The Journey To Breaking An Artist

welcome back to another music marketing video bit of a different setup today first time i've actually drawn a diagram in my life for any video and probably might be my last but i really wanted to get this point across for artists because i just think it is so so important also we've tried to put acoustic paneling on our walls to be able to get rid of this echo in this room since we got rid of the sofa setup however we asked you guys on instagram for some recommendations of acoustic panels and you guys being artists

you flooded our dms with suggestions so we have decided on some acoustic panels so hopefully in a couple weeks time our videos will significantly improve in terms of the echo and in terms of that sound but starting with this i wanted to take you through the basics of being discovered and breaking as an artist because i don't think it's necessarily clear for artists what actually happens in each of your aspects of your career and how they interlink because i get it a lot whether it's in inquiries on our website or whether it's in instagram dms

we have artists saying things like i've got 80 000 streams on spotify but no one's following me on instagram and i wanted to create this diagram which was actually meant to be in a longer video i've got a video coming in a couple of weeks time which is going to cover starting as an artist from scratch and eventually breaking and getting 100 million streams that could be about a 45 minute to an hour video so i didn't want people to miss out on this topic just because they didn't want to sit through an hour long

video but that video is going to be awesome so do check it out when it goes live so what artists often think is that at the start of your career all of these things are going to interlink but the truth is they don't so what we've got is instagram youtube spotify word of mouth live shows press on radio and tick tock my favorite of all of these if i could pick any one it would be a close one between word of mouth and live shows which being a digital marketing agency in the music industry you'd

probably expect me to say something like instagram youtube or tick tock however i would say that to break an artist the strongest is probably word of mouth than live shows word of mouth because if an artist if sorry a friend has recommended an artist to you it is much much more likely that you are going to go ahead and listen not only that you are considering that artist in a different mindset your friend has already not social proof but almost like artist proofed this or quality proofed this particular track or this particular artist therefore you're

expecting it to be good it's not like hearing a track on tick tock hearing a track on spotify playlist where you think i might like it i might not like it word of mouth you're already going into that track assuming that you're going to like it so i think that's incredibly important live shows mainly because the way that they convert just amazing so let's run through how this diagram actually works so you've got instagram youtube spotify word of mouth live shows press on radio tick tock the black arrow going down is how far this alone

will progress you in your career so if you were to do nothing but instagram nothing else you've obviously you're on youtube you're on spotify but if you put all your efforts into instagram only how far that can get you towards essentially breaking as an artist and getting a hundred million streams so you've got your milestones here you've got a hundred thousand streams a million streams and a hundred million streams you guys you're all aiming for this might take several years to get there but that's essentially what you're aiming for when you hit 100 million streams

essentially i would expect you to have the same kind of numbers on say youtube as well when you hit this i'm looking at someone who is an artist you're going to get a platinum record if you hit 100 million streams you've broken but what is happening in your career when you get there versus what was happening in your career early on so let's take a look at it what i want to represent in this diagram is that nothing is interlinked early in your career huge huge myth as i said earlier a lot of artists will

come to us and say look i've got all these youtube views and nobody's going to my instagram or i've got all these spotify streams and nobody's going to youtube so let's take a look at them one by one we've got instagram i think on instagram you can get yourself up to 100 000 streams with putting effort into instagram content alone i'd say the instagram has got a lot better in terms of their own organic reach in the last couple of months they've brought in reels they've brought on igtv they've brought in that feature where if

you get to the end of your feed and you've seen all the content that people you are following have posted they will start recommending content from accounts you don't follow therefore discovery on instagram has got a lot better i'd say before that feature it would probably be about there because your instagram if it's good enough would actually be more so word of mouth marketing because your instagram content is so good people are talking about it youtube i would say that gets close to the youtube is incredibly powerful platform it can get you close to 100

million streams by putting effort into your youtube content alone mainly because of their discovery algorithm if you get your titling right your thumbnails right you can break as an artist and many many artists have done it through youtube alone whether that is you performing your track whether it's because you started as a cover artist or whether the platform thinks your track is so good because everyone's always watching it then it is playing your track on autoplay after a big artist track and people can't be bothered to switch it because they've got music on in the

background while they're working so it just flows into your track spotify is a strange one because well you'd think that i would say that well we're measuring it by essentially streams this can't this doesn't have to be spotify it can be any dsp so apple music and deezer include as well most you guys ask us about spotify so i just put spotify there but what's interesting about spotify is that okay if you were to hack spotify say you got your friends together you put on some black masks and you went at midnight and raided spotify's

office you hacked one of the computers and then you managed to put yourself on every single playlist on spotify yeah you'll get to 100 million streams are spotify going to put you on enough playlists in the real world only for you to get 100 million streams and essentially break as an artist when i'm saying 100 million streams i'm saying you've broken as an artist and everyone's playing on you on the radio people are watching you on youtube instagram it's all flowing everything's happening you can do whatever you want as an artist people are going to

listen to you because your brand is that strong that's what i see here and i don't think spotify can get you there i think it can get you pretty close but if you haven't got a good brand if you haven't got good content around it and people can't invest in you as an artist in any way and decide to come to your live shows then no i don't think spotify alone can break you as an artist word of mouth absolutely like i said earlier it's the strongest one it goes all the way to the bottom

live shows you know you're gonna get live shows early in your career they're not going early in your career the live shows aren't going to do that much you might get your friends and family down to a few live shows you might get yourself on a smaller kind of one of those like festival nights in a small venue or something like that it might get you maybe 300 500 streams something like that but unless you are damn good and suddenly it kicks in word of mouth and it goes to here somehow i don't see it

