What really makes a successful release?
We cover every single aspect of a successful release giving artists a checklist to know how to promote their music and continuously grow as an artist.
The link as promised:
https://burstimo.com/spotify-promotion/
What really makes a successful release?
We cover every single aspect of a successful release giving artists a checklist to know how to promote their music and continuously grow as an artist.
The link as promised:
https://burstimo.com/spotify-promotion/
A lot of artists are obsessed with the pre-release strategy and even if it's successful, you actually have nowhere to push the person, so you can't push them to Spotify, apple Music, a music video Once the track's released is where you can really start making some moves. So in this video, we want to talk about everything you should do as soon as the track drops. I find that most artists on release day expect everything to blow up, as if, because the track's live, everyone's going to listen to it. But the reality of marketing your music, especially with digital streaming platforms and social media now, is you can market that track for a very long time. So the fact it hasn't got over a thousand streams in the first week isn't a big deal. You don't have to really look at those numbers to see how well it's performing, because you can just keep promoting. So on release day I wouldn't freak out. I wouldn't throw everything at the wall and hope for the best. Instead, have a full, long-term marketing strategy in mind, and I think the easiest thing to do with that is content.
Speaker 2:Putting too much pressure on that release is going to not only stress you out but also make you make mistakes because you are desperate for something to happen. Perhaps you've told your friends and family this is like a big release and then it's not doing so well. You're going to end up panicking and looking for shortcuts. It will be a lot more beneficial for you to focus on the next release and actually don't look at the numbers and what's happening for the first week, even if you can do it for the first month. Now I'm saying that I know you're going to look at the numbers I'm not stupid, but do what you would do if you weren't looking at the numbers because, like I said, it's going to stress you out. Move on to the next song, but also, in parallel, have that long-term marketing strategy. So when you're putting together a marketing strategy we actually got this advice from PSPIS. Call themselves PS Bob, let's see it's PS there is no such thing now as like big campaign and then like no release, nothing happening. Big campaign, no release, nothing happening.
Speaker 2:Now it is a case of you're promoting yourself as an artist as a whole the entire time. So instead of like a graph looking like that, in terms of promotion, it's just nice and steady going up and that's what you want. You're promoting yourself as an artist and it just so happens to be another release. So tomorrow, how are you going to promote yourself as an artist? Are you going to include your track in the promotion strategy or you're going to promote? Are you going to include yourself in the promotion strategy?
Speaker 1:It's also why we don't work with artists on like campaigns. We're not doing a four-week campaign, we're not doing a six-week campaign. We're working with them long-term, like three to six months plus, because realistically you're not going to break as an artist in four weeks even if you've got a marketing team behind you pushing really heavily.
Speaker 2:So if you are going to promote your track, then firstly, you're going to take the TikTok. I like TikTok because it has that virality. Is that how I say Virality? Yeah, aspect to it. So you upload it might not go viral in the first three days or a week, but eventually it can pick up traction. So don't go too professional with it. I love it when you want to perform your track in an environment that is very casual, but the song itself and the audio is absolutely perfect. I think that is the best recipe for getting a track to go viral, because people feel like they've discovered something. The audio can be used in different areas, people can stitch it and then that is when things start to pop. But if you take a clip of your music video, upload your entire music video. It's just not going to work.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. If you think about most of the artists that have gone viral on the platform and are still successful, their viral videos are then performing their track. So you've got Mae Stevens in her bedroom. You've got Mimi Webb performing in her car to her friends. There are tons of artists that are performing in abandoned car parks because the acoustics are really good. You have to find something that's aesthetically pleasing because someone's viewing it, but also sounds great. So either recording it prior professionally or just taking the audio of the track and just putting it over the top. You don't need to be like a professional video editor to do that. You can literally do it in TikTok, and it means that you've got both aspects. You've got great visuals, great audio and it links directly to the song, and TikTok now allows you to link your song on Spotify or Apple Music to your profile. So that's fantastic for artists. You can literally push people straight from TikTok to another platform, which before was really difficult.
Speaker 2:And how you start. That video is so important. First three seconds. By how important I mean? I mean, if you are sitting at a piano and the first half a second is you going and then you play, you've lost it. It has to be edited so it's straight in. You have to have something happening immediately. You have to have a good first note. You have to have straight into the song, straight into the chorus, something that is going to get people to hooked. And you don't have one shot of this. You've got multiple shots of this.
Speaker 1:So the rest of your life. Shots at it Like that's how great TikTok is. You can literally post that's true Basically the same video every single day.
