How Musicians Go From 0 To 1,000,000 Fans In 2025

In 2024, we saw so many ways that musicians build a fanbase, turned into something that if they take it into their own hands and do their own actions, they are more likely to build a fanbase than ever. So going into 2025, there's so many things that musicians miss. I still see them messing up every single day that crush their dreams, even when their music is great and people would like it.

And I can't blame musicians for this, since everywhere they turn, there's another scammer with an Instagram ad and a promise that is totally a grift for their money, that will fill their dreams and make them depressed. But I do this work every day and I chronicle and learn what actually gets musicians fans. Since I work with tons of musicians on their ascent to building a huge fanbase, whether they're DIY, indie, or major label, no matter what the genre.

But since I don't really want to bore my viewers, if you're sitting here watching this and thinking I'm just another one of those YouTube con artists selling a course who's just spouting off with no experience, I encourage you to go to my channel page and watch the video on my biography that's featured there. But really, what I think is most important is for well over a decade, my head's been in the game when it comes to music marketing. I live and breathe marketing.

I talk to managers, PR people, booking agents, podcasting YouTube producers, hell, even the people who run presidential campaigns about how you get things to spread on the internet and I take from it and bring it here to musicians. I talk to the A&R of some of the biggest artists in the world in tons of different genres. And I'm on the phone every day with people who are building up new artists and influencers and other people in the public eye, figuring out what actually works to get people to break through.

Since I know what's printed on the dog out of touch blogs and spread by cloud goblins using chap GPT to write scripts is poisoning every musician's thoughts. So I take all of that and put it on this YouTube channel for the past five years. And every year I make a video like this where I show you what's changed and what's actually working to get musicians to go from zero to millions of fans.

But let's get some things out of the way though to make this video way more enjoyable for you. What I'm going to do here is lay out the top line strategy to build a fan base off of. If you think something I'm saying is interesting and you want to know more about it, well, there's already videos I've made that go way deeper on every subject of this video that are linked to the description.

So just go and find that link or click on the playlist I made and become a real expert. And the same goes for if you're not finding a section interesting. There's chapters to this video, so feel free to skip ahead.

So let's talk about the first pillar of marketing music in 2025 for a musician. This is appealing to algorithms. Now I know a lot of you are going to get real turned off by hearing that, but listen for a second and hear me out.

Appealing to algorithms happens to have a happy ending. Unlike what happens when a lot of you get the bright idea to start dating one of your fans. Do you feel seen now?

Right now, the majority of music discovery and how people build a fan base is because they use smart strategy that appeals to the algorithm. But there's a smarter way to see this. If you deliver music in the way the algorithm likes.

And let me make this clear, this doesn't mean you have to, or nor should you compromise your music or what's in that music while you're making it to make those algorithms happy. This is much more about how you market it after you've made a great song. Well, if you do that, those algorithms will help you build your fan base if you do it how they like.

Because the great thing about music today is songs that are authentic, actually appeal to listeners are more rewarded than ever. And that's never been more true going into 2025. And I know a lot of you don't believe me about that, but it's real and I've proved it in other videos.

But the delivery method and the way you release your music has a definitive way that it'll spread as far as possible if you follow the rules that the algorithm likes. And I should say the reason algorithms work is they're modeled off of human attention span, which is why people build those algorithms, is to appeal to the way humans consume things. But right now what the majority of artists who get a fan base are doing to effectively build that fan base is they release a single every 48 weeks while occasionally peppering that with an alternative version, a cover or a remix, or hell, even a lo-fi version or one of those sped up or slowed down versions that are popular on TikTok these days.

Or they add a feature to an existing song here or there while doing something eventful every two weeks and something smaller every single week. This only takes six songs per year to fill up an entire calendar year. And what I encourage everyone to do is to first release a minimum viable video, which if you don't know what that is, it's a really simple video.

Since those are getting millions of streams, despite being made for no budget and you can make them in a few hours. And also on that first day, you want to release a stream of your song to all the streaming sites. Then two weeks later, a lyric video or visualizer, then two weeks after that, a music video and then an alternate version.