however later in your career festivals and live shows are actually what breaks you so if you've hit a hundred thousand streams and maybe you're on about half a million streams here suddenly live shows can really skyrocket you in order to get you to being 100 million streams because it gets people talking about you and it also gets people to invest in you as an artist and they remember you press on radio it's great thing to kick you off get your first amount of streams get some online presents but i wouldn't say that it does anything

any further that's when all of this stuff starts to kick off so press on radio good thing to kick off radio on rotation i'd say is different i'd say further down here if we're talking about radio on rotation those major stations you played literally three times a day on that station yeah that will get you further here but i'm talking more kind of like earlier in your career here finally tick-tock yes if you have a track that goes viral if you have a trend that goes viral it can get you pretty close because tiktok is

a platform where people are consuming it with the sound on and therefore because they've got the sound on they're expecting to hear music and they because it's a trend you hear that track again and again and again until it gets stuck in your head you start to like the track and therefore it starts to trigger these other things so for me i would say tick-tock can kept you pretty damn close again i've got this stuff you're not gonna break as an artist you need everything else as well so the final part of the diagram is

is these connectors here so when exactly does for example youtube start to trigger spotify when does spotify start to trigger your instagram growth so as you can see nothing happens at the top everything is just completely parallel you are trying to grow your spotify and trying to grow your instagram but don't expect them to influence each other you've got people discovering you on instagram and you've got people discovering you on spotify trying here to get people to go to your spotify is incredibly difficult it's doable but these arrows here are the trigger points when it

starts to influence it and instagram here yes you could maybe get some people to your spotify who haven't heard you already but it's very difficult and it's not worthy of an arrow to go there so when does instagram start to trigger and i would say it is past the million streams like i said instagram is a very weak platform in terms of engagement therefore to really start to be able to send your fan base to the likes of youtube and spotify it is quite late on you can get people to spotify to listen to your

music and after around 100 000 streams but to get people to your youtube needs a lot of investment because they've probably already consumed a lot of your content they've heard your music very very difficult so don't be disheartened if you have say 2 000 followers on instagram and you can't get them across to youtube it doesn't happen until very late in your career because when they're engaged enough that's when they go and see the music video for example you can start to tease the music video because your fan base is that engaged if you've been

doing something like black hack black hat marketing in terms of like buying fake followers you're in an engagement pod or you are um or you've been following an unfollowing then it's going to be much much later way later maybe you'll never even get there because your engagement will be so low so do be careful early in your career the strategies that you start to implement here are really going to affect you down here so don't try and give in to your ego by doing blackout shortcut marketing here because really it doesn't matter you're not going

to break as an artist when you get here and it really does impact everything here because you've set the foundations so youtube youtube i said is the most powerful platform because people are engaged they're discovering music it's free everyone has youtube so i would say is one of the most powerful things so i quite early on in youtube it is going to start to trigger your spotify people are going to discover you they're ready to discover new music when they're consuming music content on youtube and therefore they are going to go and save your track

on spotify because when they're on the move they might want to start listening to your music again it's the same with instagram if you can engage people on youtube pretty early on they will go and follow you on instagram little tip there which will be in the longer video is that for youtube to get people across to instagram you have to give them a reason and the reason is not to just say follow me on instagram it's not enough you've got to either two things give people something exclusive to go and follow you on instagram

something different that they're not going to see to the youtube or you have to portray personality and personality is quite moorish it's quite infectious people want more of it therefore they go across to your youtube to have a little bit more of you and get some bite-sized bits of that content so if you can show personality or you can show something controversial something that they're going to want more of then that's what gets them across music alone won't get them across to instagram so spotify very very late on because people don't go to your about

section and go and hit follow just because they like a track it doesn't work like that until very very late on when they want to start coming to your live shows and they want to start investing in you as an artist because you've been on so many spotify playlists you've had 10 releases that have been on new music friday and all those official spotify playlists that's when they start to come across because they see they hear about five of your tracks across the span of a year and then they say you know what every single

track has been amazing by this artist so i'm going to drop them a follow on instagram youtube a little bit earlier because maybe they want to see the music video or they just want to save the track in a different way but for spotify despite how powerful that platform is for music discovery getting it to instagram and youtube is actually a lot later on word of mouth again maybe word of mouth gets you to the spotify maybe it gets you to youtube but not enough to put the arrow there the arrows are way further down

where you pass a hundred thousand streams you're a bit more kind of social proofed and therefore people are going to start coming across and talking about you and they will likely link they won't link your instagram unless your instagram content is amazing and funny or something that they've never seen before maybe later on you'll start getting people across your instagram but mainly when people talk about you they'll link your spotify or they'll link your the track on youtube so it is essentially the most powerful one and the most engaged one live shows i said don't

start until later on but wow so powerful when you are later on in your career you're gonna be getting people to youtube to your spotify to your instagram so engaged because the likelihood is they are going to see the show and they want to know about you as an artist beforehand maybe you've got a good support slot maybe you've got a festival slot people are going to listen to those festival-based playlists they're going to want to know what your instagrams are like they want to know what time you're on so therefore to stay updated they're

going to go to your instagram press on radio like i said um it it doesn't really kickstart enough in order to get an an arrow anywhere it's worth doing but it's not worth investing everything into it tick tock have you noticed that nothing necessarily goes to tick tock people don't listen to you on spotify and go and see if you're on tick tock however tick tock is so powerful on its own that it can get you known as an artist and then suddenly things start happening so in the longer video i'm going to cover all

of these individual things in detail explaining to you exactly how to exploit them how to break as an artist using each of them so look out for that i hope you found this video useful i hope it focuses your mind especially if you're a new artist and you're a bit demotivated about these things not being linked it gives you an idea of what to expect when i'll take a photograph of this diagram right now and i'll stick it on our website and i'll link it down below hope you found this video useful and i'll see

you in the next video which will likely be the longer one