Are you a producer that struggles with getting more streams on your tracks?
Nothing says frustration like producing a song for 20+ hours just to release it to the world with getting less than 100 streams on your track.
You might even be in the position where you're getting a significant amount of plays, it's just that not enough people are listening through your track to where it actually counts as a stream.
If you're in this position, then this is the episode for you!
Today, I'm talking about how you can get more streams as a producer, so that you can make that $$$ so that you can be even closer to becoming full time as a producer.
In this episode, you'll learn...
and much more...
Head to www.enviousaudio.com/episode16 to check out the full show notes!
Are you a producer that struggles with getting more streams on your tracks?
Nothing says frustration like producing a song for 20+ hours just to release it to the world with getting less than 100 streams on your track.
You might even be in the position where you're getting a significant amount of plays, it's just that not enough people are listening through your track to where it actually counts as a stream.
If you're in this position, then this is the episode for you!
Today, I'm talking about how you can get more streams as a producer, so that you can make that $$$ so that you can be even closer to becoming full time as a producer.
In this episode, you'll learn...
and much more...
Head to www.enviousaudio.com/episode16 to check out the full show notes!
Hey guys, welcome to electronic dance money, your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers.
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 1:Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of
Speaker 3:electronic dance money. I'm your host Christian Cassetto. How are you guys doing today? I'm excited for this episode doing another solo one, but the last episode was Sean went really well. I got some great feedback from that one. A ton of you guys are saying that it was the best episode and they learned a bunch from it, so I'm super glad that that episode went the way it went because I think talking about deejaying is super important, especially when you're wanting to be a full time producer slash DJ becoming a full time DJ can be tricky and there's murky waters in that. So I'm super glad that you guys got a lot from that episode and you learned some stuff. I definitely learned some things. So today what we're going to be talking about is something that I see pretty consistently from producers asking questions on forums and Facebook groups. By the way, if you haven't already, go to facebook.com look up electronic dance money community and join that Facebook group. One question that I see repeatedly online is, all right, my music is now on these streaming platforms guide on Apple music. I've got it on Spotify, it's on YouTube music, it's on title, it's on these streaming platforms. Now how do I get more plays? This is kind of an age old question that so many producers, so many musicians ever since streaming really started in everything, started moving towards this streaming platform. Instead of buying a whole CD or an album at a record store or even with iTunes and be poor, buying things on there that was a little bit more straightforward. It was, okay, you want to promote the CD and get it into local stores, uh, whether it's best buy or it was Walmart or target, you know, you want to get it in these local stores and push it locally. So now with these streaming platforms, you really got to focus on, well, how do I get more people to go to my artist profile and either add my tracks, their Spotify playlists, or just listen to my tracks on from my artist profile? We're going to be going over points that I think a lot of artists miss and don't really realize they should be thinking about. Uh, when they're releasing music on streaming platforms or strategies that they can implement that will significantly increase their plays every time they have a new release. The first thing we're going to be discussing is something pretty straight forward. But I have a feeling that not a lot of you really take the time to think about or to determine. And this simple question is, who is your audience? Who's your audience? Who is it that you're trying to grab? Now there is one thing that I will say that this is what I do for my business. So many other people do for their businesses. It's how you figure out who it is your customer is. And it's what's called a customer avatar. Super simple. Now, what you can do for this customer avatar is you can write this down on a piece of paper or on a word document or whatever, but basically what you do is you write down, you write down name for this person, their age, what their income is, what their hobbies are, places they hang out on the internet, like websites, maybe Facebook groups specifically, what their hopes are, what their struggles are, what their dreams are. These kinds of things. You're basically writing. You're creating almost like a character of who it is you're trying to target and you can do this for your audience. What genre do they listen to? How old are they? Where do they hang out on websites? Where do they hang out on the internet? That's a very key one because then you can focus in on there and promote on there. Once you've gotten this customer avatar down, then you're kind of in a good Headspace. Now, you know, obviously if you're creating dubstep, you're going to be focusing on people who like and listen to dubstep. Same with trance or house music. One other thing to add to that artist profile is what artists do they listen to cause that will give you a good idea of the type of track that you're going to want to go for the style. In fact, you