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The Return of Jend

When Jend came on about a year ago, he'd just hit 4.5 million monthly listeners using Meta ads and playlists. People loved that conversation, so we brought him back.

This time, we're talking about his event series “Mosaic”, using YouTube to book gigs, ManyChat automation, and updated playlist strategies.

MOSAIC

Taking It Offline

The biggest shift for Jend has been getting out of the digital-only world. He moved to Barcelona a year and a half ago, and he and his roommate started throwing their own events.

"We decided that if we wanna go into live gigs, we wanna do it playing our music with a curated setting," Jend explains. They started Mosaic on a rooftop in Barcelona last October with one event per month in a different city.

These aren't massive shows—100 to 300 people max. Small parties where they partner with local teams to handle production and venues.

They've grown a YouTube channel to around 600 subscribers, videos pulling 5,000 to 20,000 views, and that's already generating real bookings. Jend's heading to Costa Rica this week because a festival wants them to take over a night.

"People have to fill nights all over the world. They'll see things even when the numbers aren't insane."

You Can't Judge After Three Posts

Jend keeps emphasizing consistency. "You can't judge the results after your second or third release. We had one live set get much bigger all of a sudden. That was our seventh release, and it really only got bigger after we eks."

Start Small

You don't need a massive following. Jend started with 50 people on a balcony, and he didn't even know 50 people in Barcelona.

"I just asked the five to 10 friends that I have, 'Hey, maybe you can bring two or three friends.' And then that kind of goes."

The content you get from these small events is gold. People respond to crowds, to emotion, to seeing other people enjoying music. Having multiple camera angles showing an actual vibe makes a huge difference.

"If I have two or three friends in the background dancing to it, if I have two or three different angles and you see there's an actual vibe, the more it looks real and less staged—that's really valuable footage."

The balcony event cost them 200 bucks for speaker rental and two decent cameras.

The Crowd Psychology Shift

Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day has this theory that Gen Z and Gen Alpha use crowds as endorsements of cool, whereas older generations were all about discovering obscure things first.

"It doesn't have to be a huge crowd. People aren't necessarily gravitated to seeing 10,000 people there. It's just seeing that there's a crowd of people that are enjoying something."

How They Actually Promote These Events

Main strategy: Meta ads, but not conversion campaigns. "We will have the flyer with a song of ours and be like, 'DM for an invite.' And through that, we're collecting Instagram accounts, emails."

They use ManyChat to automate the DM responses, or sometimes just do it manually. The targeting is genre-based with artist names and a song, but the real key is testing different creatives. "One flyer that you might think looks really good might perform a lot worse than a video of your past gig."

Budget-wise, they aim for 2,000 to 4,000 euros in event costs. The first ones were losses. One time, their card scanner didn't work, and they had to do an open bar. "Making events is really tough. There are so many variables that can go wrong."

Merch Actually Sells in Person

Jend tried the Spotify merch feature. Didn't work. "I used to just put it up on my Spotify, thinking that people would actually go check it out. That rarely ever happened."

But at events? Different story. When people have a great night, they want a memory. They do 20 to 50 pieces per event, and if you say it's limited to that event only, people grab it.

META ADS

Meta's Andromeda Update: Not Quite There Yet

Meta's pushing their AI algorithm hard with the Andromeda update. The pitch is you throw all your creatives into one ad set with no interests and let Meta figure it out.

"We've tried it out multiple times. We've seen that in most cases, it's not there yet. Especially for music, having a few different separations between interest targeting and actually targeting different genres or artists is still the better way to do it."

On higher budget campaigns, they'll test one broad ad set alongside their interest-targeted ones. Sometimes it works.

The bigger change is that you need way more creative variety. "A song might be a sad song for somebody, a happy song for somebody else. It's really that match of visual and audio in the first two, three seconds of seeing that ad that makes somebody stop scrolling."

Here's a crazy example: someone was running ads with lots of guys in the crowd at the beginning. They thought the music was more female-based, so they tested showing girls instead. The audience ended up being 80% guys, but they wanted to see attractive girls at the beginning to break through the scroll.

