Where to Focus Your Energy as a New Independent Musician
Part 1
If you’re an independent artist who makes and markets their own music, then this article will save you lots of time and energy. With the rise of streaming services, music production technology, and social media – the music industry is ridiculously easy to break into. However, this also means it’s ridiculously competitive. If you want to have a career as a music artist, it’s crucial to use your time efficiently. There are so many people out there telling you so many different things that you can do to accelerate your music career – and it can be extremely overwhelming! While there’s many things that you can focus on – it’s important to know what you actually should be focusing on.
Brand/Aesthetic
An often neglected part of an independent musician’s career is their brand/aesthetic – yet it’s the main differentiator between just being a musician and being a complete music artist. Believe it or not, the biggest music artists usually aren’t the best musicians, and the best musicians usually aren’t the biggest music artists.
Before you dive into making music and promoting it, it’s important to know the purpose behind the music you’re making. To do this, you first need to understand who you want to be as an artist. What will people think about when they hear your music? What places will your music remind people of? What artists and genres will your music be associated with? You need to answer these questions so you know how to present yourself through your music and everything that complements it.
There are plenty of really good songs that never get big – simply because those artists don’t have a clear brand/aesthetic. Having a brand/aesthetic may not seem very important at first glance, but it’s actually what gives your music its magic. Your brand/aesthetic should come across in everything you do from your music videos, to your Spotify profile, to the tone you use in your social media captions. It’s crucial to continually evaluate how people are perceiving you as an artist, and to constantly improve your brand/aesthetic.
Audience
If you want to be a successful music artist, you need to be able to identify and understand your audience. What artists and genres do they listen to? What cities do they live in? What are their hobbies? When defining your audience, you should use your brand/aesthetic to guide you. Knowing your audience will allow you to make music that people resonate with. Furthermore, it will allow you to deliver that music effectively. If you don’t understand your audience, you probably won’t make it that far – whereas, if you know your audience very well, you’ll have a very successful music career.
Product
As a music artist, your core product is your music. Everything else you profit from is an extension of your music (live performances, merch, music videos, etc.). In today’s music industry, investing time into your music recordings is crucial. The three sections you should focus on are songwriting, recording/production, and mixing/mastering.
Songwriting
One hard truth you need to come to terms with is that there’s a strict difference between making music for fun and making music as your career. When you make music for fun, you’re making it for yourself. When you make music as a career, you’re making it for other people. Of course, you should still make music you like, however, it’s crucial to factor in what your audience wants to hear.
When writing and arranging your songs, there are probably some factors that you pay too much attention to, and others that you don’t pay enough attention to. One thing that’s really important is the length of your song. People’s attention spans are really short, so shorter songs tend to thrive on streaming platforms. There are two main reasons for this. First, if your song is short people tend to play it on repeat more. Secondly, Spotify’s algorithm will classify a song as more likable based on the percentage of the song that listener’s get through. Therefore, if your song is shorter, it takes listener’s less time to get through a higher percentage of it.
Another important factor is crafting an effective hook. This is probably the biggest determinator of your song catching fire on social media and getting lots of streams. Having a really good hook (or hooks) will keep listeners’ minds on your song and keep them coming back to your song.
No matter what your genre is, you should make an effort to grab listener’s attention from the very start of the song. This will help with listener retention when Spotify is suggesting your song to other people. The longer those people listen to your song, the more Spotify will send your song to people. On top of that, within the first 3-5 seconds of your song, record labels and Spotify playlisters are making a decision to either move to the next song or keep listening to your song. If nothing grabs their attention quickly, they probably won’t keep listening.
Recording/Production
When recording a song, the most important thing to consider is how you’re going to capture emotion. People connect to a song based on how it speaks to them emotionally – rather than how precisely you hit the notes you’re singing or how complicated your guitar solo is. You can especially capture emotion through your vocals; but also through any instrument, sound, or effect that’s heard in your song.
It’s also really important to get your song sitting in an effective ambience or giving off a certain vibe. If you neglect this during the production stage, you’re missing a wonderful area to allow listener’s to connect your song with a place, time, or feeling.
Mixing/Mastering
The mixing and mastering phases are sometimes overlooked, but they’re actually very important. This is a very important step to add professionalism and a sense of familiarity to your song. It’s not enough to have a good mix and master – you also need to have the right mix and master for your song. The sonics of your mix and master should subconsciously tell your listeners what your what sub-genre it is, what artists it sounds like, and what kind of playlist it would fit on.
When going through each of the three product phases, you need to remember to highlight your brand/aesthetic. It’s important for your songs to include factors that are inspired by successful artists in your genre, as well as factors that are unique to your sound. This will give your songs the right mix of feeling familiar and fresh. If you really focus on the product phase of the process, it will make the marketing phase so much easier.