go to that artist Spotify profile and listen to their tracks and this is what's going to be key for this next thing that we're going to be talking about and it's determining the length of the track. This is something I discussed with Adam rife Steck in episode eight approaching artists development and taking your career seriously. Songs on the streaming platforms are getting shorter and shorter and one of the ones to, one key example of this is low-fi tracks. Low-fi tracks are like two minutes each, two and a half minutes, yet they get some of the most plays on Spotify and a lot of that has to do with college kids when they're studying, they're listening to low fi cause it's good background music and they're short tracks. Two minutes over onto the next one. This is really key. Songs are going to continue continually get shorter and shorter and as they get shorter and shorter, you have to determine what's going to be best for a streaming platform. So if you're releasing your music by yourself, just destroy self-distributing or you're releasing through record label, you have an opportunity to put out two kinds of tracks here. One do a radio edit. So that shortens, you know, basically takes out the intro and the outro. Maybe you shorten the breakdown a little bit too, and then you can release an extended mix of that. So you've got the ouch intro, outro, all the parts are extended out and longer. Now what's the point of this? So let's say someone's listening to a radio station in your track comes on. Maybe this is someone who's really into trap stuff or drum and bass, but you've got a dubstep track that comes on. Now, if that song doesn't catch them and there's a long intro, they might skip that track. But if you take that intro out and the outro and you have your hook, start right away, some great vocal top line, some great baseline, whatever it is. And you can catch that person right away. They're going to listen to that entire track. Now it's important to know that with these streaming platforms, I think you have to play the, the listener has to play 20 to 30 seconds of the track in order for you to get a payout for that stream. You might actually be getting a significant amount of streams. Right now it's just the issue is that people are listening to 10 seconds, 15 seconds of the song, and then they're hitting skip so that stream doesn't count. So you might be getting a bunch of play, but you're not getting to the point quicker so people are not interested in, they're skipping over the song. This also has to do with production quality. Is your track up to par? Like is it up to par with other tracks? Does it stand up to other tracks? If it doesn't, then maybe you shouldn't release on these streaming platforms and instead you should just release on SoundCloud or audience. So you really have to determine if is this track good enough? Compare it to someone who's a major in the industry. When your favorite artists who you referenced the track off of, does it stand up to that track next to it? Can you play that track and then yours right after and you go, Oh yeah, this is good. They're sounding good dude next to each other. If then you probably just don't want to release those on streaming platforms. I'm just being blunt here. It's the honest truth. Especially when in three years you're a much better producer and you're looking back on that release and you're like, damn, I hate that now with um, independently streaming, you can remove that kind of stuff, but if you sign it with a record label you and they don't let you take things down, you're shit out of luck here. You're looking back on your release going puck, I really wish I didn't sign that track. I wish I would have just put it on SoundCloud where I can delete it later and it doesn't matter, especially when that's tied to like an artist's name that you love, that you don't want to change and you don't ever plan on changing. It can be rough. Sometimes it's important to a determine your audience and be, make sure your track is starting right away with a great hook that's going to keep people in the song and not want to hit skip on your song and move on to the next one. Very important. Now the third thing about this with kind of who your audience is and getting more streams to that audience is consistently producing really well made tracks and releasing these types of tracks. Only your best of the best, and this is with artists coming out with their first track on a streaming platform. I usually recommend releasing with an EAP with about four tracks and then in addition, having about two or three more tracks lined up for release over the next three to four months. What's the reason for that? If you're a new artist coming to these streaming platforms and someone finds you but you only have one track out, they're more than likely not going to hit follow on you cause you don't have enough content for them. There's not enough music for them to consume and enjoy from you. This is why you kind of want to start out with a bang. You want a release four tracks all at once so people can come back to you and listen to tracks. They can pick out their favorite from you. Add those that one to the their playlist or send it to their friend, and this is the same with like signing a track with record label. Before you ever sign a track to a record label, you should have at minimum three tracks lined up. Now this doesn't have to be an EAP. If you're just releasing a single track, you should have three tracks ready and you should send all three of those tracks to record labels and say to the record labels, Hey, I have these three tracks. Let me know which ones you want to sign, if any at all. Obviously what this does is it tells them, Oh, this guy knows what he's doing. He