- Music Marketing Trends by Jesse Cannon
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- How Musicians EASILY Find Their First Fans... and microgenre
How Musicians EASILY Find Their First Fans... and microgenre
It's never been easier to find your first fans than in late 2024
Jesse Cannon
October 01, 2024
Music Marketing Trends is a Newsletter by Jesse Cannon that breaks down how musicians really get their music heard. If you know a story we should be telling or an artist we should cover just hit reply to this email.
Do you constantly feel like you have the best songs, but you can't quite get anybody to listen to them?
You know there are people out there who would love your music, but you just can't seem to find how to get your music to them. Luckily, there are tools musicians are using each day that make this easy to do in about an hour. But let’s hear from this week’s sponsor first…
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Musicians’ Biggest Problem: Obscurity
It doesn’t matter if you have the best songs going right now; if you’re putting them in front of the wrong people, it won’t connect. There are people out there who already enjoy the type of music you make, the challenge is finding where they are.
I have good news: no matter what type of music you make today–even if it's some sort of tech klezmer dubstep–you're not alone and it's never been easier to find your audience. Whether it's short-form apps or the way you target playlists, technology has allowed us to find people who like the most obscure genres of music.
The Targeting Mistake
A lot of people make the mistake of going way too broad in their music promotion. They think if they cast a wide net, they'll catch a lot of people. But the real fact of the matter is when you're dealing with large pools of people, most of them are not the type who are looking for new music intentionally.
Even when you know what type of music you make, it can sometimes be hard to find the people who listen to it who are looking for their new favorite song. Some people just put on a playlist or what their cool friend tells them is good and let that be their taste. They don't want to waste their time hearing bad songs and trust someone else to find them the tracks that they're gonna rinse.
Music Addicts Are Your Early Adopters
On the other hand, there are "music addicts," who need to search every crevice of the internet to find an artist whose fan base can fit between sidewalk cracks to fuel their addiction–similar to the drug addict who will do all sorts of ridiculous measures to get a fix, they are addicted to the mood-altering drug of music that makes them feel a way they’d rather feel. I know this behavior well because I am a music addict, as are most of the people I'm friends with…So I know how to find them.
How To Find Your Audience (In 3 Steps)
Step 1: Identify Your Genre
First off, we need to know some vague genre traits of what type of music you make. But really, if you're absolutely clueless about this, I will show you 3 easy and FREE tools that can figure that out. Two of them come from the company Submit Hub.
Submit Hub’s “What's My Genre?” tool: Upload your song and get genre percentages based on Discogs data. After you do this, you’ll likely have 2-3 subgenres of what you sound like and can use this as a starting point. Note: It’s way better to put in a YouTube or Soundcloud link rather than Spotify, as it will analyze the full song rather than just the first few seconds.
Submit Hub’s “Hot or Not” tool: Upload your song to get feedback from real music nerds... I mean, early adopters. After a few days, they'll get around to you and hit you back and tell you what other artists/groups you sound like.
MusicStax: The perfect tool to look up the artists you think you sound similar to and check what genres Spotify considers them.
Step 2: Content Strategy
“What Genre Am I?”
So now that you know your subgenres, it’s time to start promoting through TikToks, Reels, and Shorts. You're going to do the content prompt that even the biggest artists do like Tommy Richman–who had the #2 song in the world this summer with “Million Dollar Baby.” Here’s what he did to promote their songs to blow up the charts…the simple query: “What genre is this?”
Asking people’s input on your genres gets a lot of people talking. And what you probably don't realize is that when someone comments on TikTok about something, they're very likely to see one of your next videos…and if they see that next video and it has your song in it, now they've just heard it twice and will be continually served that earworm hook as you continue promoting your song. The more they hear your song, the more susceptible they are to it and are likely to go and listen to it on one of the streaming platforms like Spotify or YouTube.
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