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The Importance Of The Social Media & My Basic Strategy

Why are social media so important? Social media are the perfect tool for marketing your music, building relationships with your fans and driving new sales. Social media lead to massive worldwide exposure and trigger a huge number of daily listeners. Social media provide a live feed from your fans which is extremely helpful for understanding your audience's preferences, respond to their tastes and adjust your outputs accordingly. In that way you will maximize your impact, expand your fan-base, increase your sales and eventually increase your income. Social profiles are the facade of your store. It is where people come close to your product or service and make up their minds about it. At that point you might think "Wait a minute, I am a musician and I want to be judged for my music and not for my digital appearance". I am sorry my friend but we are living in a transitional period of time. Allow me to explain.

The beginning of the music industry goes back to ancient times, when song scores were traded, bought or sold. The epitaph hymn of Seikilos is the world's oldest known song, whose lyrics and music are fully preserved. The song was written c. 200 BC by Seikilos the Greek, in the Greek language. (If you check on Wikipedia it states that the music industry began in medieval times. Wikipedia is a not trustworthy source. Many articles written on Wikipedia are inaccurate and often biased. In our case Wikipedia is wrong by at least 1500 years.)

During the music sheet era that lasted till the end of the 19th century, if someone wanted to hear a popular song, he had to buy the music sheet and play it with an instrument. It was only after the invention of the gramophone, in around 1880, that physical records went commercial. A few years later radio broadcasts spread across the whole world. Later on we had cassettes and afterwards compact discs.

Till recently all you needed to succeed in the music business, as a music producer, was... GOOD MUSIC. Other factors like outlook, appearance, dancing skills were important too, but if your music was good enough, the labels would sign you, record your music, play it over the radio and your career would lift off. What would happen from there was only a matter of how much the people enjoyed your music. If your music had a strong impact, you would start performing in public, touring, selling more records, and so on. As for sales, things were pretty simple till the millennium; 100% of the income was generated by the sales of physical records. After the millennium all that started to change and approximately in the year 2015 the compact disc industry collapsed. Almost no one buys cds anymore. You can find vinyls only in some exclusive retro shops. The music industry is dramatically changing making it harder for everyone but at the same time offering great opportunities. As I said in the beginning, we are currently living in a transitional period of time.

Producing good music is clearly not enough. Take a look around you. Everyone is looking at his mobile phone. The most important thing nowadays is how many people you influence. How many people you provoke to look at your pictures, watch your videos, listen to your music. It’s all about your overall status, not the looks, not your music, not the dancing skills, not your character, BUT ALL OF THESE TOGETHER. And your social profiles are essentially responsible for making a good or a bad impression. For example, if someone likes a track of yours but goes online and sees that you have no engaged audience, he will assume that you are NOT as good as he thought. If a club promoter likes your music but checks your Facebook page and sees that you post pictures of you playing golf, which is totally irrelevant with your occupation (music making), he will instinctively assume that music making is not your main occupation.

Anyway, I am NOT going to talk about your appearance and how your social media should look like or what you should say and what you should not. I am only going to provide a basic strategy on how to increase your traffic and your numbers. We are only going to create a small BUZZ around your social profiles.

But what you should go after are not the numbers but THE ENGAGEMENT of your audience. How loyal and how often your fans interact with you is what matters. What you need is a dedicated fanbase and not big numbers. And keep in mind that in every scene the veterans know each other. So DON'T overdo it. And never buy fake followers. Try to keep your numbers real and objective, close to your actual popularity. Because the veterans of each scene can pretty well guess where each artist stands. If you are a newcomer keep your numbers low. A newcomer cannot have 1000 followers on Twitter, or 5000 subscribers on Youtube or 10,000 followers on Instagram. Using prudently the strategy described below will help you grow your numbers and eventually get your music heard by a larger audience. Let's get started.

