one of the things I see so often is that musicians are like one or three flaws away from a huge breakthrough to all of a sudden get out of alri MC jail and have a huge audience start to notice them they just have a few small things that if somebody would just tell them all of a sudden their life can totally change but how can you get answers on how to fix those for us well sometimes you just need to ask the right people so music marketer Matt bacon and I recently held a music business
Meetup in Bushwick Brooklyn and at a packed house where we did a Q&A on the problems musicians are having and we get some really great questions that addressed a lot of the flaws you all have when promoting your music so I was kind enough to assemble a bunch of the more helpful ones right here in this video and along with Matt I'm going to answer those right now so here you are hello my name is Rosa so how do you promote your music like how is the sequence is it possible to promote a single and
a album the same way or do you promote it differently the core thing is going I'm going to have a body of work I'm going to release a single every 6 weeks I'm going to sit down and figure out every piece of content I can create to promote that single for six weeks then I'm going to move on to the next one and what I'm going to do to promote that single for six weeks and I might have my own ideas but I'm also going to go look at every artist I admire and just take
all their ideas and just do that all that to say so I think that's the core Loop is like consistent releases with a lot of content around each time focusing on the hooks focusing on the Jesse Canon patented word earworm era and being like okay this is what I do that makes me special High leading into the brand right and I think that for 98% of artists that is what it needs to be because until you're at a place where you have a bunch of strangers coming to your show PR isn't going to help you
radio isn't going to help you that's not really how it works the way the sort of order of operations is create great music build a community around it start to get some real organic interest run some ads around it keep building it and then eventually but you agree that ads come before PR no actually I don't agree why not why not hit me in many genres some geners PR is useless all together if you are making really great content PR is going to be worth more because PR will have an easy time Landing that great
content in more organic reach places in some genres whereas I will agree that ads are a necessary thing but ads are largely serving in most conversions people have already heard about you in the best case and if you only had a certain amount of money but you had great content I would choose but if you had mid content I'd probably choose that's fair but second part to the second part of the question promoting a single versus an album you got your 10 song album or whatever you're going to do half that album on Singles just
putting it out because the way attention works is like people only care about artists doing new things right nobody cares about an artist who hasn't done something in 2 years it's a lot harder to get opportunities when you haven't done stuff in 2 years you know what I mean so like you want to be able to take advantage of that album cycle and having all this material to keep eyes on you for as long as possible Right the core difference with promoting an album versus just singles you're putting out is at some point you have
to go what is the physical product how do I highlight that physical product and keep people engaged on that right because that's where a single cassette sale if you're getting a $12 profit on that's worth several thousands 3,000 streams I think so that's when you switch the dial and you start to go okay we're going to have cassettes we're going to have T-shirts with the album art we're going to have CDs or whatever the [ __ ] eight tracks if you're really clever and you go from there you know what I mean but whatever your
physical product is you have to really go okay let's lean into that and let's make sure we're showcasing that and showcasing hey this is a really great way to support me and a great way to have a circling back a collectible around the music so I wrote a video this year where I a lot of my videos in YouTube I take notes for sometimes two years most often six months to a year uh I did want to on this but the quick synopsis is singles when done well leading into a record almost every every campaign
I see that really does a great job at getting a record to explode is basically saying I have some sort of narrative that narrative can be really shall Charlie xx's narrative right now is my last record sucked let's party this one's [ __ ] dope can't wait for you to see you in the club and all you dry humping each other that's a fine narrative to do for her crowd as [ __ ] shallow as it is the point being then what happens when that album comes out though is what are the experiences what are
the times and what is the thing if you think of it this way what does any band do 10 years after their record somebody reposts this was my wedding song we fell in love to this it's just what happened during the record but that is really valuable because the thing is people are always looking for experiences I think of all the time I've had a really rough ride so far in 2024 finding like fulllength records I really love 2023 was probably the least amount of them I ever found whereas I loved so much music from
23 so I'm very eager when somebody this record is amazing for example Pitchfork gushed over this this record that's not even on Spotify and of course it's 2 hours long hi future Jesse here I couldn't remember the artist I was talking about here which is Cindy Lee's record Diamond Jubilee I listen through the [ __ ] two hours because it's quite an experience people tell me I'm experience I'm going to listen a lot of the thing I think bands neglect about releasing a record is they forget to tell the experience and as stupid and as