or she knows what they're doing, so they don't think you're just some kind of quote unquote one hit wonder. You know, you're not just coming to them with one piece of content. You're like, I've got three of these, we can sign all three of these over the next three months and I'll have more releases lined up after that. It gives you a good wiggle room. They might say, yeah, we want to sign off three. We'll sign contracts for each one and then this one won't be released in this month, month. This one will be released in this month, in that one and that month. So you should be looking at the same way with like when you're going, when you're self-distributing make sure you have, this is your first time you've ever self distributed, make sure you got tracks lined up so you're either releasing them consistently one after the other, over a period of two or three months or you're releasing a big all together and then you've got more tracks lined up for the next three or four months. You want to plan ahead. It's all about being ahead of the game and consistently putting out content for people to consume. If you don't have enough content out there, they don't care. They want music now, especially with streaming because they get it now. There's a million other artists on Spotify that they can go listen to. Why should they listen to you? Oh, well it's because you have all this music release for them that they can enjoy and you can build up more hype for your next release coming out in a month. So create your audience avatar, make sure you're putting out tracks that hook people right away so they don't skip. And then third, make sure that you've got high quality produced tracks and you have a consistent amount of releases lined up. You want content on the streaming platform so people stay engaged and follow you. Now the next thing we're going to be talking about is one of the most important things about these streaming platforms, especially more specifically with Spotify because that's where a majority of people are listening. And it's all about the playlists. I'm sure many of you know this. This is where you're gonna find your audience. This is where you are going to find your fans, people who will consistently listen to you and follow you and follow up on your releases and follow your social media accounts and interact with you. This is, these are the people that are in these playlists. So what we're going to be discussing is ways to get on playlist because that's where you're going to make a majority of your streams is on playlist. Now the first one we're going to be discussing is Spotify for artists. If you don't know what Spotify for artists is, it's basically your artist's page for Spotify. You can control it. So if you have a personal page right now but you've also released on Spotify, well you'll want to do is reach out to Spotify. You can actually just Google Spotify for artists and they have a page that you can log into and you can claim your account, claim your Spotify artist account. And with that you can see all the metrics for your music that's been released, all the streams, everything you need to see. And there's some added benefits with Spotify for artists. And one of the things is be able to submit to Spotify playlists. Now what I mean by Spotify playlist is these are the people who run Spotify who are curators for the company, Spotify. So they're like the top of the top playlist, the ones you want to be on. Now when you submit to these playlists, they're going to send them to their editors and they'll review your music and you might have the possibility of landing on a suitable playlist, something that's actually going to drive you traffic, drive you streams and get you somewhere. These are extremely important playlists to be on because not only are fans listening, but other artists are listening to these playlists as well. And there's some good opportunity in that. So there's some things that you need to keep in mind though when you are submitting to playlists. The number one thing above all else, and this is kind of a main theme to this episode, is the quality of your tracks. I'm going to say it again, the quality of your tracks. If you do not have high quality production, good songwriting, good mixing, good mastering, do not submit your tracks to these editors. The reason why is if your tracks are not up to par to commercial standards, whatever genre that's in, doesn't matter what genre it is. Commercial standards being, this could be played on the radio or maybe not even on the radio, but it's just high quality. It's up to par with either the up and coming artists of that genre or the top tier ones. Regardless, it needs to be good. Now, how do you determine if it's good? Don't send it to family and friends. They're gonna lie to you and tell you it's good no matter what. You need to find someone who's going to give you good critical feedback. Someone you can send the track to that you won't be offended when they say, yeah, this is a good track. I don't think you should release it, and that's something you should ask. You should say, Hey, does this stand up to par, to this track? Whatever your references, do you think this should be on a mainstream platform like Spotify? You need to send that to someone you can trust. But not only that, but they're going to give you an honest opinion. They're not going to say, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And don't cop yourself out and just be like, Oh, this person would tell me the truth. And it's your best friend who would never knock you down a peg. And you'll know, you'll know when you're doing that and it doesn't do you a favor. It only screws you over, just sets you up for failure. You need to only be releasing the best of the