Music Marketing Insights: How Artists Can Leverage Modern Platforms
I talked to more different artists of different styles of music about marketing and see a lot more data than most people in the business. And while I don’t find Taylor Swift to necessarily be the best example of that, fans are now who choose which songs get popular. Everyone I know who actually works in music with a lot of artists is seeing what Jack Antonoff is describing here, and that this is one of the best times for promoting music since good songs being pushed by artists are what’s blowing up.
The artist Russ has been saying similar and getting in a lot of fights with his fans. But I’ll tell you, I think all of us who see this up close see what I see each day, which is the people who are actually making exceptional music and do the work of getting to know the short form videos and what works in an algorithm well.
They’re able to do less work than any musician in history has in order to change their life and set themselves up for success by blowing up their song doing very minimal work.
The Reality of Spotify Playlists
The majors do not control 70 to 80 percent of Spotify playlists. So a lot of you are blowing up my inbox freaking out since you read this headline of this clickbait article that said the majors dominate the big playlists. But here’s the thing: it’s not true. Even in that article, they could see that in April that wasn’t even true when looking at New Music Friday.
Fun fact: you can easily see this isn’t true for most playlists if you have access to Chartmetric since you could look up any playlist and easily see the percentage of major label artists on the playlist plain as day.
This makes it even funnier since playlists like hyper pop have less than 10% of major label artists, and on “Pop Punk’s Not Dead,” less than a quarter of them are majors or big indies musicians. Let me blow your mind if you have 1,000 monthly listeners you’re in the top 8% of all musicians on Spotify. Even crazier is if you have around 100,000 monthly listeners you’re in the top 1% of all musicians on that platform. Every so often, Spotify puts out this loud and clear report.
I did some poking around when I was bored this weekend and did some math for a while today, and this really blew my mind since I work with a lot of artists with around 100,000 monthly listeners and the way they live is not really housing one in the top 1% should be living. But what’s really interesting is there’s only 500 artists Spotify considers chart toppers across all the genres in music, which is really a pretty weird spread.
TikTok’s Influence on Music
What do you think? TikTok has one of the most genius prompts I’ve seen in a long time. Nearly anyone can do this prompt and give the context of the type of music they make and where they are from.
Anyone in the audience who feels a connection to that type of music and location is likely to check out your song because this really breeds curiosity and makes them feel like they should know about you.
So I know conventional wisdom is if you want to blow up as an influencer, you need to post on TikTok three times a day. But as someone who reads data from tons of musicians and looks at growth on here, that’s not actually the answer for musicians. The reality is the median I see is about ten posts a week with a few of those being lo-fi ones where you just reply with your phone, and that gives so many artists thousands of followers a month.
I see artists who have songs people really like growing really fast off three posts a week, but in all reality, I don’t see a lot of growth difference in the people who post ten times a week and the people who post 21 times a week.
The numbers I see show that those old additional 11 posts a week don’t make the hugest difference for most artists. Instead, what makes a difference is coming up with really good ideas and the quality of your hooks.
The Power of TikTok for Musicians
This is why TikTok is so important for musicians. A recent study showed TikTok users are more likely to stream a song by two times compared to other short video platforms and social media. Not only does TikTok send you the most passionate fans for music, but the ones on the platform are much more likely to click on your links, listen, and build a relationship with your music.
Stop saying 60,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify a day. It’s not true. Okay, so Spotify from time to time tells us how many songs are on their platform, and last week they updated their website in pretty big ways and they said they had 82 million tracks that are on the platform. But in November of 2020, that number was 70 million. So the newsletter Flat Rate No Cap did the math there, and that comes to around 60,000 songs a day, which is a good deal less than half of the 60,000 number everyone repeats on the internet all day.
Understanding Spotify Analytics
We now know how many songs on Spotify have nearly zero listens. So this week we learned that it was a lie—60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify each day, and the number is more like 23,000. But now that Spotify is providing more clear analytics, Music Business Worldwide was able to do an analysis. For everyone who’s constantly upset about how many other artists are competing for an audience’s attention, well now we know that the number is really not that bad.
51% of the 78.
4 million tracks on Spotify have been played fewer than 500 times, and 60.8% have been played fewer than 1,000 times. And it gets even worse: 79.1% have been played fewer than 5,000 times. So the fact is if you’re really pushing your music a lot, there’s not as much competition as you probably think there is on Spotify.
I keep talking to musicians who are blown away by other musicians making 30 to 60 TikToks to finally make their song go viral. And well, you can’t really argue that it is working for some people to do numerous clips of their music video and tons of lip-sync videos to push their song till it blows up. But why does this work? Well, think of it this way: songs aren’t like normal TikToks, and we all have had an earworm of a hook take a few listens to get into our head.
If you hear that hook a few times, you may be prone to watching the next video even more.
And if you start to like the hooks of the song and it drives up the playthrough rate on the TikTok, it gets spread more to more people. So making tons of videos with the same hook of your song over and over, well, it seems to make sense why it keeps being TikTok gold.
