Music Marketing: How Artists Are Achieving Millions of Streams

So many of you complain when you watch music marketing videos that the ideas are outdated, or don’t show how an artist is going from literally nothing to hundreds of millions of streams. Well as many of you who watch this channel know, when you complain, I mostly listen. Unless it’s that comment that I need to blow my nose, then I just look at you and judge you for never having come across a white guy this nerdy in your life before.

Anyway, I noticed a lot of musicians are getting a lot of streams, like you. Streams on their first song type stuff from a few simple new marketing techniques that I have yet to explore on this channel. So in this video I decided to show you what’s driving new fans right now. So let’s do this. Oh and be sure to stick around to the last one since it’s huge.

State of Music Promotion

So before we get to the big stuff, we should probably start off with a little talk about the state of music promotion. So our first technique is to diversify. So right here is a chart that I got texted to me by everyone I know, as if I hadn’t already seen it a hundred times since it made so many people’s jaw drop.

This is a chart from one of the most accurate analytic outfits around on the daily app use for users, meaning what people actually use. And while the headline for many people was that Elon has chased everyone off Twitter by letting it run rampant with Nazis and bots, I think there’s a lot of interesting things in this chart that are much more interesting for musicians.

Diversify Your Following

The first is to show that, just as many of you thought, TikTok has been slipping a little bit. And so many of you write me asking what to do about this stupid TikTok ban. Now, some of you know this, but I talk to politicians all day in my day job. Trust me, it’s real glamorous. And I’ll tell you straight up, TikTok is going nowhere. It’s just gonna get bought by a US company, and if anything, hopefully they’ll stop showing that stupid shopper’s money. But that’s if this legislation even gets passed.

But this is all not to say you shouldn’t take advantage of everyone else’s ignorance on this subject, of what’s actually happening here. Right here on the screen now, I have a perfect example of taking advantage of this for musicians from the artist Sophie Powers, who’s one of the masters of short form right now, and just killing it on TikTok.

And what she shows here is you should all be reminding people to follow you other places all the time, because the more places people are following you, the more likely it is to see your announcements and see all the things you have to offer them. And even when there’s not good reasons, like an app might go away, this is a really good technique to use all the time.

So, some of you are now old enough to have seen one platform die and another spring up in its place. But if you haven’t experienced this before, trust me, just listen to anyone who had tens of thousands of followers on Facebook talk about how in one year, that became totally worthless. So if you have a content schedule like you probably should, I would put in there that every 30 to 60 days to suggest a follow on another platform.

This could even be sharing one of your threads on an Instagram story or in a carousel. This could be mentioning your at handle is the same on every platform from time to time. But the key is to diversify your following. And if you have any following on TikTok, use the misperception that TikTok is going away to grow your Instagram. Because as we’re about to discuss, Instagram promotion is just as good for music as TikTok promotion. And if any of these apps take a plummet like Twitter, you don’t want to have to rebuild from nothing.

Technique Two: Viral Content Strategy

But now we’re at tip two, and I know you’re sitting on the edge of your seat wondering about that 100 million streams in 60 days for an artist with only one song out, since I kind of promised that. Okay, let’s take a look at this group, Good Neighbors. This single came out about 60 days ago from when I’m taping this video. And it is nearly a hundred million streams on Spotify. And if you count the other platforms, it’s way over that. And as you can see, well, this is their first song. So what happened? Let’s head over to TikTok.

So as you can see, if you scroll around their TikTok, the majority of their attention comes from a few TikToks getting hundreds of thousands to millions. But let’s look at what they actually did with those TikToks, since it’s really interesting.

So since copyright laws are total garbage, I can’t play you this song. So you’re going to be subjected to my very, very bad imitation of it. So what’s going on here is they took the imagery from that movie, Normal People. You know, it’s the type of movie that made my fiancé have a desperate crush on Paul Mezcal, along with countless other girls, when they saw a guy actually be nice to a girl. Who would think that would ever happen?

Anyway, let’s look at the subtext of what they’re actually doing here. So that picture, for those of you who don’t know, will remind anyone who saw this of the emotion of that movie. For those who don’t, it’s still conveyed what you kind of see here, which is a person who feels like home, someone who’s falling in love, since they look like they’re falling in love in the first slide. And they say, POV, you found that person who feels like home.

And then as you can see in the second slide, it has the lyrics to the song, which emotionally compliment that POV prompt that they put in the first slide, as well as the lyrics to the song, since those are the lyrics to the song. Now. If you were listening to their song instead of me, you’d hear this barn choir type song singing those lyrics that are very, very emotional. And frankly, all of this works really emotionally well together, even though I don’t even care for this type of music. But the emotional alignment is a lot of the key here of what worked.

Consistency in Content

Since as I’ve told you in one of my more slept on videos, that’s linked below in the description, music is a mood altering drug that makes you feel a way you’d rather feel. So what this TikTok is essentially doing is saying. Hear that song? You want to feel this way? You know, probably the strongest emotion any of us can feel falling in love with someone? Well, here it is. And shockingly, a lot of people will click over to feel that mood altering drug.