best. One of the big reasons for having high quality tracks is one, you're going to attract more people, obviously, but if you send in a low quality track to these editors, they're going to remember that they're going to remember the bad and they're going to remember your name. So when you consistently submit to these playlists and these artists in these editors, what's going to end up happening is they're just going to throw your stuff away. When they see it in their inbox, they're going to go, yeah, I already know this is not good. So why am I going to listen to it? Now when you consistently send in bad promos, that's what happens. It's the same with record labels. If you consistently try to get attract signed to a record label and they've given you like three or four nos and due to the quality of the track, they're not going to listen to your music anymore. You should have like a six month buffer between getting a no and submitting again so that they don't really remember you. So they've gotten so many submissions prior to you and when you submit again, one you're going to be better in too. They might not remember you. Now the second thing when you're submitting to these editors is it's all done in Spotify for artists. So once your track has gone through distribution in Spotify has notified that, okay, the the track is separate release on this day on Spotify, you'll have the option when you log into your Spotify for artists account to submit to playlist. What you'll want to do is get your, get your release lined up as early as possible so that this can go out to as many editors as possible. They can sit on it and they've got a few weeks to determine whether or not they want to put on a playlist or not. So set up your release like three to four weeks prior and usually with record labels they'll do this, they'll give you like a month, month and a half advance before the track is actually released. With the record labels, they won't submit to these playlists. So like once you log into your artist's account, if you have a track signed to a record label, you'll still get notified, Hey, this track is going to be released under your name. If you don't see that when you log in and you know that this, this releases lined up, it could be that they, the streaming platform, assign the track to the wrong artist, in which case you'll need to reach out to Spotify support team to get that fixed. But you'll want to get your release setup as early as possible. That way you can get these submitted to playlists and possibly get yourself onto a decent playlist that's going to give you good streams as soon as you release the track. Now the next thing with these playlists is paying for playlists promotion. This might sound dirty to you, but it's gonna run in with the next topic we're going to be talking about after these playlist playlist pushes. The example I'm going to, because it's one of the biggest out there right now for paying to get on playlists. And this is a really good website because it's not just artists on here, but it's also curators. So they've got a bunch of curators that they send tracks out to the curators, like the track they're going to put on the playlists, and they only work with indie artists too. So you're not going to get smacked down by all these major releases. So you're going to have good opportunity to get your track on playlist through playlists. Push no herb censure with their prices. Uh, I want to say it's like three 50 for a track. And I'm sure some of you are sitting there going, huh, fuck that. But listen, there's an important thing you got to realize as an artist right now and something you have to accept. If you even want to remotely be successful as an artist, you have to invest money into your career. Just like you invest time and work into production. You have to invest money into marketing and advertisement. It's something you have to do. There's no way around it. Whether you're going to get merge, you have to pay for a website, services for the website, or you pay to get on playlist to get more streams and get more fans. And this isn't necessarily the fact that you're paying to just get on a playlist that nothing's going to happen. And there's a shit ton of, uh, there's a shit ton of people that listen to the playlist, but you don't get any streams. It's just for social cloud. That's not what this is. This is connecting artists with curators. It's very difficult to find curators, freelance curators that have good playlists that aren't already bogged down by so many emails. But then building a connection with them and trying to get on the plate. Like unless you're a huge artists already where you don't even need to reach out to any curators because you know your tracks just going to land on those playlists no matter what. This is where you can get connected with the right playlist in the right people and the people that listen to that music because you're going to get added to the playlist that is directed towards your audience avatar. And then people will become fans of you. Three 50 might seem like a big number, but it's not. When you can determine that, Oh, I'm gonna get a significant amount of streams and monthly listeners out of this, people who are going to actually start listening to me. Now, the nice thing about playlists push is they do a targeted campaign, so it's not like your stuff is getting sent out to a bunch of alternative rock playlists. They listen to your track, they determine, okay, it's this genre. Let's go ahead and send it to all of these playlists curators that are currently on the website and we'll see if they like them. And what they'll do is they will email you if you're getting added onto specific playlists, they give you good detail report on what your