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What if there was one technique that most musicians skip, which keeps them stuck with under a thousand followers and prevents them from getting fans, a manager, a label, or any attention? This technique has helped build most careers in the music business, unlike what other YouTubers sell you in Facebook ads - botted playlists and cheap answers that keep musicians stagnant with vanity metrics forever.

This provides real growth and a clear path to expanding your music's fan base. It helps you escape algorithmic jail where you're stuck at 300 views, based on how I've seen popular major label and indie artists actually build their fan bases. This will also help you make friends with people who will support you for years.

Finding Your Community Part 1

In this four-part series, I'll show you the time-tested way your favorite musicians have built their fan base throughout the social media era, with tons of secrets that are all updated for 2024.

In this newsletter, we're going to help you understand how all this fits together and why you need to be detail-oriented and really put the time in to investigate. This is the crux of how you do everything that moves the needle--whether that's exciting the TikTok, Spotify, Instagram, and YouTube algorithms to promote you, or finding the musicians you should be playing shows with, collaborating on features, remixes, and split releases.

Do Your Community Research

This approach will show you the producers, managers, video directors, booking agents, mixers, mastering engineers, lawyers, photographers, labels, and other team members you should have on your radar. When one hears about you and follows you, you can recognize them and build that relationship.

You'll also discover the fans who are most passionate in your genre, who are most likely to like you and spread the word: the YouTube reviewers, the TikTok accounts that recommend music in your micro genre, and the Facebook groups, Discords, Subreddits, message boards, and other places online where fans and influencers in your community hang out.

Since so many of you don't know which playlists, venues, YouTube creators, blogs, websites, and other places will potentially give you placements, or what hashtags you should be using on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, this method will teach you that too.

Community Theory

The sooner you learn how to do this, the more you're able to learn and take from what you observe each day. This is like how, once you learn some music theory, you can observe music better. This is community theory and how to observe what people are doing to promote music correctly.

This approach is more important than hiring the right publicist or anyone else to promote your music. The artists breaking today, not 5 or 10 years ago, do this first. The artists who break are students of the game, and this is the game.

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

This Is How Artists ACTUALLY Blow Up

This is how musicians who built a fan base actually got there. I've worked at a major label, talking to artists right when they get signed, helping them tell their story coherently. I've heard stories from thousands of musicians of all sizes across every genre over the years.

Here's the best news for musicians - after you pay to get your song recorded and produced well, tons of artists who understand this spend zero on publicity or content creation. They do it themselves and blow up. When you get this approach, you see the right work to focus on and get more from everything you do, enabling you to grow without wasting money on unnecessary expenses.

Your Ticket Out of Algorithmic Jail

But so many of you are skeptical of how this community work helps you, and to that I point to algorithmic jail - you know, where your posts only get a few hundred views. So many of you get on consulting calls with me, stuck in this prison, and what got you there is using silly hashtags and not following or interacting with any of the smaller artists you'd find doing this technique. Even when you're making good content on TikTok, you're still stuck because you've given the algorithm no clues as to who to send you to. If you just did this work for a few hours, you'd know it.

So, how does this get you out of algorithmic jail, where all your posts get the same amount of views? Your community is who the algorithm should be recommending you to, but you haven't taught it anything. The only people you're interacting with are cousin Anthony, who makes videos about his framed autographed hockey jerseys, and your partner, who, like mine, only watches videos of capybaras and dogs.

That's not helping the algorithm understand you. But if you have a list of 25 smaller artists who have 10-100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify who make music similar to you, where their fans would also like you, the algorithm can try out what you do on them and often be successful.

Algorithmic Bonds

If you recall one of my most recent and important videos, I discussed how everyone I know at big indie labels and major labels agrees that the biggest marketing opportunity in the history of music marketing is artist page visibility. That means doing features, collaborations, remixes, co-writes, and split releases. This not only gets you on the artist page of another artist, it gets you on the release radar of all their fans - the best real estate ever available in the history of music marketing.

You'll be on a song the fan will potentially love from an artist they already like, giving them the hint that they may like you too. You'll also get tagged on social media together, which teaches TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, and YouTube, along with tons of other algorithms, to recommend you alongside this artist and allows algorithms to build your fanbase while you sleep.

But you can't be effective at doing that work unless you have a vast understanding of your community.

“The More Niche You Go, The More You Grow”

And since we got on the subject of TikTok, I have to say something I see every time someone blows up on there - they understood their community well enough to know who to target and collaborate with, and the language and hashtags to use to make them blow up. It's a detail, not the top-line thing people focus on and what articles are written about, but I can tell you it's actually what matters.

There's something so few people understand about algorithms that I'm going to go deep on soon on this channel - they can only see connections users and music genomes make. There's a marketer I really respect named Coco Mocoe who says, “The more niche you go, the more you grow.” Hell even Charli XCX has echoed the sentiment in discussing that the algorithims and human attention spans reward niche artists who appeal to a sepecific set of people and then slowly widen the aperature of who they speak to. They both make great point that by the time you see a lot of the more famous people, you don't realize this person started off by making huge gains in a small niche, but that niche lifted them up to what they are now. They understood their niche and the smallest corners of the internet, talking about it, and then grew outwards.

When you're part of a community, the algorithm looks to see the fans of other similar artists and decides if they should recommend you to them, because that's how they keep people glued to their platform. But so often, many artists I know doing great work aren't making those connections because they undervalue community.

[To be continued]

Stay tuned for next week's part 2/4 of the Finding Your Community series. You should probably click the button below if you aren’t subscribed.