And well, you'll fill up those eight weeks really easily. Then you just start the cycle again with another song on either week seven or week nine. But a lot of people want to release a single every single week.

And when you do that, it makes people feel like the music that you make is not important to you. Instead, you're just desperate and just guessing at what will work so you can become another cloud hungry famous person. And no one's interested in someone guessing or messing around.

They want to see a real artist creating something powerful that they're proud of and worked hard on. And unlike what so many of you think, songs are not a lottery ticket. They need to be emotionally powerful.

People don't want to see everything you do. They want to see the best of them. Whereas releasing a song every two months and pairing it with eventful marketing pushes keeps everyone's attention spans engaged.

And this is what makes so many of your favorite artists your favorites is that they know how to release their best material and capture your attention. And let's remember, with those songs you leave behind, it doesn't mean you throw them away. It doesn't mean they never get released.

Most artists play with those ideas years later and they end up in something in some form anyway. And I want to remind you, you're also competing with a lot of people for attention. This is why when Lil Nas X rose from being a completely unknown artist to having one of the longest running number one hits of all time, he continually reminded people of his song and that it was something exceptional by over and over again showing them memes and reminding them to build a relationship with the song.

Basically, he was at the beginning of what works on TikTok today. But more about that later. Now, a lot of people get really bummed when they hear me talking about releasing singles constantly as they love albums and EPs.

And you know what? So do I. I was listening to some while I wrote this script, but you have to see EPs and LPs and mixtapes as what builds deeper relationships with fans who want to start to like you.

It makes them think about you more and more, feel close to you, and you should release them from time to time after a string of singles. And the deeper that relationship is, the more likely they're going to come see you live, buy your merch, and engage with you on socials and go much deeper with you. And most of all, never shut up to their friends about you, which is how you really get fans.

And look, since we did the biggest music listening survey of the year recently, which there's a link to take that survey if you'd like to in the description, we can see that most people get their music recommendations from friends both on and offline. So we need to see it this way, that singles are what lures people in, much like that sample of the chicken or tofu at the Chinese food stall that they give out for free in the mall courtyard. They hope to lure you in at the counter and for you to then buy a pound of it.

And then they hope you'll keep coming back and doing that each day after you've tasted how good it tastes from that one free sample. That's the goal here. And we have to see albums and singles as two different things.

Singles offer the opportunity to bring in enough people that they're going to go through your album or back catalog and actually get to know you and develop a relationship with your music. But singles are the sample. But if you aren't releasing as many singles as possible these days to bring people back to that album, you're basically not allowing your music the chance to get discovered.

Because this is sending out the samples that will intrigue people and have them come and hear more since the single is the portion that makes somebody really judge if they want a full meal from you. And right now, algorithms only spread singles, not albums. Because the way Spotify and YouTube and all the short form video apps are designed and people's attention spans also work this way is that the more singles you release of quality material, the more of the chance increases that somebody will get curious about your album and back catalog.

But let's go over this. The top way people discover music now are TikTok reels and YouTube shorts, as well as Spotify and YouTube's recommendation algorithms. But before we get to TikTok, we're much more concerned about where people are going to repeatedly listen to your music and make a relationship with you, which is YouTube and Spotify.

Because when it comes to streaming audio platforms and listening to music without videos, if you open the majority of artists analytics of where their listeners come from and keep in mind, I'm paid to look at this more than just about anyone on Earth. If we take out YouTube and just call that watching videos, Spotify is usually 80 to 85 percent of where those streams come from. And then the other 15 to 20 percent is just really between Apple and the other audio streaming sites.

So like it or not, Spotify is where you really need to focus your energy. And luckily for you, they give artists tons of tools to promote themselves, whereas all the other audio streaming sites give you virtually none. But because Spotify only lets you submit one song at a time to its editorial playlist submission tool and they recommend you submit four weeks in advance, this means releasing singles more often than once a month is a wasted opportunity.