reach was, how many followers you got, how popular your song is in the campaign. So it's you actually get a lot of good reports out of this with determining whether or not like this track is meant for these playlists or not. And again, it's important to remember you need to have high quality releases for this and less because the playlist curators aren't going to put you on their playlist if your track sounds like shit. Here's the thing. If your track is not up to par and you go and submit through playlists, push and you don't get added a playlist or you get added to bad playlists, you're going to whine and complain that, Oh, I spent$350 my track didn't do anything. Well, yeah. Let's take a step back here. One, what playlists were you added to? How were the quality of the other tracks on that playlist and then what's the quality of your track? I mean, just that's like, this is step one is you need to, if you're listening to this episode and you know your production isn't up to par, then start working on getting your production up to par. Pause this episode. Don't listen to it until your tracks are up to par and you're ready to move on to the next step. This is, this episode really is focused on those artists that are starting to consistently put out really good tracks. This is the perfect episode for you. If you apply all these things in this episode and you've got really good tracks, you'll see a significant push in the amount of streamers that you're getting. Do some research on some other playlist services now, be where you like, there are some sketchy ones out there that are fake, uh, that just scam your money out. Like you need to look up reviews on either better business Bureau or um, blog articles that you trust from trusted websites saying, Oh, this company's really good for pushing your playlists, pushing your track onto playlists. Do some research on this though. Don't be afraid to invest money to get yourself on playlists where you're actually going to gain traction and get some fans in monthly. Listeners, this is what's super important about Spotify is these playlists and there's a way to get on a significant amount if you have the quality of track. So the final thing we're going to be discussing is, again, this one's all about investing. This third topic is 100% about investing your money into your career because how else are you going to be better if you don't invest? If you just strictly bank off of hoping that people listen to this stuff and sharing a link on Facebook and Instagram, sometimes it just doesn't cut it. Sometimes it does, but a majority of the time it won't cut it. We're going to be talking about running ads. This is going to be a super soft and light episode. And I do not recommend any of you run ads without doing significant research on running ads. There's something that my business coach talks about cause he's a master with Google ads and it's a stupidity tax and it's when you fuck up ads and way overspend your budget with something that didn't give you any return on investment, you pay a stupidity tax when you, especially when you're just learning and you're just trying to figure out ads, you will, I paid plenty of money in stupidity tax. I'm put that much money into ads, but I've probably lost about$1,200 running ads just to learn what I'm doing. You need to do research on this topic if you want to do it, but ads are going to get you directly in front of the audience that you need that are going to want to listen to your music. So the first step you wanna do is putting a budget to your ads for your releases. So if you're releasing one track a month, you should be saving up a certain amount of money and that's the money you're going to be putting into ads each month. Now, if you budget this out, you'll always have that money. You'll always know how much you have for ad marketing, and if you find something that's working a bit more, then you can increase your budget and focus in on that one ad that's getting you more and more traffic and more and more results. Now the important thing to mention with ads is where you'll want to probably be focusing on is social media ads. These ads are called interruptive ads. Interruptive, meaning someone's scrolling through their feed and then you interrupt them with a sponsored post. And what that saying is, Hey, look at me. This is something you want. This is something you'd like, but if it's not something they want and not something they like, they're going to remember your name. They're not going to like you because you interrupted their feed and they're going to be upset with you. So you need to make sure you're nailing the audience that you need to nail because when you say, Hey, look at me. Hello, I'm what you want right here. They need to be like, Oh yes, this is exactly what I want. Click, and they go straight to Spotify to listen to your track or add it to their playlist. One way to get your ads to be super catchy is providing something really nice and sweet for them too quickly listen to, and I, I recommend doing a video ad. I don't think just doing an ad of cover art with you saying, Hey, I'm so and so, this is my track, blah, blah, blah. I don't think that's going to work as well. What's going to work is if a lyric video or a music video you do for the track, I do think a lyric video might be better, especially if you do vocals. I, I think vocal, a vocal track is going to be best bees. You can do a lyric video and it pops really nicely on these social media sites, especially with Instagram. Boom. It's into the chorus or into the first verse going on. There's like and it's a 20 or 32nd ad with your track, really catchy great lyrics and then under it is a button that says listen on Spotify or something like that and it directly