Facebook

Achieving organic traffic on Facebook is not that simple. It takes time. Back at the time when Facebook was founded, each new post on a page that had for instance 1000 followers could get 50 likes. Nowadays Facebook has become extremely greedy and a post could only get 1-2 likes on a page having 10,000 followers. That happens because FB is not showing your post sufficiently and thus forcing you to pay for your post to appear. So FUCK FACEBOOK. Don't put your money on it. Instead:

- Hire a professional graphic designer to create your image header and cover.

- Make regular posts with interesting material and add related tags. There must be variety on your posted content, you can't post only Youtube links. You must upload videos, images, all sorts of posts. There are 2 reasons for this:

a. You don’t want to exhaust your audience with the same type of posts.

b. Facebook algorithm gives priority to those pages posting diverse content as it considers them as more interesting.

- Add friends of the same interest (EDM in my case) and invite them to like your page via any possible Facebook account that you can access.

- Create a group and link it to your artist page, leave it open for people to post freely.

Instagram

You don’t have to put a single penny in order to create a decent Instagram profile. All you have to do is:

- Follow the limit which is 7500 people but be sure they relate to your music genre or topic.

- Upload regularly and add many tags. Your content needs to be:

a. 50% Promotional material (videos, teasers, spots, covers, short clips, anything that has to do with your music or products)

b. -25% Pictures of you and of your everyday life. People want to see who you are. They want to see something personal like what kind of food you like or how you spend your free time.

c. -25% Irrelevant content that has nothing to do with you or your music. Post a flower, something that draws attention, a joke, an anecdote. Something light and easy to watch. After all, life should be carefree and easy, right?

- Interact with your audience. That will urge them to engage with your page. A small engaged audience is more valuable than a large inactive audience. It is better to have 100 interactive fans than 10,,000 non-interested followers. In order to achieve that you must show them some interest. If you don't give a shit about them, they won't give a shit about you either.

- A trick for Instagram: When your traffic exhausts, instead of making a new post, add or change the hashtags of a past picture. The picture will re-appear in the feed and you will gain new likes and followers right after you save the changes.

Soundcloud

SC is my favorite social network. For one simple reason: You can't buy fake followers. It is the only decent and objective platform where you can really see the actual popularity of each musician. SC's team is required to check and delete fake profiles. I bought once 500 fake followers and after a few months they all disappeared all by sudden. What you can do is this:

- Follow the limit 2000. Some of them (10%) will follow back and some will even like/repost your tracks.

- Use repostexchange.com or a similar service. Through that kind of service you can trade reposts with other producers. Try it out, it works.

- Use a free download service like theartistunion.com. That kind of service requires from listeners to repost/like/share/comment on your track before being able to download it.

- Use hashtags. You can do a trick on SC and add your music genre in the title. (For example: Open Source - Space Kablooie - Psytrance) In that way your song will appear in the results when someone is searching for this keyword (psytrance). I know guys that achieved monstrous numbers by just adding tags in their song’s titles.

I don't recommend uploading frequently because it takes time for a track to become popular. Instead, leave gaps between uploads and upload your very best stuff only! At some point you will witness your traffic drain. You will check your activity and nothing will be happening. At that point you have to restart the traffic; with a new upload, repost, unfollow irrelevant people and follow some new and so forth.

Youtube

Youtube is the most important tool for any artist. Especially for musicians. But most artists have not realized the importance of Youtube and don't even have a Youtube account. So for starters, create a Youtube account, with professionally designed headers, add your links and start promoting it.

What you should be after are the Subscribers because without a fan-base you won’t be able to generate views. I will tell you a secret to encourage you while struggling to get subscribers. It is extremely difficult to get 1,000 subscribers but then things scale up pretty easily and much faster than before. Although you might need 1 to 10 years to get to 1,000 subscribers, you might possibly need the same period of time to get to 10,000 subscribers. Because your channel's exposure is based on a geometrical progression and is not cumulative.

So your goal is to get to 1,000 subscribers. How you do that?

- Number one issue: Consistency, upload frequently, at least once a week. If you upload one video today and one next year, your channel will never flourish.