much as that doesn't matter it does not have to be a profound thing if it is an extreme death metal it could be like I learned how to pick in a new [ __ ] way that is not profound [ __ ] here it can be my record is fun tell some story your audience is the type of person will appreciate it as an indie artist I feel we're working with small budget so it's hard to know in which direction to throw that out outside of actually making the album but this pitching or working with
the pr or doing the ads and I do as much as I can that's free but I guess in your opinion what's the best place to throw that money it's it's different for every artist I know but for the playlist they say that you're not supposed to be paying for them but then you shoot an email and they're like yeah I want your song on it but it costs such and such amount what's the Vibes second part of your question three biggest waste of money that artists do one is definitely like paying to be on
a bunch of different playlists there's a very real like cottage industry of that and in the vast majority of cases it's just like a dramatic waste of time cuz first of all if you're not on the exact right playlist that's going to up your skip rate and that's what [ __ ] kills you cuz if your skip rate is high then it just doesn't matter cuz the artists who you see were maybe they're not huge but they have 200k Spotify monthly and are getting a big boy check every month they just hit Spotify radio because
they wrote really good songs that didn't have any skips algorithmic Spotify algorithmic Point yeah Spotify algori or whatever right autum Kings is L anyway doesn't matter all this to say you the way you make money is algorithmic playlists and if you have a high skip rate then you're just [ __ ] and paying to be on a lot of these playlist is going to increase your skip rate and it's going to [ __ ] you let me put an asri paying to be on is different for paying for consideration submit Hub is consideration be on
is bad and all those play are fully worthless no need very crucial distinction thank you Jesse yes the second place I see a lot of people wasting money we talked about this a little bit earlier is Radio cuz radio is like a lot of money and if you're not like already getting Traction in other places then yeah you're going to end up spending like5 $6,000 to screw yourself similarly PR again if you're not like having people organically check you out who you do not know on mass where you think some random person who has sent
a about you would be like oh yeah I know that band I'll write about them then you're really screwing yourself and also let me sidebar that I don't agree with that if you have extraordinary content you can come out of no place with PR and have it be worth it my thing is always this is that if you need to pay to make that extraordinary content now most people who are making really extraordinary content these days are doing on a very limited budget and doing it there's a performer named Hemlock Springs she just gets all
her weird friends together and does really cool [ __ ] and does that then the publicist can get that more attention but in other cases than what Matt was saying absolutely correct and then I'll add a bonus one I think that a lot of people are wasting money on ads because they don't have anything to back it up CU it's oh I put out this song and I have crappy content I'm trying to promote with which doesn't help you and then also you go check out their in like they they spend $3,000 on ads and
then you go check out their Instagram and it's just like crappy post so it's there's nothing for the fan to latch on to like you need to have if you're going to promote using ads that can work but you need to have substance you know what I mean that's where people are wasting their money Jess's going to tell you where to spend your money that's where I going to go I appreciate you reading my mind yes okay you're an indie artist here's some ways you could spend money one of the things that gets a lot
of doors open is a beautiful thing these days is that there is now so many people with so many credits that are great credits that you can work with that will one make your music better we all know people listen to music more when it's done better getting a good producer getting a good mixer a lot of people think that's going to be a lot of money I a retired record producer mixer and mastering engineer I have a million friends who are sitting who are very talented who are not employed as much as they would
like many of the top mixers my favorite mixer told me he mixes six songs a day which is unfuckingbelievable when you hear the the quality of this work but the fact is everybody's gotten it good they've gotten assistants who do these things so if that person is not getting let's counted a thousand songs a [ __ ] year he's underemployed so he's willing to cut deals here and there to get to it especially when it's really good so the other thing is with that when you tag that person on Instagram and you were able to
say that thing you're able to one get doors broken down when you're playlist pitching two when they reshare it it goes to all their manager friends who work with them and if they hear it that kind of slaps they see the name they know D does great work that can be a very easy ticket into things the second way I think that people really can do this is paying somebody who really gets Tik Tok in your local area we're all obviously in a more Metropolis area here since we made it here tonight but for a
lot of people sometimes paying the local person who takes pictures of their [ __ ] muscles or ass really can teach you a lot and I've had a lot of people I consult with have major breakthroughs going can I pay you $300 a for one day to follow you around and listen to you show me every question I have I'm going to annoy the [ __ ] out of you but you're going to be $300 richer honestly has turned around a few people I've worked with hi future Jesse here again just so you know if