Marketing
Now that you have a brand/aesthetic, a target audience, and songs that tell your audience about your brand/aesthetic – you just need to figure out how to deliver your songs to your audience. This is where the marketing phase comes in. We’ll go through the 4 most important sectors to focus on in the marketing phase as a new independent artist: Spotify, social media, paid ads, and live performances. It’s important to remember that everything you’re doing in any of these sectors should be showing your audience what your brand/aesthetic is.
Spotify
Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world, and it does way more than any other streaming service to help new artists get discovered. One of the best things about Spotify is its music discovery algorithm. As Spotify’s algorithm learns what your music sounds like and what your audience looks like, it will push your music out to more and more people. Eventually, this will get to the point where Spotify will organically bring in more fans for you than any amount of money spent on ads could do. However, you have to train the algorithm first.
The most important thing you can do to train the algorithm within Spotify is releasing music consistently. It’s best to release a song every 4-8 weeks. Another really important thing to do is show off your brand/aesthetic using various Spotify tools like canvas, profile pictures, bios, etc. On top of that, it’s really important that Spotify is showing your music to the right people. If it shows your music to people who listen to different genres, they’ll probably skip it – which will tell Spotify’s algorithm that people don’t like your songs. Whereas, if Spotify suggests your music to the right people – they’ll listen longer, save your songs, and add them to playlists. Then, Spotify will begin suggesting your songs to even more people. A great way to get the right people listening to your songs is through social media marketing and paid ads.
Social Media
Social media is where you can grow and strengthen your fanbase. The three most important social media platforms for independent musicians are TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube (and YouTube Shorts). While any of these platforms can accomplish a variety of tasks, they each have areas they specialize in. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are best for bringing in new fans, Instagram is best for keeping your existing fans updated, and YouTube is best for deepening relationships with your fans.
Ideally, you should post on TikTok and YouTube Shorts 1-2 times per day. On top of that, you should post on Instagram 1-2 times per week (and post on your stories daily). Finally, you should post a YouTube video once every 1-2 weeks.
Similar to Spotify’s algorithm, you also need to train the algorithms of each of these social media platforms. There are several things you should do to teach these algorithms who your audience is. You need to pay close attention to the environments you film in, the objects that are featured in your videos, the location you tag your videos in, the time of day you post, the hashtags you use, the filters you use, the on-screen text you use, and the captions you write. However, even if you get all of those things right, your video won’t go very far unless people are interested in it. These algorithms determine how good a video is by the percentage of viewers that like, comment, save, and share the video. So, it’s important to make content that people want to engage with. The algorithms also pay attention to how much of your video people are watching. Making shorter videos (without sacrificing necessary information) can cause people to get through more of your video and even watch it multiple times. On platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, most people skip to the next video in less than a second if nothing captures their attention. So, it’s crucial to have an effective hook at the start of your video that gets people to continue watching.
A good way to ensure you’re making effective content is researching artists in your genre who are ahead of you, and replicating their most successful pieces of social media content in your own way. You should constantly be evaluating and bettering the content you’re making.
Paid Ads
If you can afford it, paid advertisements are another important part of the marketing process. You should learn how to make effective social media content first, or you’ll probably just waste your money. However, once you have content that you know people are drawn to, you can use paid advertising platforms (Facebook ads, Spotify ads, TikTok ads) to boost that content out even further. The great things about these advertising platforms is that they’re very intuitive, so they are very effective at sending your ads to people who will be interested in them. Paid ads are a great way to teach Spotify’s algorithm who to suggest your songs to. If you use paid ads to target listeners of artists who are similar to you, then Spotify’s algorithm will pick up on those patterns and continue suggesting your music to those types of listeners (for free).
Live
Live performances may very well be the most important aspect of a musicians career once they have a large enough fanbase, however, when you’re just starting out – you need to focus on building a fanbase around your music first. The most efficient methods of doing this were mentioned above – but, live performances can still be a great way to grow an audience.
When performing live, you should focus on who’s being exposed to your music, and how many people are being exposed to your music. Instead of playing at small bars and restaurants where there’s less people and those people aren’t paying attention to you – you should play at places where there’s more people and those people are paying attention to you. Some great examples of this are opening for artists in your genre who are a couple steps ahead of you, playing at college parties, or playing at large community events.
In any of the marketing approaches mentioned above, collaborating can be a very useful tool. When you collaborate with an artist who makes similar music to you – your music is exposed to their entire fanbase. This can be one of the quickest ways to grow your fanbase!
Putting It All Together
Even though this article aims to make being a successful independent musician much more straight forward – there’s still a lot of information here. So, how do we put it all together?
First, you need to set goals that are specific to your career. You should have a very clear idea of what success looks like for you and where you want to be 5 or 10 years down the line. You should be very specific about things like how many albums you want to release, who you want to tour with, what you want people to associate you with, etc. These are your longterm goals. Once you have clear longterm goals, you can set short term goals that act as stepping stones leading you to accomplishing your longterm goals.
