I'm going to keep this week's Tuesday edition brief, as some of these have become quite lengthy lately. In one of my many consulting calls a few months back, I saw an artist hovering around 150K monthly streams on Spotify who had run out of new material to promote. Their music is highly produced with a sought-after producer who can't get them new mastered material for another 4-6 months. We were developing ideas on the call about how to increase their growth during this period. We identified a few areas for improvement in their overall strategy, but it was apparent that one simple action triggered three times more streams per month.

I keep my consulting calls private, especially when they involve embarrassing oversights of best practices that most of the music business knows. But seeing a best practice triple streams really made me somewhat shocked at the magnitude of this simple tweak. The artist had 9 singles out, and each had been released one by one as singles, rather than doing a waterfall release. So we immediately went in and sorted the 9 singles into two categories since some were a bit more "ambient" and others were a bit more "composed." They now have two releases instead of a string of 9 singles. What began to happen as traffic from Discovery mode (aka radio), various playlists, their link in bio, and an occasional email blast came in was not a large increase in monthly listeners, but instead, streams per listener greatly went up to around 3x what they were previously, with this largely being the only thing we changed ourside of cleaning up their link in bio, and adding links to a few socials that were missing them.

For those of you not in the know: If you send a listener to your Spotify and it's a single song, after it finishes playing, it will switch to Spotify radio and they will potentially play another artist. On YouTube, the same goes for a single video, unless the listener clicks on a video on your end screen, they will probably be lead to another creators video. Whereas with a waterfall, you can keep the listeners you bring to the platform engaged for multiple songs. This is why you often see the smarter artists share their discography playlist for both Spotify and YouTube (and occasionally Apple).

But one thing I do understand is that artists are artists, and some consider a single a body of work, and they don't like how a waterfall singles group's songs. I completely understand that. If that is the case, make a playlist of your discography or some songs that work well on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, and share those.

The benefits of waterfalling extend beyond inbound links for your listeners, who may come from a link in your bio or a short-form video. When they hit play on a waterfall, a discography playlist, or your most popular songs at the top of your Spotify profile, they keep hearing your songs, building a deeper relationship with your music and potentially finding more favorite songs and getting more invested in their relationship with your music. Every time you share a link to a single song of yours or one of those link services that list out a link to your song on 12 different streaming services, you are dropping the ball on an opportunity. Instead, you want to ALWAYS BE SHARING PLAYLISTS.

Now for the even more nerdy part - Many of you ask me how to do things like waterfall your music through your distributor or have single covers match albums, and here's the only answer: Every distributor worth working with has an FAQ on this since they all have different backends that require different methods to get a waterfall done. I can't make a tutorial on it since they change them all the time. What you can do is read their FAQs or contact their customer service. And frankly, if their customer service sucks, then you should leave them for another distributor that feels a responsibility to answer their customers' questions, since far too many of these distributors think they can cut that cost for more profits so they can drive stupid cars.