Defining your ICP on vibes is a pipeline killer. In Build Your GTM Alpha, Clay + HubSpot for Startups walk you through a live build. Real prospect list. Real enrichment. Real outreach sequence. You don't leave with a plan. You leave with outbound running. June 18. 11am ET / 4pm GMT.

Register Before June 18

If you've been stagnant in your fanbase growth for a while, it can be depressing. Science literally says one of the causes of depression is feeling like you aren't making progress. Plus, you want your dreams to come true, you want to grow your fanbase so you can make money, and you want people to adore you and hang out with cooler people. There's a lot of concepts and actionable things you can do to make growth happen so you level up to the next level. By the end of this, you'll understand how to do exactly that and stop being stagnant.

I often think of building a fanbase like a 10-step ladder. The bottom rung is under 10k monthly listeners, since those are the hardest to build. The second rung is 10-30k. Then 30-60k, 60-100k, 100-300k, 300-600k, 600k-1M, and on up from there. Everyone agrees the first two steps are far harder than the rest for a new artist. But the thing they all have in common is that whichever step you're on, you feel like no one is spotting you or knows how to get your leg to lift to the next rung.

Let's first talk about the difference between the first two rungs compared to all the others. When you're on these two rungs, your biggest problem is just about no one is giving you opportunities, and when you ask people for opportunities, even getting 1 out of 20 of them can often be a good batting average. So many people shoot themselves in the foot by getting discouraged after 2 or 3 no's when they reach out for collabs, playlists, or shows.

The first thing I always tell everyone, no matter what rung they're on but especially the bottom rungs, is resilience. What I mean is, the same way if you start playing guitar or keyboard or yelling on the mic, after a few minutes at first your fingers or voice will hurt and you'll have to stop. But when you've been doing it for a minute, you get a callous and can soon do it for an hour or even hours.

In order to grow, we need to get used to no's and see them as part of our journey. Stephen King, the most prolific and successful writer of our times, would hang rejection letters on his wall because he saw them as part of the journey you do to get to a yes, and it showed him he was putting in the work that needed to get done to get his first books published. That's the right attitude. Now let's discuss what gets you to the next step.

If you've followed my stuff thoroughly, you may have heard me talk about a concept most people don't get, which is that the opposite of aura is slop. For those of you who aren't teenagers with an avid understanding of the discussion around whether Nettspend's latest record is mid or not, allow me to explain.

Slop is what we see every day. Artists putting in no effort and making an AI video that takes 1 minute. Another video of someone in their pajamas singing on their bed to a song. Then we have mid, which is when things have a little effort put in but they aren't really impressive. If we already like an artist, mid can be fine. We'll be glad to see them and hear their song, and it's good enough for our friends' attention spans to stick with them. But aura is when an artist makes something super sick. That video or look where we can't believe they could even think of this.

This is a scale and not absolutes. There's mid slop, and one person's mid can be another's aura. But aura is rarely mistaken for slop.

The great secret of growth, no matter what level you're on, is that what gets you to the next step is often leaning more into aura. Let me explain why. You may have seen one of these statistics that seem to drop every week about how many songs flood the apps, whether they're AI or not, that never even get a single play since they're slop. What we have to think about in this crowded environment is what will get us seen amongst all these other artists.

A thing I keep reminding all of you is that it's important, when people are scrolling, that they see you as an artist with your own unique personality, which is often perceived as aura. When people see you as a unique artist and you make a type of music they like and your song even sounds pretty damn good to them, they feel like they need to know it in order to fit in with the people they hang out with. That's the secret sauce of music promotion.

Now the smarter people amongst you are thinking, "Jesse, that's all well and good, but that takes artist development and I have no idea how to do that." Lucky for you, I've been writing a book on that, available free to any of my members, which you can find a link to below.

The key here is we want to figure out what makes you unique as an artist and lean into it, and then bring that out even more in your songs, music videos, photo shoots, and short form videos. Then we need to get a vision not only for what you're going to do today but what you're going to do next to level up from there as an artist. Sometimes you see a really cool thing you can do but you don't quite have the funding and resources to get it done, so you're going to create something now and then hope it grows big enough to get the funding to do the next cool thing. Some of you have a whole different problem: you want to make something cool, but it never looks good enough and you need to hire people to help, but you're broke af. Luckily I have help.