Speaker 2:I find that interesting as well. And the fact is not chronological. So so, for example, if one of your videos flops, it's not going out to your entire audience, it's not going out to the entire world. It hasn't gone viral, got the exposure and failed. It just didn't get the exposure. So think of something else, try something else. Try a different point in the song, try a different aesthetic. When you are starting out, this is the time to experiment, because it's not going out to a fan base, it's not going to flop with anybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So TikTok is a platform that you can promote on forever, whereas Instagram it's a little bit different, because your feed posts are going out to your audience, so you don't want to just spam them 24 seven. You don't want to just have a screenshot of your artwork and you be like listen, listen, listen, listen. If you're going to, well, I would suggest posting it on your feed that you've released a track. But the only way to do that is to tell a story, because if you just post the artwork and you're like new tracks out, go, take a listen. No one cares. They haven't heard the track, so they don't know whether it's worth going to listen to. They don't know anything about it. Tell a bit of a story as to why it's worth listening to, and that sounds really sad that you have to persuade people. That's life. There's so much on social media now and there's so much music out there that why should they choose to listen to your track?
Speaker 2:Both on Instagram and TikTok. You can do that as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So just finding a way to tell a story on any social media platform is how you're going to get people to care enough and get people to listen. And I can be something as simple as I wrote this song because all you can be more creative with it and you play the song to your best friend that you wrote the song about you there are so many ways that you can tell that story even just a ton of text on the screen. And for tick tock algorithm that she works really well because People spend so long reading it, their loops, so the algorithms are people watching this video a lot. So that's quite good hack, but you've got to tell the story for people to be invested. Yes, it can be a fantastic song that they just want to listen to. Getting them to care that little bit more is the difference between them watching the tick tock and then going to spot find, saving it and putting it in the playlist.
Speaker 2:You know who's really good at that rent are you? And yeah, I'd say in terms of being able to tell a story with the track and you understand him and what he's going through, what tracks about. And if you look at his youtube videos and we haven't discussed youtube yet but if you look at what he does, it is a story and it is something creative, but it isn't high budget, it's just something which is very watchable but very on brand with him. On the subject of youtube, I wouldn't go creating a music video and hoping that it's going to go viral on there. It's not a good platform for that. In fact, why prefer is you to pitch to those music based youtube channels?
Speaker 1:Like rain bird and things like that. Yeah yeah, grind daily they've already got the audience, so you don't have to spend on ads.
Speaker 2:They've got the audience and your video or your music will reach that audience exactly, and you don't need the audience to come to your your youtube channel yet. Just start building awareness through these channels first. So they're also very contactable, these channels, because what you can do is just go to the about section, click the email to reveal the email address and you can always pitch to them. So just keep it nice and short and snappy and hopefully they'll like your track.
Speaker 1:Yes, some of them even on submit hub and I mean they're very harsh with what should they take on but they're on this, so they're quite easy to access. But with youtube it brings me to like a nice thing of like playing it by ear, because music videos can actually work really well if the track does really well. So if you find that your six months after release promoting this track and it just takes off on tick tock and you're getting so much attention, then you create a music video because you can create something really creative where, because people do listen to music on youtube, they can listen to it there. They can see some cool visuals. But if you're trying to work at growing your audience, youtube isn't the platform for that unless you can invest a lot of time and you have a content strategy or comfortable following, which most artists aren't with the platform. They don't want to put a camera in their face, they don't really have time to create long form content. Fine, but that means you don't really need to invest in a music video because you're not going to be growing that account.
Speaker 1:The playing it by ear one is really important as well, because I've spoken about this in a recent video about release strategies. Most artists will have in their mind I'm releasing this track, then I'm going to promote it for two months. Then I'm releasing my next track, then I'm going to promote that for two months. What you might find is that first track that you promoted actually blows up after month one, and then you could do so much more with that because people recognize it. You can take it to radio, you can do that music video, you could. But then if you're releasing a track in that time you pulled all the attention away from it, whereas if you played it by ear a little bit you could have waited and you could have released that track a little bit later on to really milk the attention from the first one.
Speaker 2:When you want to plug your track to your audience. Have you ever had it where you get so many views on your stories and you're happy with the views, but you plug and suddenly those views are like 20% what they are? That is because your audience is not engaging in what you're putting up. However, you need to plug your music. So how you get around that is, you need to think of something controversial, something unique, something exciting that you are going to upload to your story. It doesn't have to have anything to do with your music, if you don't want to, but what you need to do is have a story up, then your plug, then you need to follow that plug with Creative stories that are going to get people engaged. Whether that is putting a controversial statement out and I don't mean like political, I mean it could be to do with anything all you need to do is people To either like it, reply, vote on a poll, something that is going to get people in your DMs, and what that's going to do is boost the engagement on that later story, which is going to push them through the plug.
