SMS / Text Message Marketing For Musicians

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Why Every Artist Should Be Collecting Phone Numbers

All your favorite artists are sharing their phone numbers with you. If you were paying attention before 2016, this might seem odd since musicians used to do everything possible to keep a barrier between themselves and their audience. But that barrier has fallen. SZA is telling fans to come over to her house. Even the coolest bands making niche underground music are handing out hotline numbers.

Here's the thing: when you do get fans, you constantly regret not implementing certain strategies sooner. Collecting phone numbers is one of those moves. Text message marketing can make significant progress in building your fan base, and you'll wish you had started earlier.

The Numbers Don't Lie

People check their phones constantly. 95% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent. Text message marketing averages around a 90% open rate. Email averages 20 to 25%. That's a massive difference.

Text messaging marketing is three to four times more effective than anything else when done right. TikTok gets propped up as the greatest thing to ever happen to music marketing, but it's terrible at announcements and promoting specific releases. Text message marketing actually works for those crucial moments.

These services used to cost a fortune and were clunky at best. Now we have great tools to build your fan base with them.

What You Can Actually Do With Text Marketing

When your new song drops and you text all the fans whose numbers you have, you get a high open rate. The people most likely to give you their numbers are the same ones most excited to listen to your music. They'll drive up your Spotify popularity score, which feeds the algorithm and gets you onto Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists. That can push you into editorial playlist placements.

When you have merch and need to raise money, you can drive sales to the people most enthusiastic about your work. When you're playing someone's town, you can text them your show dates. If you collect zip codes, you can sort inside your text messaging app and target people in specific areas to drive concert ticket sales.

Text message marketing hasn't been exploited fully yet. It still feels intimate to fans. You can get them to do things that a social media post or email would get ignored for. Text message marketing is a great way to get user-generated content. Fans make TikToks of your song or share it on their Instagram story.

Because this technology is so new, you can send a text with a bit of vulnerability to these fans, and they'll feel close to you. It's their text messaging app where they message their friends. Try something like this: "Hey, it's [your artist name]. My new song [song title] is really important to me. If any of you can make a TikTok for it, it would mean the world to me and my cat Mr. Whiskers since I'm trying to blow up this song so I can get him one of those crazy cat tree things to climb."

This type of approach works even when you have just a few fans because it feels intimate. There are tons of possibilities, and people are still figuring out what works, so you should experiment.

How to Collect Phone Numbers

If you play live, do it the old-fashioned way. Print a mailing list paper and ask for phone numbers, emails (since emails are still effective and some people will only give you those), and zip codes so you can text them the next time you play in their area.

Some musicians get fancy with an iPad at shows. People type in their info, and you can send them an unreleased song or other exclusive content only available to mailing list subscribers. That works really well.

If you sell merch on Shopify (because you want it integrated with Spotify), you can collect phone numbers and zip codes from everyone who buys from you. Shopify has SMS marketing tools that let you message customers directly.

If you have a website or one of those Linktree-type services, almost all of them have ways to collect phone numbers and emails. They've had this feature for years. Or if you wanna go really hard use Laylo.

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

Which Service Should You Use?

I don't want to go crazy talking about the best service because they're all changing fast. With growing competition in the space, prices change every few weeks. Comment below and let everyone know what you've used and what you're liking.

Community is the service that has made the most noise and is one of the cleaner ones, with robust features. But that comes with a price. While they aren't at Mailchimp levels of exploiting customers for what they get, I'd like to see this tool become more cost-effective as the market opens up. This is truly a tool I'm watching for anyone who has a sizable income from music. This service could pay for itself with its engagement tools.

For those with really small email lists who want to get started without using your own numbers, you can use Google Voice. It will give you a free number where you can track contacts on a spreadsheet and text them individually without giving out your number. This will get cumbersome once your list gets sizable, but it's a great place to start if you don't want to spend money.

Then we get to the two services most people I work with use. SendHub is known for being affordable and having the tools you need when you aren't doing super complicated marketing pushes.

If you use Shopify to sell merch, their SMS tools have great rates and are effective at driving sales. This platform continues to improve constantly.

There are so many of these services, which is why this space is changing so rapidly and making text marketing viable for musicians at the start of building a fan base. I've become convinced in the last year that while many of these services will change, there's no doubt this will be one of the most powerful channels you should start building. With constant coverage of how Gen Z and younger generations are moving away from email toward text and WhatsApp marketing, these relationships can last decades. Getting invested in this can really help build your fan base and your musical journey.