If you want to get financial help to make songs with better producers, video directors, hire a creative director, or do better marketing without signing a contract that gives up a big percentage to a record label for a crazy long license so you can level up, you may be interested in the sponsor of this article, who I'm thrilled to show you, which is beatBread. They've helped countless artists level up what they do with track advances over the last 5+ years.

If you aren't familiar with them, they offer flexible masters and publishing advances that provide financial freedom for independent artists, labels, songwriters, and rights holders without having to give up ownership. Their mission is to empower artists so they can own their art and control their careers by giving them funding and more choice to select the promotion, marketing, and production partners that best fit their unique needs. What this means is you can get an advance on future royalties so you can level up the next thing you make without the strings attached of a record contract that can last years and tons of negotiation. beatBread artists customize and select their own deal structure from hundreds of options depending on their own needs to level up their future.

Musicians need funding at key moments. To market and promote that new EP, to go out on the road, or just get in the studio with that great producer who can take a career to the next level. beatBread makes it super easy to find out what your catalog is worth and get an advance so you can make that high aura creation that gets you to the next level. You can even enter your Spotify artist profile into beatBread and get a quote on what they may offer you. You can see a quote instantly.

One of the things we have to talk about is data, aka the great terror of musicians' minds, self-esteem, and mood. I get it. I've talked before about how I only read my analytics once a week, on Fridays at 6 PM, since if they aren't showing me something I like, an hour later I'll be out to dinner with friends doing something I like instead of dwelling on it.

When I look at analytics, I only do it if I have a plan for what I'll do to fix them if they don't go my way. This is because you lose your self-esteem and will to create if you're constantly looking at views and likes, which aren't even the right things to be looking at. Instead, we want to look at the data that will tell us what to change. If you're continuously looking at your data and seeing that your Average View Time is better on a certain video, you can learn what to do next week. If one video got more shares and went in the algorithm, you can learn lessons from it. If you want to learn more about this, I get into it deeper in my 4-hour video, linked below with a timestamp.

One of the biggest factors that changes when we go back to that fame ladder is that once you're above level 2, your hardest decision is often what opportunities you should pursue, rather than having to create them for yourself all the time. The biggest part of leveling up is how you make those decisions.

Part of the workbook I talked about earlier helps you learn who you are as an artist, so you have the backbone to know when someone is pushing you to do something you shouldn't. Truly, one of the things I see that so many artists regret in their career is that when they don't know who they are, they move like a ping pong ball through decisions, having no clue what to do, since they don't know who they are and anyone can change their mind since they have no basis. We need to form that point of view and artistic backbone so you make good decisions.

If we want to level up, we also have to talk about investing in growth. Luckily, here I'm strictly talking about time and smart practices, not your money. What I mean by investing in growth is doing things that make sure the fans who like what you do are able to keep staying in touch with you.

For example, you want to be doing my Close Friends funnel on Instagram, since Instagram loves punishing you if you put a link in your story to Spotify or YouTube. But if you do this Close Friends funnel, you can link to those videos to the people most likely to click on them. The link to go deeper on that is below.

Then we should be doing smart things to get people on your email list. That can be putting an unreleased demo or cover exclusive to your email list signup. Making sure you collect emails with zip codes at live shows makes it so you can activate fans when new songs and videos go up, and can drive yourself into the algorithm easier, which makes it easier and easier to keep getting fans while you sleep from the algorithm.

The biggest factor with going up a level is how we call attention to ourselves. One of the biggest questions I get is about whether an artist should hire a publicist. The first thing I try to instill in them is that publicists can only call attention to something, and unless it's exceptional, it won't really matter if it gets attention. If it's just AI slop, odds are the publicist won't get anyone to pick it up, no matter how good they are. If it's mid, it won't do much. But the best publicity for a great thing can get you two notches up this ladder of fame we've been talking about. The key really is, you better have great songs and visuals, or else it sometimes won't even take you up 1/100th of a ladder rung.

Thanks for reading.