The Hype and Reality of AI in Music

So I laugh every day as people buy into the lies of the tech elites who are always claiming “next week, AI will do everything you want,” because frankly, I have heard this bullshit before, as someone who has followed many tech bubbles. But with that said, what I am interested in is what we can do today to save time with technology, and I pay close attention to that so we can stop doing boring tasks as musicians to get your music heard and focus on what we should be doing, which is writing great songs.

Using AI to Market Your Music

So after you're done reading this newsletter, I will show you how you can use a chatbot to research your genre of music to find the people who do influential YouTube videos, record reviews, reaction videos, TikTok videos on what artists to listen to, and tons more, so you can get your music heard in your microgenre. 

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

So, one of the mistakes people make about using AI for research is that they either see what it does and go “meh, that’s not that good,” or they don't realize that you need to give it a whole lot of instructions to get it to perform better. But I know you, you're a musician and are lazy and don’t want to do that, and that’s why you come to me...

The Ultimate AI Research Template for Musicians

So, luckily, I made a template that removes about 95% of that work. All you need to do is input your genre name or names if it's one of those genres that go by a few different names. For example, the main example I’m using in this newsletter, the genre of music goes by a few names: Baddie Core, Cum Metal, and Horny Metal when talked about online. And no, I didn't choose those just to make you giggle-that is real…

After that, you just add some artists to include and some to exclude. Basically, you want to list the artists whose fans are most likely to enjoy your music for inclusion, and any artists in a genre that the chatbot detects but that you feel aren’t a good match can be excluded.

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

Then, I provide an absolutely excellent starting point with tons of influential people, message boards, potential fans hang out on, and how they like to discover music. Pretty simple. No code, no fuss.

Fine-Tuning Your AI Research

Now let me say this I know some of you with big brains are going to think “I will just ask chat what I sound like or to give me artists who sound like another artist I sound like” Chief I got bad news for you, it is stunning how bad these chatbots are at music genome-type things, AKA figuring out what artists are in each genre and its largely because they don't have as good data as say Spotify.

Straight up, looking at an artist’s “Fans Also Like” section and actually listening is the only way you get good answers. Yet again, let’s use these chatbots at what they are good at, not what they are bad at, and the tech isn't quite there yet.

I am telling you, I have done this with over 50 different genres now, I have seen it, and the results you get when you do it the right way are way, way better than if you are lazy and ask the chatbot for artists.

As well, you should look at playlists that have other artists whose fans would also like you, and then come back. 

Getting the Most Out of AI Tools

So, anyway, I have come up with a prompt that gets rid of all the hard work so you can save yourself some time and make music. I’ve watched like a hundred hours of how to prompt chatbots and took recipes like this and worked and worked till this prompt gave me what I needed.

I then took it to my member community to get their feedback since that’s where I share what I am experimenting with way before anyone sees it on the main channel, and I show all the things I am watching and learning each week. A lot of what the community wanted was not just the influential playlists, tastemakers, but also what fans often dislike about artists, as well as any email addresses to contact the influencers, Discord chats where they discuss the genre, and subreddits. This report will also tell you hashtags people use for videos, and the main ways fans who discuss it say they find new artists. 

Now I should say if you are searching for influential peoples’ email addresses since my company has to do constant cold emails, we test out AIs for this and I have found Perplexity.ai to be the best AI at finding email addresses and it has s a free tier that works great for this just give it context and chat with it giving it clues. 

Step-by-Step Guide to Using the AI Prompt

Ok, but let’s get into what to do here. If you have a favorite chatbot—whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude— use it. Some will do it for free or cheap, and some will ask for a monthly subscription. Depending on your financial situation, do what you will here since you get different results with them all, and I personally find Claude to be the best, but whatever you want to use is fine since the sauce is in the prompt.

The first thing I want you to do is download the prompt from this link here and copy prompt 1 into a text editor.

Enter your genre name and artists to include and exclude. As you can see, I highlight the two places where you need to enter your genre name, and then the artists to include and exclude are in different colors to make it clear to you.

The artists to include should be the artists that have fans who would like you, and the ones to exclude, well, obviously aren’t as good and are the ones helping to give as helpful results.

Oftentimes, these are artists who are super super popular. And yet again, these chatbots can do a bad job of detecting genre, like putting Imagine Dragons as a heavy metal band when we all know they are cringecore.

This is why you need to do this part of the work yourself and find similar artists, and I find that particularly the artists with a couple of hundred thousand on up to 3 million monthly listeners get the best results in this tool.

Customizing and Improving Your AI Results

So now that you've pasted it into your chatbot, it’s going to ask you a few questions. One trick to getting good results is that the chatbot will ask you to customize it for what you are looking for.

Every time and every genre is different, so I can’t tell you what to write. Just use your common sense, and once you are done, you need to give it a few minutes to cook. You will then see what it comes up with in Claude. You can see which artists it observes, and if you feel those aren’t a good fit, add them to the exclude list and regenerate the prompt until it gives you relevant information. 

Once you are somewhat happy with the results you have been given, we aren’t done yet, as we need to do something to get even better results. I want you to now paste in prompt 2, which will have it reevaluate the information it collected and dig even deeper for more thorough information.

It basically says, now that you have identified all these sources, can you look at them and give me a more in-depth analysis? But when you put that in, it makes this thing I would literally go as far as to say it improves the results to be 150% - 200% better in my estimation. 

The Results

So lets look at these results you have extensive lists of who talks about these genres on youtube, influencers on tiktok and instagram, even comedians and outsiders who occasionally comment on the genre, Spotify playlist curators, how fans say they discover music, the hashtags they engage with on platforms like Instagram and tiktok, trends that were big in the genre that you can use to get an idea of what performs well.

Then we get to an in-depth analysis of what it found on forums for how fans discover music in this genre, the unique vocabulary the fans use when describing what they say when they like a song, so you can get inspired on words to use while writing hooks.

Then we have a whole section of the emails of different people involved in the scene. This next section I would take with a grain of salt, it has some good advice, but this isn't what AI is good at. But, for example, I see the posting time is actually accurate, but a lot of this is meh.

Lastly, it has content angles that convert and give some general advice that can be helpful but also I would take with a grain of salt, too. The fun thing is that every genre you get totally different results, and if you mess with the prompts and the groups to include and exclude, it does change.

If you play with it for an hour, you will learn a ton.  

You Will Need to “Chat”

But as I just hinted at, the key here is the word “chat” in chatbot. When you see things you want more or less of, you need to instruct it to do so and chat with it. So, for example, if you don’t care about Reddit but care more about Discord, ask for it to go deeper in Discord. It’s sometimes better to start this process over as you include and exclude artists, and sometimes chatting can give better results. 

Use This as a Starting Basis

Now I should say one of the things pointed out about my people much smarter than I, is that part of the process of doing research is that you learn little details along the way. The time you take looking for clues, you see other details and learn things that are very important. What this chatbot does is give you a starting basis, but you still need to live in these communities and try to learn how people behave, but this can give you good clues on how to read the room.

You should use this as a starting point, but really getting it into the communities it shows you and being a part of them, listening to the playlists it finds, is where you learn what makes a difference. 

Join My Discord

So here’s another fun thing, while I am happy with this prompt, we can get it better in my Discord. I have a chat for prompts where we discuss how to improve this and other helpful prompts. If you want to join in, there’s a link to join the Discord here. 

Thanks for reading!