletters

An email list is a great and valuable tool for music promotion. Unlike your blog posts and press coverage, an email list is a direct way of building a fan base. When someone signs up for your email list, they are willingly applying to hear from you, and you need to take advantage of that!

So what do you send as a newsletter? Your newsletter should drive people to your website, so make sure you include links and updates about what is happening -like when you have an album coming or a tour. However, you need permission to email a person, so that means you can only reach out to people who signup for your playlist or buy something from your website.

18 – Use Crowdfunding

Many artists often wonder (and potentially struggle with): “How to market your music independently?”. The main struggle with being an independent artist is finding your funding – securing the money you need to create your music without a label funding everything. Among the best tips for independent music artists to succeed is to use crowdfunding to make sure they can create music their fans want. Many bands have turned to crowdfund and started using Kickstarter to secure the money they need to release an album. With crowdfunding, you can offer your fans a lot and get the support you need to give them the music they want.   Just look at what Icon For Hire achieved.

19 – Record Music Tutorials

A great way to create compelling content is to offer music tutorials of your songs. People will want to watch you play, and they will like to learn how to play their favorite tracks – yours! So offering compelling tutorials on how to play your most famous songs, and then you can even repost their videos as a way of showing your appreciation. 

20 – Don’t Be Afraid and Release Your Singles

Before you finalize your album and release everything on it, you should release a single or two – or even three. Why? Releasing singles gives your fans a preview of what they can expect with the entire album. If you’re an independent artist using crowdfunding, singles are a great way to attract more people to fund you.

 

 

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