And I hear a lot of people saying Spotify editorial playlists are over. But if you read as much data as I do, you see over and over again, there are a common ingredient in how musicians blow up, as well as oftentimes the first ingredient on how an artist starts to break. It's still one of the greatest chances to have your music discovered because it leads to you getting on more of those algorithmic playlists and on those A.

I. playlists and into Discover Weekly and all the algorithmic bonds you need to start getting played a lot on Spotify and make fans while you sleep. So you're basically failing yourself if you don't follow Spotify's guidelines and give that song a chance.

So let's also keep in mind it takes weeks for some songs to spread on TikTok, Reels and Shorts and blow up. So pushing out different songs constantly doesn't benefit you since you need to be concentrating on drilling an earworm into people's ears. Since we're in what I call right now the earworm era of music promotion and while editorial playlists are the biggest ones, we have to remember Spotify puts the artists who get on user playlists on their editorial playlists.

So it's important that after your song is released, you then pitch it to other user playlists. But there's an important part of the Spotify game to keep in mind. That's trying to get into the algorithm so you get on Discover Weekly and Release Radar and all those other algorithmic playlists.

And to do that, you need to keep your popularity score high. And that happens by driving as many ears that will potentially like your song as possible as early as possible to your song. But now's a good time to mention for that work, you need to have a high quality algorithm.

What I hear all the time from artists is they're doing blah, blah, blah to stimulate the Spotify algorithm, particularly ads. But what I see over and over again is unless you build your fan base and trade the algorithm in an organic way, these people who build with ads hit a point where they find it impossible to grow, mostly because their connections are to a bunch of artists that aren't similar to them, but instead the same people who are also running ads. Just look at their fans also like sections and see why they often suck.

Whereas the artists who do the work I talk about in my video on building community, build connections with the artists most similar to them, grow wildly while they sleep since the algorithm is programmed to show them to the right people who adopt their style of music early on. It doesn't die the second they stop paying for ads and get dropped from a playlist, but instead keeps recommending them to new people continuously. I have a lot more to say about this and other videos that are linked in the description if you want to learn more.

So getting attention from your community and driving people from your socials or especially an email list is crucial to driving up this popularity score and having a healthy algorithm. But truly your mission when you first release a song is to try to get as many ears to your song as possible that are familiar with you and already like you or the potential to like you because they like your genre of music, not a bunch of strangers, not a bunch of randos, and definitely not a bunch of bots. But there's another platform we have to consider which is YouTube, which not only helps with music discovery, it's also where you can build relationships with fans best.

Because we all know that a great music video is what often tips people to send a music video to their friends so that your music gets discovered and it keeps spreading. But here's a good example of why YouTube is so important. We've all been through this where we maybe hear a song on TikTok and then pop it on Spotify or YouTube afterwards.

And then we'll hear it again a few months later after we stopped listening to it and realized we forgot about it and never rinsed the song as much as we would have. But then when we watch a great video, what we see over and over is when we look at the data is you remember that artist more and you have a deeper relationship with them. And listeners also share the video when it has impact on them, which also converts new fans while getting the ones who watch the video more invested in you.

I can think of numerous times in the last few weeks when I watched this sick video from Frost Children of them DJing in an elevator. I sent it to a ton of people or an amazing video like Suby Clubs Laced Up which I passed on to a bunch of friends I knew would like it. I see this on analytics and Spotify and YouTube both have analytics to show you who it turns into diehard fans and gives your music repeated listens.

And those ones tend to correlate with the people who make good videos since they always have higher numbers because YouTube rewards those who are uploading weekly or bi-weekly which is a little bit of a conflict with what I told you about Spotify. So putting up behind the scenes playthroughs vlogs lyric videos single screen videos of your songs help the algorithm favor you and help serve you to more fans while feeding the attention spans of those who are starting to grow a relationship with you as you put up different versions of your song into the algorithm while keeping Spotify to be a much more highly curated place. And this is also why doing my release plan where we put up that minimum viable video then the lyric video or visualizer then your music video works so well especially if you pepper in that alternate version.