takes them to your Spotify artist profile with that track where they can add it for, add it to their playlists or start listening to it right away. You can do this on YouTube as well. Run these ads on YouTube so you're actually providing like if someone's listening to music on YouTube and your ad pops up for more music, they might not be more, they might not skip that ad, but the point is you can run these ads on YouTube and they won't be as interrupted as other ads because it's more music that they're getting a chance to listen to. Once again though, before you start doing these, this ad stuff, you need to do research on these kinds of things, so I've got a couple of books that are going to be I think really good for figuring out this. This side of marketing. The first book is the ultimate guide to Facebook advertising by Perry Marshall. The reason why I recommend this book is because I've read the ultimate guide to Google ads, which is incredible. Same book by Perry Marshall Perry Marshall has is like the one person that has been running Google ads since Google announced Google ads. He is the King of it. He knows every single little thing there is to know about Google ads. He's a master at ad writing. Um, he, he's just incredible. He's the best of the best. You're going to learn the most about Facebook advertising through Perry Marshall. I highly recommend this book. I think it's only like 10 or 15 bucks on Amazon, super cheap. Uh, it's really fun to read too. He's got lots of images in there. Just take you guys step-by-step through everything. So it's, it's really good read and you'll be able to get a significant reach that converts pretty well using this book. The second book I recommend is building a StoryBrand. Clarify your message so customers will listen. And this book is by Donald Miller. This book is going to be the key to figuring out how to brand yourself, how to tell people who you are and get them to listen and engage in. This is important before you start running Facebook ads so that you have a good brand set up and you have a story set up to tell people so that they're going to be more engaging and going to be more involved in your stuff and they're actually going to listen cause that's what we need here. We need them to listen. We need them to click on the link to go to go to Spotify and add your track to their playlist. So this book is going to be all about telling a story through your brand and you can start implementing this with everything as a producer. So it's not just with ads, but this is how you can tell a story through your brand, through social media marketing, not just ads, but posting on social media, creating content that's more engaging and tells a better story for the fans of you. These two books combined I think will get you in a really good place with figuring out what you need to do in the steps you need to take to getting more plays with ads, getting more streamers with ads. And again, a, you must, you have to, there's no escaping the fact that you have to invest some of your money into your self as an artist in so many, so many producers failed to see this and understand that. And I think that's where a lot of them fall short. And I did the same thing. You just think I just got to work on music and post it and release it. Okay, but you're investing all this money into production in gear and plugins. While that's great and it might help a little bit, but you're not getting any more followers or fans. So what are you doing for marketing? What are you paying for marketing? Are you running any ads? Are you trying to get on playlists? By paying for them? Like there, there are things, there are steps you need to take in order to get that following you need. And it might just be a push that you need for the first year. Maybe you just need to pop on these ads and these playlist for a year and get yourself up to that five or 10,000 Mark for monthly listeners or fans or followers, and then the machine can start running itself and word of mouth starts spreading. But in order to get there, you might need to push it a little, especially with this digital age and how saturated the market is. You just need to invest a little bit of money in order to get in front of your audience. And this is the thing with Facebook too. Now if you have your, if you have a page set up, you're not getting seen by people.
Speaker 1:Facebook is now set up with when you have a page, a musician, a band page, or a business page, and if you are on Facebook with a page, you should have a business dot Facebook account set up. Facebook understands that you're now a business, they're making money, they have money to spend, so you're going to pay us money to get in front of your audience. That's just the way it is now, especially with the digital age. Until someone comes out with a new platform, you kind of have to buy into that. So that's where I'm going to leave you guys off with this episode. Still looking for some more Apple podcast reviews, so head on over there to the page on Apple podcast rate and review the show. I would really appreciate it. Electronic dance money community is the Facebook group that you guys can join to start interacting with each other and talking. I really appreciate everything and while we're on the topic of getting good quality music out there, I do provide mixing and mastering services. If you're at all interested in getting a free test master or you want to get a mix and a master done regardless, whatever it is, or you maybe want to learn how I do what I do, head to envious audio.com you can check out my portfolio there and request a quote as always, head to envious, audio.com/episode 16 to check out the show notes and I'll see you guys later. Take care.
Speaker 2:[inaudible].