The Music Industry Podcast
The Music Industry Podcast
How We Got an Artist From ZERO to 40k Spotify Monthly Listeners In 8 Months
Learn the marketing tips and tricks that we use, to get the fans you deserve.
This isn't hypothetical. We tell you all about an artist we grew from nothing to 26k followers on Instagram, 120k followers on TikTok and millions of streams.
Isaac's story is a testament to how consistent, engaging content and active interaction with followers can drive organic growth.
Tune in for inspiration and actionable advice that could change your artistic journey.
Welcome back to the Music Industry Podcast. This is a bit of a short one today, but it's about a really interesting case study. An artist that we worked with for around six to eight months saw some insane results. So if you want to see some similar results, you want to work with us. Grow your streams, grow your socials, actually get that engaged fan base. Make sure to inquire with us on our website and we'll take a listen, see if it's a good fit for us.
Speaker 0:We worked with an artist for around eight months. We grew his instagram and tiktok from basically nothing. We grew the instagram to 25k, tiktok to 150k. His streaming numbers we took hundreds of thousands. One track has over two million streams and I wanted to talk about what we did so you can take all that information and use it to market yourself. It's not gonna be one of those videos where I just kind of use a hypothetical example. I'm going to tell you exactly who the artist is. I'm going to show you content. I'm going to show you exactly what we did so you can do the same.
Speaker 0:So this artist, isaac butler legend you should check him out came to us wanting to grow. He was doing well in ireland, where he's based, but he wanted to take it across to London, places like that, and actually play live to an audience. He wanted it to be a career and I would say, within those eight months, we did exactly that and it wasn't that difficult. It just required knowledge on marketing good music and some hard work, which, after this video, hopefully you'll have all that. So the first step was working out who he was as an artist, and this is very, very important for every single artist what is your brand? In the situation with Isaac, his brand was him as a person. Some other artists they wanted to be a certain persona, they want to be a bit mysterious. You have to work that out before anything else, because your content strategy comes from that, and the content strategy was the most important part of his growth. His Instagram, his TikTok, wouldn't have grown so significantly if we didn't have a content strategy in place. So once we'd understood him a bit more, understood the music, we created a content strategy which he could follow pretty simply and you can go across to his socials. Now you can look at his Instagram, you can look at his TikTok and look at his strategy. It's simple Every single video is promoting the music.
Speaker 0:I think a lot of the time we get so hung up on creating a viral video, we get so hung up on creating videos which are going to get loads of views, but you forget that the reason for the content is to promote the music. So every single video had to promote the music, and the best way of doing this was understanding the narrative behind every single release. We did this with every single song, but I'd say one of the best ones was a track called Even Giants Fall, and this was a song about his dad. Because it was about his dad, we wanted to make that the full focus of this content strategy, for this singular release. So every single video was about dads, because everyone has a dad. Everyone can relate.
Speaker 0:Plenty of videos did extremely well, but the best one was when he was playing live. We always get our artists to film themselves playing live, but also the crowd, and this can be done simply on a phone, and you must do the same. If you're playing live, have a phone facing you, have a phone facing the crowd. The next day you can go through all that content and you never know what you're going to find. And in this instance, we found his dad in the crowd watching and it meant we could put a video up. That was his dad's reaction to the track. This video hit over a million views and if we went to Spotify for Artists, we saw a direct correlation between the views and the streams, which is the objective of content. You don't want to get a viral video and no one cares about the music, so whenever you're thinking of content, whenever you're thinking about what you're going to make, link it back to the music.
Speaker 0:This was our strategy from day one with him. In the first couple of months of working with Isaac, he was incredibly consistent. He was posting multiple times a day. Now he's in a position where he doesn't need to do that. He can post once a day or maybe even less. But in those early stages it was so important because we had to work out who his target audience was, and one side of content that could work really well for you and worked incredibly well for him is something called demographic finders. We use these all the time with our artists and it's a way of working out who's going to actually engage with the content. You can talk to the camera or you can have text on screen, and it's a way of working out who would like the music, who would like the content. So you can do this by either explaining who you think your audience is, or explaining artists that are similar to yourself, or just making it very clear what that piece of content is for. I'll put a few examples on the screen so that makes a bit more sense. But the main reason for this piece of content is to find out who is going to engage, which makes your ads a lot cheaper because you can target the audience that has engaged. You don't have to run test ads to work out who the target audience is, because your organic content has found that.