- Add interesting thumbnail, title and tags. The title is the most important thing. I have seen forged videos getting millions of views because the title was interesting. For example everyone would click to see a video named "Who killed JFK" or "How to fly without wings".

- Share your links on all social websites including reddit.com, blogs, forums and everywhere else possible.

- Use google ads. Yes you need to spend some money at some point. You can't just conquer the world on zero budget. The cheapest views you can buy cost 0,01 cent. So with 10 euro you will buy approximately 1,000 views. You have to set the audience familiar with your topic otherwise you will get many dislikes. When buying views you get a few new subscribers too. My strategy is, when uploading a new video, to allow a few days for the video to gain some views organically, and then add up 2-3 euros to increase the views furthermore. The more views a video has, the more it appears at the side (where suggested videos are) and thus gains even more organic traction.

Twitter

Strategy on Twitter is simple:

- Create a nice layout including your Logo/Brand.

- Follow the limit, 5,000 people. After a while unfollow those not following you and follow some new. Retain your integrity by keeping following those who followed you back, do not unfollow them. When more than 5,000 accounts are following you, you grant the privilege to follow plus ten percent of the number that are following you. For example, if 10,000 people are following you, you can follow up to 11,000 people.

- Tweet regularly adding hashtags.

- Retweet, like, comment, interact with people of your niche.

Mixcloud

There is no limit on how many people you can follow on Mixcloud. Decorate your profile with some professional images and start following people. Be careful not to upload a mix that includes only your own tracks or it will be taken down. I ‘ve lost a few uploads in that way. Upload quality mixes with well designed thumbnails and catchy titles. Your goal is to get to the charts. There is an easy way to do that apart from by paying. In order to enter the charts you need a lot of listens and fast. You can achieve that by posting an embedded player of your mix on popular pages, like forums, blogs and set it to “autoplay”. In that way whenever a page containing your embedded player is loaded, it will add up a listen.

Spotify

Even though Spotify is not exactly a social network but a streaming service, we will consider it as a social network for having followers & listens.

The most important factor on Spotify is your music to get listed in major playlists. You have 3 ways to do that:

- You can either create your own playlist and start promoting it until it gets popular.

- You can contact the people that own popular playlists. Some of them are curating playlists as a profession and some as a hobby. Some other playlists are owned by labels. Labels use them to promote their artists. That is why it is essential to release your music through labels. I have heard some theories claiming that you can release your own music all by yourself without a label. Sure you can do that but no one will buy. The labels own popular playlists, popular social media accounts and an established buyers club. Anyway, it is not difficult to find the owners of a big playlist. Some of them want to be found for their own reasons.

- You can pitch your upcoming release to Spotify’s editorial team through your “Spotify for Artists” application. In that way the employers of Spotify will listen and consider adding your track to their big editorial playlists.

Keep in mind that Spotify pays about $0.002 to $0.006 per stream and big playlists can generate thousands of listens on daily basis. Therefore Spotify playlists are essential for any musician.

Beatport

Beatport is an online shop but we will also consider it as a social platform. It is crucial to get your releases to the top 100 of your genre by all means. There are some underground services offering that, and they charge around 200$-300$. They have multiple accounts buying your track over and over pushing it to climb up on the top 100. What is your benefit out of that? Well first you get noticed by the people that are checking the charts. There are many people buying music from the charts. And thus you might generate some more buys and get even higher in the top 100. After each purchase, Beatport gives you the option to follow the artist. When you follow an artist you get a notification on your screen each time he releases something new. The "real" people that are going to buy your music are probably going to follow you. Some of them will become consistent buyers and you will gradually build your own fanbase. Another promotional action is to build a DJ chart. There are currently 7000 charts in my genre but Beatport chooses only a few to feature on its home page. How does Beatport chooses which charts to feature? Well, when creating a chart:

- Add 10 tracks in total

- All of the same genre

- Released on near dates

- Released by different labels

- Add only quality tracks

With the above criteria Beatport concludes that you are not self promoting, and you made mature choices and thus you deserve an exposure.