Most CX platforms don't own the voice. They orchestrate a workflow, then call a third party for speech and transcription. Every hop adds latency, and latency is what turns a frustrated customer into a churned one.

ElevenAgents is the opposite. Built on the voice models the market already builds on, it runs voice, transcription, chat, and reasoning in one vertically integrated pipeline. Responses come back in under 400 milliseconds and sound human, not synthetic. When a caller gets frustrated, the agent detects it and shifts tone in real time: calm, reassuring, patient.

You keep full control. Plug in any LLM, connect tools, webhooks, and MCP servers, and ground every answer in your knowledge base. Launch in minutes, A/B test with Experiments, enforce Guardrails, and version every change.

More resolved conversations, less infrastructure stitching. Pricing is transparent and flat at $0.08 per minute.

Start building free

A lot of you are baffled at the fast growth of some artists. It can be really depressing when you've been playing with puddles, and then some artist is all of a sudden going off. There could be a lot of reasons your growth is stalled, but one I see far too often is that artists aren't making the connections with other artists that tell algorithms to connect and recommend you to those artists' fans.

So here's how to make connections to other artists so algorithms start to recommend you on Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, and other apps.

Some of you will wonder why this is important…If that's happening, I imagine it's due to you not understanding the biggest music marketing opportunity in music today: which is that features, collaborations, remixes, and split releases are the greatest music marketing opportunity ever in music. They get you what I call artist page visibility, aka people see you on the artist page they already like and see your name next to a song they're enjoying. When they're loving that song, they have an easy hint to go deeper on you, since you're already part of a song they like and in the community with an artist they enjoy. If you missed that one, I highly suggest you read it after this. It's super important.

To get this more fully and why it's so important, it has a compounding effect. For those of you who don't get what that means, the benefits of doing these collaborations are numerous and add up the more you do it as your audience grows. If you recall from that other piece, everyone I know at major labels and big indie labels is going in on this technique. Some of that is artist page visibility and the labels seeing the power of an artist becoming part of another artist's community. But it also comes down to the compounding effects of what it does to algorithms.

I have news for you. One thing everyone who has big numbers will tell you is that algorithms are usually driving the majority of that. Whether it's getting on the browse page of YouTube, Spotify radio, Discover Weekly recommendations, or recommendations on Instagram or TikTok serving up your video.

I know some wise ass is going to ask for my sources here. If you simply look up the algorithms of any of these sites, there's plenty written on them, along with the book Spotify Teardown.

But most of all, I live in Brooklyn, where a lot of these startup employees live too. And boy, do their lips get loose when we're out drinking. So go off in the replies if you must

Spotify has one advantage social media doesn't have, which is what are called music genomes, this thing Pandora invented where you can have computers analyze the sound of a song, and it can tell it's similar to another song in some ways. Those help, but the thing Spotify weighs in their algorithm is the connections you have to other artists.

Those connections are largely for things like Spotify radio. What gets recommended in Spotify radio after an album gets done playing, or someone starts a radio station off it, or they make a playlist with that artist, is the artist that has a huge overlap with that artist and their listeners.

This is easily observed, y'all. Next time your playlist or an album of an artist finishes, I bet within the next three artists it'll be someone the artist has collaborated with or toured with. That's, of course, because doing those things together makes you have a combined audience with that other artist.

This is also what I see in my Discover Weekly, where so much of the collabs an artist has done before will get the other artist into my playlist. And if you want to get on that coveted Release Radar, those collabs are the exact connective tissue that gets you onto another artist's Discover Weekly. You're both going to get on each other's Release Radar; more people will inherently be listening to you both, which shows the algorithm the common fandom, and you will now be in all the beforementioned algorithmic recommendations.

This also goes for the YouTube algorithm, as YouTube gives no fucks about making any music genome since they just observe user patterns and what people click or skip.

Again, one of the many reasons these collabs, features, and split releases help so much for music marketing right now is listeners are less likely to skip you if one, they recognize your voice or songwriting style, or two, they've heard your name a bit, perhaps from collabing or playing shows with another artist or being tagged on social media with their favorite artist, and they're familiar with your name enough to let the recommendation go. I find about half of the new songs I get into come from what YouTube plays me after I listen to a song I like when I'm relaxing at night reading.

Let's say you do a collab or a tour with another act. Instagram is looking at who you @ tag and follow. That's how you get put in the Discover recommendations, and in the suggested accounts that drop down under an artist's profile on Instagram and TikTok.

Since Instagram only has user data of what people follow and click on to go off of, that's what they base it on. If you are one of the top few mutual follows of an artist, that's what Instagram is cycling through when it does recommendations. And you know how you become one of the top follows, which is collabing or playing shows with that other artist.

The way this compounds is when people are tweeting and Instagramming and doing @ tags about your collaboration or the shared show. That is not only telling Instagram to recommend your name to the users most susceptible to liking you, it's also that the most adamant music fans are the ones who give you your early listens since they are such addicts for this genre. They see your name and listen to you, and you get that important new fan who's a tastemaker.

And yet again, this is why I think Facebook ads are the dumbest thing to waste your money on. It does none of this work and gives you the illusion of growth in numbers increasing, but they are unengaged fans with no influence on anyone else. Whereas the @ tags of fans seeing you play a show with someone or do a collab are the adamant ones who are going to tell other people about you on Reddit and Discords and get you the word-of-mouth recommendations, which are the most effective in music, up there with playlists and collabs.

I know a lot of you hate on X and say you don't get it, but this is the type of promo that does great on X, which is also every music journalist and playlist influencer's favorite app to be an addict on. When they see your name intertwined with an artist, it's their literal job to go deeper and to do the thing they love the most in the world, which is to find a new artist before their other dork friends and brag about it for the entire duration of that artist's fame that they were on to them before everyone else. As insufferable as that is, these people can really help you get fans. So playing the game on X and interacting with your community helps compound these algorithmic recommendations.

I know you are all very concerned with TikTok. The same thing works here in that you getting tagged with other artists gets people looking for you, but TikTok can also do so much work of linking yourself to other artists.

TikTok doesn't have any music genome either. Instead, it spreads you to people who engage with similar behavior patterns on the app, and those patterns are what hashtags and TikTok tropes they like to engage with. That's why knowing your community's TikTok hashtags and Instagram ones is so important for linking together. Doing those hashtags will put your content in front of the people who like that hashtag and interact with it the most. In other words, in front of the eyes and ears of people most susceptible to liking you.

@ tagging the artist you collab with teaches TikTok to link you two together. So in doing collabs, having multiple TikToks about your collab, whether it's footage of you working together or from the music video or whatever, you may not get the most viral numbers, but the algorithm starts to know the work to do for spreading you around. Making videos every few months where you do that thing where you say if you like this artist, you'll like me, and tagging them, can help do this work too by bringing you into the algorithm of those bigger artists. Remember, the smaller you go, the more chance of it doing that, since the algorithm has thousands of other artists doing that for the big artists.

TikTok does have one more element of stitching you to other users and sending content to users. The songs in the background of your videos are like hashtags, in that they regularly serve people who use the same song to make videos to the users who watch videos with that song. Bearing this in mind, with the combination of a hashtag, this can help get you in front of the fans of your micro genre.

To tie this all together, now that you get this ecosystem, even if you aren't making songs with these other artists, you've hopefully done your community work and are making artist playlists and tagging the artists on it on Twitter, TikTok, and Insta, yet again drawing more connections between you and the artists similar to you.

In time, if you keep doing this, you'll have so many connections to you in such a big community. You will be algorithmically favored and connected to so many artists. You really are going to have to have some terrible songs for it to not work out.