Long Songs on TikTok
Your song doesn’t need to be short to go viral on TikTok. One of the most confusing things musicians ask me is whether a long song can go viral on TikTok. The popularity of the band Sleep Token, who you know beat Metallica as the most streamed metal band in 2023, shows it doesn’t matter since they had a six-minute song that was a massive TikTok trend.
Let’s remember on TikTok we’re playing short earworm clips of songs, so the length of the full song doesn’t matter.
Musicians are always asking me what’s the optimal length for a TikTok where they’re lip-syncing their song or clipping a part of their music video since every lame influencer person always is running around saying it’s the optimal time. But here’s what matters when it’s music: figure out how much of your hook needs to be in your TikTok to get in someone’s head is really what matters. Would make it an intriguing video, but the melody repeats twice in your hook. You can try making two versions, one with a longer and one with a shorter hook, and see what works best.
Since putting up many versions of your song is often what drives them going viral, and we really can’t tell unless we experiment. For so long, self-promotional videos weren’t pulling up on TikTok, Reels, or Shorts. But now they’re really doing numbers for so many musicians, but there’s a few tricks you should know.
Optimizing TikTok Videos
All the TikToks you make should use the same hook, so even if the footage is from your music video and you’re playing a different part of the song of the music video, you should still use the hook as the music for that TikTok. Second, if the lyrics are strong or hard to make out, use the app captions to make captions of the lyrics to draw people in and make sure the song and video loop perfectly on beat so that it’s more likely to be played repeatedly.
This is why your TikTok earworm isn’t working: one, you need to be hashtagging micro-genres of music. Hashtagging hip-hop or EDM is too big. Find niches on TikTok and study other similar users’ hashtags to your song. Is it clearly labeled in your TikToks or TikTok doesn’t recognize it? Add your song using CapCut from the song library to make sure people can look it up.
A recent study showed 64% of TikTok users rarely have a clue what they’re listening to.
Three, capture the lyrics on the screen since it increases watch time. And lastly, make sure your video has motion in it. Tell a story in it. People get engaged by storytelling.
I feel like at any point in time, there’s an obvious trend happening that most people are in denial of every single genre. TikTok influencer marketing is the hidden hand making songs popular. It’s where people are blowing up by putting very little money. If you look where the music business is spending its money, it’s here.
Collaborative Strategies
I haven’t seen musicians changing their strategies to incorporate it.
Admittedly, I’ve been experimenting on a few campaigns, and it’s been crazy to watch how few dollars we spend to get so many people to listen to a song. One of the most backward thoughts I hear from musicians, and I hear a lot when I talk about reposting and supporting the artists in your community’s TikToks, musicians get really mad when the artists they support don’t do it back. But so often, I dig deeper and find out that musician didn’t even ask that artist to repost it or let them know that they had something new that they were really trying to push. They just assume that everybody would notice their songs.
This is really silly, but even if you ask and the artist ignores you, just remember you’re actually building up your own personal algorithm by reposting and tagging that artist and making connections to them in the algorithm.
And if your fans listen to that artist a lot as well as you a lot, that’s gonna just keep building bonds with them in the algorithm for Spotify. You’ll start to get recommended in their algorithms and start getting recommended to their fans and build you up, so it all works out for you.
Teenagers’ Preferred App for Consumption
TikTok is not actually teenagers’ preferred app for consumption. Musicians obviously see explosive growth on TikTok, but so many of the idiots who give out advice on promoting your music have given up on music videos and YouTube despite everyone who isn’t just a con artist selling a course doing otherwise. And some of it is actually because data and analytics show that YouTube is actually overwhelmingly teens’ preferred app to consume on.
Take this study from Pew, literally one of the best researchers in the biz, showing YouTube being preferred by 93% of teens with TikTok coming in at 63% and Snapchat and Instagram barely behind TikTok.
Spotify’s New Discovery Mode
Here’s five things I keep seeing musicians mess up about Spotify’s new discovery mode. Discovery mode is only available for Spotify Radio and autoplay, not Discover Weekly or Release Radar. So it’s only when a user clicks on the radio button on a related artist or if a playlist or album ends and your song gets played while Spotify takes 30% of your royalties of the song. It’s only the plays that happened while in discovery mode, and you can opt in and out with each song in the program on a month-to-month basis.
Some of the musicians I work with have seen plays increase on a song as much as 14,000%, while others barely see any improvement. So it really depends on the quality of your song.
Smart Spotify Marketing Tricks
If you have more than one project on Spotify, this is how you blow them both up. You may be familiar with the group 100 Gecs. They’re one of my favorite groups today.
They do one of the smartest Spotify marketing tricks in that both the members are tagged as solo artists as well as the group as primary artists on all their songs. This means if someone rinses their solo material, they’ll get suggested 100 Gecs in Release Radar and in the algorithm. It goes vice-versa for their group with their solo material.
The supergroup Boygenius also does this masterfully since the three members have solo careers to feed into the group’s success. You could even do this if you change your artist name by tagging your old name to bring your old fans over to the new one.
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