Speaker 0:Alongside working on his socials, we also wanted to increase the algorithmic reach on Spotify, and you may have seen this in our videos before, but we work very differently to other agencies and I'm going to explain how we do it, but you can also do exactly the same. So what we've done over the last three years is spend a significant amount of money on growing our playlist through meta ads. We push out to english-speaking countries in europe and run those ads to those people and bring them to our playlist. So we know exactly where those followers are coming from, we know those streams are legitimate and we can put our artists on the right playlist for their genre, which is more likely to trigger the algorithm. We've spent hundreds of thousands on this. However, if you have a small budget, you can do exactly the same.
Speaker 0:So what you're going to do is basically make a playlist, title it something that's intriguing and interesting, something that people are going to want to click, and then you run ads on that playlist. Your track is integrated within that playlist, which means people are going to stream it. So that playlist could be called Girlboss Energy and you have a track that matches that vibe. Put all of your songs within that playlist, run ads on that playlist and people are going to follow it. You own the playlist, you own the data, you're getting streams and you're more likely to trigger the algorithm because you're going to be on a highly followed playlist alongside similar artists. The beauty of these playlists as well is you own all the data. So in our situation, we owned all the data on these hundreds of thousands of follower playlists so we could then retarget them. So we put Isaac on the playlist and then we hit the playlist listener with an ad so they hear the track, they see the artist on social media and you can do the same. You can run these ads, grow this playlist. They hear your track, then you retarget them so you can convert them into a fan. This helped Isaac's streams massively and can do the exact same for you.
Speaker 0:But, as I said at the beginning, we worked on the social media strategy first. You don't want to push people to always our rule If it's not going to work with no money behind it, it's not going to work with some money behind it. The algorithm is powerful. It can push out your content pretty simply. So if you're creating good content, the algorithm will work for you. If it's not working, the content isn't good enough or you haven't been posting consistently. So we've built his organic reach there. We've built the streaming side of things. We've retargeted those playlist listeners.
Speaker 0:Another technique that we worked on is cold ads. There's a bit of a stigma in the industry towards ads. I think people believe that if you run ads it suddenly stunts all your organic reach. Not true at all. What you will find is most people will run ads on, say, tiktok and they'll get tons of views on those videos. Then they'll stop running ads and the views won't be good and it's because you were relying on ads for views, which is pointless. Organic reach first and then introduce ads to give it that extra boost.
Speaker 0:One ad campaign that we worked on with Isaac that was extremely effective was community interaction ads. This is a style of ad on TikTok. We grew his following by 19,500 with these ads the ad itself. You're looking at cost per follower. So, yes, it's going to be slightly more expensive, but that return on investment is incredible. So if you run these style of ads, you can directly increase your following. But the best bit about it, if you are running those ads effectively, you grow that following. You're then going to trigger the algorithm and that's exactly what happened with Isaac. 19,500 followers were his audience, the target audience he wanted, which then meant that he triggered the algorithm because 90 and a half thousand people were watching and engaging that were his target audience. You can use ads to trigger the algorithm. You can use them strategically rather than throwing money at them to just grow views. I've never found spark ads on TikTok to be that effective, but community interaction ads so effective. They're just incredible. I don't understand why more people in the industry aren't using them.
Speaker 0:We see plenty of artists trying to do what isaac is doing, but the main thing that helped him grow was the lack of ego behind all of it. This definitely came more when his following grew, because the confidence just grew with the following growing, and this is the case with a lot of artists. When your numbers grow, you feel more confident. You feel like you can post whatever you want because you're getting the results. However, if you can have that mindset from an early stage, you're going to hack it. You're going to be above everyone else because you're posting content with the aim of growing your audience, rather than the aim of looking cool, rather than the aim of showing your friends that you're a musician.
Speaker 0:If you're creating with your fan base in mind, you're going to get the results quicker. This is proof of it with Isaac, for example. He would post royalty free videos with text on screen because the text on screen was intriguing and it meant he could pump out content quicker than creating his own, stitching people that have used his track replying to to comments. It was constant because he was hungry for the growth. The best thing about growing your audience organically and engaging with that audience so you know they're an actual fan base, is you see the results in real time so you can release a song and your streams grow. You can put tickets out for a show and you sell it out. Isaac was playing Ireland. He was able to headline in London within a matter of months with our help, and you can do the same if you follow a similar strategy.
Speaker 0:Nothing I've said here is mind-blowing. Nothing I've said here is something that you can't do yourself. But having those creative ideas, being consistent with it, running strategic ads, growing your streaming numbers with playlists but real playlists that are legitimate, from the right countries and the right people all of that leads to real results with real fans, and a huge amount of money doesn't need to be spent. Let me know in the comments if you found this video useful or if you want to see more of these kind of videos. Also, let me know in the comments if you've been doing anything that you found really, really effective for growth. We've been loving community interaction ads, but let me know if there's anything that you've been trying that's been effective. I hope you found this video useful.