Once you have your specific goals lined up, you need to think about how you’re going to achieve these goals. For example, if one of your goals is to be signed by a certain record label: maybe you need to make songs that sound like an artist who’s signed by that label, target that artist’s fans, and then get in a recording session with that artist. If you’re not constantly staying on top of your goals, it’s very easy to fall off track. So, you should constantly be making yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily schedules.
You should constantly be tracking data that will tell you where you’re at in reaching your goals. Important data points could be things like streaming numbers on Spotify, engagement ratios on social media, or daily new subscribers on YouTube.
Lastly, it’s crucial to continually cycle back throughout this entire process. The goals you make and the data you collect can tell you things you need to change about your brand/aesthetic, which can tell you things you need to change about the songs you’re making, which can tell you things you need to change about your marketing strategies.
Pursuing music as a career can be overwhelming and scary, however, it’s important to remember there are many successful musicians in the world. This alone means it isn’t impossible, and it can certainly be done. So, apply the information in this article to your careers – and continue chasing your dreams!
Part 2
I chose this genre because I think it’s a common genre to address musicians in the online space. In this essay, I used a casual, yet informative tone to speak to independent musicians.
The type of independent musician I was specifically addressing is the independent musician who’s in the early stages of their careers. To be even more specific, this independent musician is probably already good at what they do, but they are struggling with building an audience, or they’re discouraged with the results they’ve seen so far. On top of that, they’ve probably spent time scouring the internet reading all kinds of articles that tell them so many different things that they can do. However, this independent musician is most likely overwhelmed by the wall of information that’s hitting them. Of course, they can’t do every single thing that’s possible to do in pursuit of advancing their careers. What they really need to know is what are the most important things to focus on. This independent musician is most likely very serious and passionate about having a career in music, and they would go to far lengths to accomplish this.
With that being said, this article aims to “tell it as it is” to the independent musicians who are reading it. It is very straight forward about the fact that having a career in music has processes that aren’t quite as magical as making music for fun is. This article specifically addresses today’s music industry, and is more so focused around digital practices that will help advance an independent musician’s music career, rather than things like live performance and touring (although it does touch on that). It also specifically speaks on the early and unglamorous stages of an independent artist’s career, rather than when artists are in the spotlight or in the stags that are more highlighted in media.
When formatting this article, I made certain decisions to organize it in a way that’s easy to follow for readers. The formatting also allows each section to support the next section. The very first sentence of the article tells people who should be reading the article and what it will do for that type of reader. This immediately allows readers to make a decision on if it’s worth their time to keep reading or not. If they decide it is worth their time, they’ll immediately be more invested in the article. The first paragraph goes onto give context about the current state of the music industry, and how that leads the independent musicians who are reading the article to be in the state they’re most likely in.
After this, the article is split into sections that make all the words that the readers haven’t read yet feel more structured. It can be daunting seeing tons of words when you land on an article, so I tried to do what i could to make things feel a little less chaotic. On top of that, some readers just don’t have a ton of time, or they might be looking for very specific information. Having several sections throughout the article allows readers to follow along and skim through the article with ease. On top of that, if there’s a specific section that they’re interested in, they can just go directly to that section.
While this is a somewhat long article, I felt it was important to include all of the information that I did. My goal for this article was to write as complete of a guide as possible for new independent artists, without leaving a lot of lingering questions after reading. There were certainly a lot of details I left out in order to keep this article as concise as I could. However, after writing this, it’s clear to me that any of the sections could be its own article. Maybe I should write smaller articles for each section to supplement this broader article?
Overall, writing this article was a very enjoyable process for me – and it was so cool to write about something that I’m so passionate about. This is one of the first times in college where I’ve written about a topic that I feel like an expert in. It certainly gets me excited to write more things like this!
Sources
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Coulter, Andi. “Marketing Agile Artists: How Music Labels Can Leverage TikTok’s Virality.” MEIEA, vol. 22, no. 1, 2022, pp. 135–61, https://doi.org/10.25101/22.5.
Murphy, Shane, and Margee Hume. “The New Digital Music Marketing Ecosystem: Artist Direct.” Creative Industries Journal, vol. ahead-of-print, no. ahead-of-print, 2023, pp. 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2023.2214492.
Wares, Christopher, et al. “Exploring the Impact of Social Media on the Music Industry—From Music Consumption and Discovery to Health and Wellness—And Developing a More Sustainable Future.” MEIEA, vol. 23, no. 1, 2023, pp. 13–47, https://doi.org/10.25101/23.1.
Passman, Donald S. All You Need to Know about the Music Business. Tenth edition., Simon & Schuster, 2019.