you want to learn more about things like this this is exactly what I talk about on my members only feed where for $5 a month you get 4 hours of videos where we dissect the artists that are blowing up up right now along with cheat codes for different micro genres of music as well as the latest things musicians are doing to promote their music that I see are great ideas from a wide variety of different genres that people are doing that you can take and bring into what you do and you'll hear this long before
you hear it anywhere else okay back to our show and then third really at the end of the day I think that the real thing is a softbox like Dome a better iPhone and some sort of colored either colored filter or film filter for your editing where you can consistently make content yourself that feels like your music 100% And I think just to Circle back to your second point about like finding the local like Tik Tok celebrity to help you out like this is where the community building piece comes in I've literally seen artists like
go on tour with this Bandai manag Justa grind who are like incredible at Instagram and then finish start the tour and then finish the tour better at making content cuz they just hung out with the squa and who are just the best at Instagram and it was just like oh okay this is what they do and they were nice to me that's where the community building comes in Cara has a question hello everyone you look beautiful from up here uh my name is Cara ker that's coer like the word loser but it's about with the
k um okay here is where I'm at not really a deep question but I love making content I love it I feel like I'm not I don't do terrible with editing I turn out Tik toks all the time the Tik toks that I create that don't really the junk ones that people just think are funny go viral the stuff that I put out about my band 500 views I'm like trying to figure out how to make this thing I got going on work for me as far as like my band is concerned sometimes I will
put my band's tracks in the backgrounds of these junk videos but like nothing is really sticking so I just wondering if you had feedback on like how I could capitalize on that so there's in any era of Music I've worked in the last 25 plus years there's always usually two things you can point to that somebody with no fans and the people at the top have a problem with right now both those problems are exactly what you said everybody will say that across the board the thing being when you have one of my Consulting clients
with 16 million monthly listeners they have the same exact problems they go it does not get and the key always is how do you bridge the two together as much as possible so a good example sometimes it really is just the thing of in the middle of video I see it all the time like one of the funniest things about music marketing when you really want to study it being done at a high level find the prettiest man alive who listens to Consultants all day long because they know they're a [ __ ] idiot all
the pretty guys who make terrible pop punk with Travis Barker the best marketing you'll ever seen what they do in all their videos they're like yo look at me I'm on the skateboard you s out back to the skateboard dropping it in in finding any way you can do it whether it's dropping in the song is the only way we have right now and really the reality is what everybody's getting hip to is tour date announcement you go we have a new tour that is going to get one 100th of your best post but if
you literally just put the tour dates going across and say I was eating it in nabur I can't wait to do that on tour tomorrow tour date's here that will totally be a different thing it's integrating it into the middle of it as the only solution yeah and this is something I've talked about a lot is cuz you're right but I think if you sit down and you go okay consuming content thoughtfully from some of your favorite artists and being like like the same way but all this to say you can see the commercials that
your favorite artists are making you know what I mean so go look at them and be like huh how do they slip in a reference to their new record or their new whatever or an old song they wanted to just push the catalog on but really any artist you like who is consistent on Tik Tok and then just really asking yourself every time how do they sell something in this video cuz or how do they build brand in this video that tied into whatever they're doing do you know what I mean and like it's really
like that intentional consumption like looking at other people very intentionally and being like okay what did they do to do this and that's a that that is genuinely a strategy Jesse and I both did use to get better at short form yeah I I think actually the best thing to is really to remember that you can make another Tik Tok account where you can just hit not interested on anything that's not musician cuz honestly all the people I know who are best at Tik Tok are stealing from like country when they make metal or they
make queer hyperpop and they're stealing some [ __ ] weird country racist or whatever you're stealing from people who would never see your thing and figure out how you put your own flip on it and honestly too it's like the number one I things I tend to steal her I my fun fact day job is in politics I steal from a lot of political people on how to do marketing and then I when I do political Consulting everyone thinks I'm so cool because I'm like this is how musicians do they like musicians we're [ __
] dorks we're in politics it works all the ways taking it from somewhere where you're not but make your make a view only Tik Tok and just comment and cl hard things all day no one knows it's you and you will have inspiration for days I literally that's what I do to study all night all right listen if you enjoyed that on the screen now is a video that has 40 more minutes of that show or it's linked in the description since I uploaded the whole thing for you to watch I hope you enjoy it
thanks for watching