"It's very hard to predict what the best thing is," Jend says. You find this stuff out through testing.

AI for Promotion (Not Creation)

Nobody in the artist community wants AI to make music. But using AI to promote your music is different.

"If it's AI doing boring tasks so you can do more creative things, that's where I'm all for," Jend explains.

He's been using stock footage from Pexels and Unsplash for years—sites with Creative Commons licenses that are safe to use. Stay away from Pinterest videos; those are usually ripped from Instagram accounts. You can't use people's work in your ads without permission. Depending on where you are, that's platform bans or legal trouble. Jend's seen people in his circle get hit with takedowns and fines.

The better option is videos from your camera roll. Clips of you and your friends on a summer trip pieced together with your track feel personal and authentic.

They're also working with videographers to create ad packs: 100-plus clips of people driving, running on the beach, different themes you can stitch together.

The newest thing is AI-generated video clips. "Now, to create a 15-second visually appealing animation or even a grandpa dancing on the moon through your track might be something that actually works pretty well."

With the recent OpenAI video tool launch, 90% of what I’ve been seeing has been really, really stupid, but the other 10% of content is actually very creative and fun.

"I think it's gonna open a lot of doors for musicians to create visuals for their music, exactly tailored to what they have in their mind."

Automation: Getting Time Back

Jend's agency built software called Intelligent that automates the Meta ads process. The problem is all the manual work—duplicating ad sets, deselecting Meta's AI enhancements you don't want, and recreating campaign structures.

"With Intelligent, you just upload your ad creatives and everything from there till the optimization of your campaign is done automatically."

It also tracks how your songs perform against ad spend over time, so you know whether to keep pushing a track or cut the budget because something else is growing faster.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

PLAYLISTS

Playlists Still Work (If You Do Them Right)

Playlists are still viable for growth, but Jend's approach hasn't changed much. He runs ads to promote the playlist and manually curates submissions.

The automated tools that add songs for you? "It's never been the most accurate thing." You need songs that actually fit together, and you need your song in playlists where it makes sense. "Anything else distracts the Spotify algorithm from who your actual listeners are."

The SEO Play

Major labels figured out that parents search things like "16-year-old slumber party pop," and they're making playlists for those terms. ChatGPT scrapes these, so if your playlist becomes the ChatGPT recommendation, that's huge traffic.

SEO promotion works, but it's long-term. You're competing with major labels. It works way better in niches they'll never touch.

One tactic that's worked: when a song blows up on TikTok but isn't released yet, make a playlist called “[Song Name]" or "Songs Like [Song Name].” "That's what people actually look up. They look for the song, and then they'll check the playlist."

This only works until the song drops or loses its TikTok momentum, but it can jumpstart a playlist fast.

Jend talked to someone whose entire label runs on playlists they created seven or eight years ago. But he doesn't recommend going all-in on SEO if you're just starting. Run ads to your playlist initially.

His biggest playlist hit 30,000 followers, and "it really got more SEO traction without me spending more in ads after it got like 20,000 followers."

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media Reality Check

Followers don't matter like they used to. Jend has close friends who've told him, "I haven't seen you post anything in months," even though he's posting regularly.

"Some of my posts get a lot less engagement now than they did three years ago, even though I had fewer followers."

The algorithm favors consistent posting across different formats. When you have 20,000 followers, that doesn't mean they're all online every day scrolling through their feed.

Consistent posting matters because people don't find it exciting when someone posts once every two months. They say, "Hey, this person really seems like they're gonna blow up, I'm on it early." That's exciting.

Most people don't use all of Instagram's features. Some people only check stories. Some only watch reels. You need to hit multiple formats.

Keep It Simple

Jend's advice: less overproduction, more consistency.

"Figure out some sort of format that works for you that you can replicate easily, something that fits your music that's not overly complicated."

His suggestion: post something from the studio twice a week, do pre-promotion for your track once a month, and share a random story unrelated to music once a month. Having that system makes the organic side way easier.