But there’s even more to this. So many of you are scared of doing the same type of content over and over. But Good Neighbors are a masterclass in doing one version of a video. And if it does somewhat well, then continually doing that video, but trying to improve upon it each time. If you scroll through their TikTok, you can see they’re constantly iterating on these two slides. Most of which they’re not even in. They’re just using imagery that feels like the song’s lyrics, and this could work for any type of lyric.

And as you can see, sometimes it did well, sometimes it didn’t. But most of the time, if they were ramping up a little bit and doing something, well, they could catch a wave and get a lot of views as they did this over and over again over the last two months, but they kept repeating the same two slide format, a prompt on the first slide, set of lyrics on the second slide, and always a picture that looked like two people falling in love, like the lyrics we’re singing about. And as you can see, it doesn’t always work, but they kept persisting.

Numbers rise and fall like waves, because TikTok often has a neighboring effect where one video does well, well, the ones close to it will rise up as well. And this group was not shy about doing similar tactics over and over again. And really, this group only has a few formats that they do, and they slide back and forth between the different formats, and boy does it seem to work as they get millions of views.

Experiment with Multiple Platforms

I know a ton of you don’t want to do dances, or even show your faces. Well, here’s a viral formula where you do none of that, and if you want to learn more about this, I went super in depth on what this group is doing on my members only YouTube stream, which is linked in the description. But I know a lot of you are like, “Yeah, okay, Jesse, but they make poppy music. Despite how bad you butchered that vocal line, it’s way poppier than the music I make, you know, Trap Goth Sex Dungeon 4, and you don’t understand non-pop music.”

Well, Chief, I got news for you. It’s working all over the place. A great example of this is the band Love Rarely, who I’ve been listening to nonstop ever since I found them from this technique on TikTok. They’re doing a similar technique of repeating similar videos on TikTok and changing the message a little bit in the prompt. And they’re doing amazing numbers for a group where the genre doesn’t have a very huge audience, as you can see here. And that’s one of the things too, is so many of you get disappointed when the numbers aren’t huge.

And you have to remember, some of your genres are huge. At this scale are not going to get that big numbers at first but over time this all adds up. So that’s all to say as usual you really messed up by doubting me chief, but here’s the takeaways when something works. Think of not how you imitate it, but how you improve upon the idea each time. Secondly, align your music with prompts and imagery that feel emotionally strong and in line with what your earworm is saying that you’re putting in your videos from your song.

And three, since many of you mess this up, make sure to use the same hook from the song over and over so it gets in people’s heads and then they go to listen to it. And tip three is related to this, that if you have very few followers right now, it is just as likely you will blow up on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube shorts. If you post the same short form to each of those platforms, Instagram has really caught up to TikTok on making the algorithm engage users with songs. And so many people, myself included, have a way easier time building on Instagram than TikTok right now.

Leveraging Short Form Content

That’s not to say everybody, but you have to experiment for yourself and to make things even more crazy. If you’re someone who’s making music videos and then chopping them up into short form and then connecting the short form to the long form videos you make on YouTube. Well, it’s possible that may be where you get a lot of your streams from. I see different ways artists are blowing up every single day since I talked to so many different types of artists.

So this tip is a lot like the first one I made, in that you should diversify and experiment with platforms. And if you look at Good Neighbors videos right here, you can see that some of them are getting a massive amount of views on Instagram. And some of them are getting a massive amount of views on TikTok. And yet, when they post it on the other platform, it would not get as much attention. So the algorithms are totally different in what they would boost. So you should really be giving all the short form platforms a try.

And pay attention to which platform it does best on, and lean into that one. But really, you should be leaning into all of them. Since as you can see from Good Neighbors’ example, you cannot predict that just because a video does well on one platform, it will do the same on another.

Final Tip: Embrace Threads

Okay, but time for the fourth and final tip. I’m gonna go back to that chart we looked at at the top of this video. See that death of Twitter? Well, it’s really dying. You could argue that all the other apps are doing pretty minimal movement, especially considering they’re all pretty old. But Twitter is really not doing well. But that doesn’t mean people don’t want to read short form text. Hell, I’m an addict of it. So I want to yet again drill into your head. Threads is where it’s at right now and so many artists I know are growing a following there.

This is a big tide shift that’s happening right now. And the thing that’s really starting to work about threads is since so many more people are using Instagram, if people follow you on Instagram, they often follow you automatically when they use threads. So once you have a follower on Instagram, you have potentially diversified another place to communicate with them without having to beg for a follow since Instagram users can automatically set themselves to follow whoever’s on threads that they follow on Instagram.

Also, Instagram pushes threads to users of their platform, and it’s another way that you can get discovered. But one of the things I love most about threads is that it shows most people a lot of different posts from people that they don’t follow. So if you’re interacting on threads, and you’re good with text, your threads will show up to strangers, who could end up hearing about you, and following you, and grow your fanbase.

I don’t know how long it’ll be like this, but having another platform that’s really low effort to post on, we have more of a chance of people seeing your announcement, increases your chances of fans seeing and hearing your song, Sticking around with you to hear your other announcements. So here’s the thing, while you just learned all this, if you really want to grow your fanbase, you need to understand how to make algorithms like you, which I talk about in the video on the screen right now. So make sure to watch that next if you want to really level up. Thanks for watching.

Read More: 13 amazing Music Marketing Tips In 9 Minutes