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On to this week's big dissection. One of the things I get most requested is ethnic music. And yes, it's always a little cringeworthy when a white guy like me is talking about ethnicity. But here’s what I mean: I’ll get requests for artists like Buena Vista Social Club, a salsa group, or other music that’s primarily popular within a specific ethnic community.

Often, that ethnicity makes up the core demographic for the genre. Yes, some major artists break through and find broader, cross-cultural success, but most others remain mainly listened to within their own community.

Community Is Everything

If you have not watched my video on finding community. It usually takes 10 to 15 hours to get good community research done. If you're in these genres, you're going to do 30 hours of it because it's going to be more important than a lot of other genres, and it's going to take a lot more work to find it.

Here's what I mean. In these genres, partnerships and collaborations are going to be so much more important for what you do because you're going to need all the cosigns and help to get in front of the audience that is going to like you.

Not Everybody Will Vibe

Now, one of the biggest problems with Ethnic music marketing is that not everybody in that ethnicity likes that style. Most countries, sure, they have a dominant music genre, but there are people who are listening to the other ones, and one of the biggest things about Globalization is that it becomes more diverse every year.

So you're going to miss out on some people who are, if you target a certain country or a certain ethnicity, there's going to be people who just don't vibe with you.

Influencers Are Key

What we need to find are influencers who have a large audience for that thing. This can be all sorts of things. This can be people who dance on TikTok, who on YouTube talk about the cooking of their ethnicity, and you become their guest for the day, or provide a new theme song that you did with them. There are all sorts of ways to collaborate with people where you could demographically target this.

But the point is that you need to know everybody who has an influence in your culture. But particularly those to whom you can easily travel to. Now, for some people, that's easier than for others. If you're in New York City, it could be easier.

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