This all helps you serve another video every two weeks and keep YouTube spreading you. And really the YouTube algorithm is on fire right now. So many people say they're seeing so many small artists on their browse page every day.

But I know what you're thinking. "Oh Jesse what does it matter? No one's paying attention to me anyway.

" Truly the greatest thing about algorithms is instead of some gatekeeper choosing you like how every other artist used to break through a decade ago if you use smart strategy you can draw connections between you and other artists algorithmically and then have the platforms push you to all those other artists fans. I made a video on how collaborations, remixes, features, and split releases are one of the greatest marketing opportunities we've ever had in the history of music and you should really watch it as it's linked below. These connections not only introduce you to another artist's fanbase but they live on another artist's page potentially forever.

Continually growing your fanbase as an artist also makes new fans and vice versa. But there's an algorithmic benefit to this too. You end up in the Release Radar and the Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes and other algorithmic playlists which are the most consumed playlists on Spotify all the time.

I've talked to the managers of some of the larger artists I know who say this can help a lot more than getting on the biggest playlists especially those artists who are regularly doing collaborations since they have lots of algorithmic ties. We even saw it in our music listening survey that up to word of mouth this is the second biggest way music listeners say they find new artists the most. Which is wild since this is something you can put work into to finding who to collaborate with and work your way up from smaller to bigger artists and do the work yourself.

But the benefits of this do not stop at YouTube and Spotify. One of the things musicians seem to forget is the way Instagram and TikTok algorithms learn to recommend you as the algorithm looks at when two artists are tagged together and mentioned together. And when that happens regularly, like when you're playing small shows together all the time with another artist or do a song with another artist, the algorithm ranks how often this is happening between the two of you and then recommends you to the other artist's audience.

So if you're one of those people who's always complaining that the algorithm doesn't pick you up, this is what you need to be doing. This is why you need to be regularly tagging and doing things with other artists to help you grow. But what does that mean practically though?

Doing those collaborations with other artists as well as making artist playlists where you tag the artists you add to them on your Instagram stories and on X, Blue Sky, and Threads helps get you those algorithmic ties especially if the artists are small and building just like you. You basically want to be creating a link ecosystem that all the algorithms start to understand that you're similar to these other up and coming artists that the people who are adopting this type of music are going to be listening to and then they'll find you as well. And the same goes when you tag them on TikTok, Reels, and on YouTube Shorts.

And I know some of you are getting some big ideas into your head right now. The key is these algorithms, they work at scale. Meaning you can't just do this with Drke tagging him all day.

It's not going to tie you to him. There's too much other competition trying to get close to them which is weird since he keeps getting called up. But this right here is why knowing your community and working with other artists of your size and doing this with artists who are just a bit above you in fan base size is the key to growing which is why you really need to know your community which is why I emphasize this over and over again this challenge.

You're probably wondering how you find your community and use it to leverage your fan base. Instead of going into detail on that, you need to watch my longer video on that. Instead I'm going to show you the other pillars of marketing right now.

So I just explained why knowing who the other small artists in your community is important. So you doing as much research about your community will show you the other artists you should be creating a connection with so the algorithm knows who to serve you to the fans of. But community work goes way deeper than algorithm.

This is actually about people and connecting to them. And I know I said this last part was about people too but this is even more so. Knowing where the people in your micro genre, your local scene, etc.

Congregate. Whether that's in clubs, discord chats, subreddits, introductions you get on email from other people you met is how you meet the people who open doors for you and connect you to the right people. So often the artists who grow are the ones who are most engaged in their online communities since the people who are in those communities are tomorrow's tastemakers, playlists, A&R of a cool label.

And knowing your community allows you to know who the best mixer or director in your price range is in your community to make you level up and do better music. And if you're just trying to get signed one of the most common ways that happens is by working with the mixers, master engineers, and photographers and directors in your community and then they share the work they do with you on their socials. And all the A&R they work with and the managers who follow those people and work with them regularly see your name in your song and maybe hear it.

And if you have a great song well that's how the managers and label relationships often start. I see it all the time. So you need to be taking the time every single day to understand your community.

And truly one of the things I see that's different between whether musicians are growing faster or not is whether they've done the work at this as it makes you a better artist and a better student of the game. Truly this is part of both artist development and marketing. But most of all those who reach out to their community get propped up by it.

This is how you get your first fans and I just made a video on that. So many people wonder what the first step of getting fans is and I'll tell you this is often that you make friends with somebody on a message board let's say and they post about you to their fans then you post about them when they put up a new song or it could be through an Instagram DM and that this happens because you both make a similar style of music and then you have a web of people like that who are connecting with you on the algorithm and that's the first steps to get a leg up and build a fan base. And truly the difference I see when I do consults with artists who do this work for 10 to 15 hours well the artists who don't do it are always the ones who are flailing and confused and the ones who do it are the ones who see a path forward.

So head to the description and watch my video on finding community. And truly one of the things that changed over the last year is that you have no idea if TikTok reels or shorts are going to be what blows up your song or even a combination of the three. Since one of the things we see on my members only feed is so many artists post on all three and the videos that do well on one platform flop on another and vice versa.

So you need to show up on all three since my music listening survey also showed that the majority of music fans are watching all three platforms every single week. Oh yeah and speaking of that membership feed for just $5 a month you get access to the entire back catalog of over 50 videos I've made on the latest music marketing techniques, what I'm experimenting with, dissections of artists of all different genres who've gone from no fans to viral. I answer your questions every week and every month I listen to all my members who submit their songs on a live stream.

So hit the description since for just $5 a month you get over 6 hours of videos every single month. But now of course we should talk about what I think is the most exciting part of what I saw change in 2024 and continues into 2025. And I know this will make some people mad but I'll tell you this when you get together with people who actually work breaking new artists we all see the same thing.

Never before in the music business you see artists with $0 budgets start to get their music heard by millions of people for $0 after the song is recorded as long as they have some lighting, a decent camera on their phone, and study how to do short form videos and the nuances of what works on them they can blow up. Hell, even with music videos we see videos like Shaboosia Bar song filmed in front of a green screen and one take in front of it or Tommy Richmond's million dollar baby low five party footage get hundreds of millions on a shoestring budget. Truly we're not in an era where money is making the difference here anymore.

Since we're now in the earworm era where if you're pushing your song over and over again and it gets inside people's heads and converts those people over to listeners, well it's making a lot of artists dreams come true. So I'll make this as short as I can. When we talk about having a great algorithm, what TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts allow you to do is make algorithmic connections on those platforms to get you introduced to fans who are likely to like you.

And there's a certain technique to do it that I've talked about in a video below. But you also need to then send them to the streaming sites like Spotify and YouTube to strengthen those algorithms since the fans who will jump over to another app out of enthusiasm to your song are the best fans to build off possible and the ones you want building your algorithm, not the ones from ads. So I'll be straight with you.

Right now if you're a broke musician with time on your hands, studying the moving target of what's working on the short form video apps and getting good at making videos and editing in CapCut offers the greatest chance of changing your life and building a fan base I or anyone else I know has seen. So be sure to study what's happening on those apps. Click not interested whenever you see some person coming and saying some weird food thing or you see the guy with the pigs and click heart and follow every time you see a musician and two hours your for you page will only serve you inspiring musicians and you can begin to learn.

Take notes on the cool things you see and think about how you can apply them to what you would do. The people who do best on the short form video apps are the ones who keep repeating similar content and getting better and better at it, who do both lo-fi content, somewhat edited content and hi-fi content like produced music videos. And remember, since we're in a for you page world, this means if you learn how to interact with the algorithm properly, you are most likely going to be shown to strangers every day.

Truly what's exciting right now is YouTube browse pages are showing videos of small artists with thousands of views. Spotify does the same thing on Discover Weekly to the people most likely to like those songs. The for you pages on TikTok, Reels, Threads and Blue Sky are serving you to strangers as long as you make something engaging.

If you can figure out how to make cool things and target an initial niche of fans that is likely to like you, you can get noticed like you've never been able to before. And if you're curious about that, hit the description since I have videos on this, as well as an entire playlist on everything you need to know to blow up on TikTok in 2025. And I need to say, one of the things about a for you page world is follower accounts and subscribers matter less and less.

And the main complaint huge artists have is no one sees their announcements for new songs and merch and touring. So what we do to combat that is we need to regularly collect emails and texts so you can talk to your own fans. This really helps since you can have those contacts for years or even decades.

But most of all, it's because social media posts get seen by around 10% of your audience, but emails can get 25 to 40% and texts get double that oftentimes. This is why I recommend you put up an unreleased song, a cover your audience would like, or maybe an alternate version of one of your songs on Triblia, a free site that lets you trade track downloads for emails, texts, or presaves. And when you get those emails and texts, you're building a fan base you can collect and grow with, especially since I see the artists who get even 200 emails can get their popularity score to raise 5% by sending to the people who are most enthused about their music and email that their song is out since those people are most likely to rinse.

But let's talk about what works on these platforms. I want to say this, the majority of musicians I talk to on a daily basis have made social media far too complicated because they don't realize what they're actually seeing. What appeals to you or any audience for that matter is not someone trying to be something they're not.

We all have authenticity radars that give us cringe the second we see something inauthentic. And yet, most musicians talk to me as if they should be doing some performance that's not authentic to them and they're not comfortable doing. It's literally the thing I hear most when I talk to musicians.

And I gotta be honest, that's not what I see blowing up and making fans for us. Devote time each day to thinking about your most interesting thoughts or the most interesting things you are personally doing. Or the traits of your personality that are most charismatic.

And then how can you use them to build relationships with fans showing who you are on social media. And I also want to say this though, you do need to remind people regularly about your music and making stories that involve your music. Just saying your song is out now is the weakest sell of a song possible.

Tell the story of how the song makes you feel or makes others feel or how you felt when you made it. If you do that, you'll see your song streams increase. And if you're regularly telling people this with an understanding of community, you'll build relationships with fans and grow their relationship with your music.

But I know what you really want is a cheat sheet on which social media apps you should be using. Threads in Blue Sky is probably the best place to socialize and keep up with people right now. And it's really a great place to build community and start conversations since it's been proven over and over.

Twitter is dying since, well, we all know what happened there. And if your audience is under 35, every moment you spend on Facebook can probably be spent better doing something else. But if you're just pressing a button to share your story or reels there, well, it's worth it to occasionally post an update there too for the biggest of announcements.

SoundCloud for many niche electronic music and rap genres, if you use the right hashtags, particularly micro genres, you can get found by important early influencers. But let's get to the last pillar of how you grow in 2025. That's to understand the cheat codes of your genre.

So I can't get super specific with this. In this video, since each genre or micro genre has their own cheat code, I talk about this a lot in my member feed. But what I mean by this is there's often a trick happening at each moment, a practice or an aspect of music promotion you can focus on that will get you way more fans if you understand it and allocate more time to it.

Think of it this way, right now, hiring a radio campaign, if you're a DIY pop artist, well, you'll find somebody will take that money, but you may as well set it on fire since there's no chance it'll ever get played unless you have a ton of streams already. But a moody indie rock artist doing this for college rock radio or Sirius XM could really be a small amount of money spent to make it really excel. But one of the reasons we watch your community so closely is that you start to understand what the cheat codes are as you study it, since you see what works for others.

Understand and research the cheat code techniques of your genre and then exploit them as much as possible once you see them. But let's also remember, it's rare for an artist's massive growth to come from concentrate on one place. It's often an accumulation from a few smart strategies.

So here's the thing, while you just learned all this framework, if you really want to grow your fan base, you have to understand how to find community. And I just made an amazing new video on that, which is on the screen now. So make sure you watch that next if you really want to level up.