Speaker 2:So you've got Instagram saying this set of stories is strong. Put this story at the start of everybody's Instagram profile then, because the value is at the end, they have to get through your plug of your music. You're going to get most people who are going to see the plug and then they're going to listen to your music and then some people or all well, the rest of the people are just going to all filter through. So it's complete benefit to you. But that is why sometimes your plugs aren't working. So you need to integrate them and have a think about where the value is and put the best story you've got first, then at the end of plug because then it's just going to people are going to be bored. At that point you're not going to get as many views.
Speaker 1:But even that point as a whole shows that you should be posting consistently anyway, because so many artists will just suddenly start posting when they've got a release and it's like stories plugging, plugging, presave, presave. It's out, now go listen. It's got a music video, go watch it. No one's going to view your stories because they know it's just constantly plugging. It's too predictable. If your stories are unpredictable, people are always going to click like where are you going to be? What are you going to be doing? People want to know that. People are naturally nosy. So if you've got those things where it's unpredictable and then suddenly you've got a plug, they're going to look at it, because they're looking at all the other ones. Like you said, when you're getting replies to these stories, it's so important to then engage with that person.
Speaker 1:Majority of artists don't have over 10,000 followers, so you can easily respond to. I mean, even if you have 50,000 followers, you can easily respond to all of your DMs. The DM space is where you're going to be able to really connect with your audience but also create that super fan, because if they are sending you a message and you're liking it, you're replying, you're sending a voice note. They're going to be hooked. They're going to talk to you like you're a friend. They're going to tell their friends about your music. Word of mouth is going to be insane there. So doing something as simple as liking someone's message is going to make a difference. And no, it doesn't ruin the mystery of you as an artist, like we hear that all the time. It's just making you real and makes you more relatable and easy to access.
Speaker 2:You still become a mystery later on as well. Yeah, just because one guy got a like is not going to change the mystery.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, but same with comments as well. Just liking a comment doesn't mean that you're suddenly not a big time artist. Like it doesn't take long just to give it a click.
Speaker 2:So, once you've done all that you've plugged to your audience as much as you can you feel like you've really exhausted how many clicks you're going to get to your Spotify profile. The next thing to do is to create a Spotify playlist dedicated to you and your music, and what I would do there is create a playlist that is going to engage people. It's going to be crafted for a certain activity how you're feeling, for example, feeling down on lonely on a Sunday. If you've got a sad track, then you can title it that. Then you curate your own playlist of all the good songs that match that vibe. Then you're anywhere between the third and sixth song. You can put your track in there.
Speaker 2:So what you can say to your audience is now I've curated and you play this for you all. It doesn't even look like a plug, because your course, you're going to put your own track in, but you've got other tracks there. And then if it's on a Sunday and people are just sitting there, they're bored, they think you know I'll stick that on, and then you've got more people coming to that playlist and streaming your track along with other artists that are similar to yourself, other good quality artists and what that does now is that people are going to like and follow that playlist, so you're going to get followers for your next release. Also, you're going to get associated with those artists on the playlist, because if you go on to your profile, you've got similar artists. Suddenly, you're going to get put in similar artists with major artists, because people are streaming your track along with those major artists, which is fantastic for the algorithm.
Speaker 2:You've also promoted it yourself, so at this point, maybe you've exhausted your audience again. What you can do is one, create more playlists and secondly, you can start running ads for it yourself. You can do a talking to camera ad where you are suggesting the playlist to people, why they should listen, and then just tell them to swipe up. Do you still swipe up these days? You don't, do you kind?
Speaker 1:of click. No, no, you just click.
Speaker 2:So you're just telling them to click and then they're going to click through to your playlist and give it a listen and you're going to get even more fans outside of your audience.
Speaker 1:So plus, you own the data there. Yeah, you can. You see all these people clicking to that specific playlist, which means they like your solo music. So you can always retarget them at a later point if you want to promote a new song or promote that song and you want to go to people that like that solo music and do click ads.
Speaker 2:And that is so effective that we've integrated that into our service now. So if you've got a hundred pounds to 200 pounds to spend, then absolutely go for it. However, if you are ranging between the six hundred pounds or dollars up to nine hundred pounds, then what we've done is we have Hundreds of thousands of followers that have accumulated over the years, which means that your cost per click and your streams are going to go a lot further for your money, because we already have that ready made audience ready for you. So it gets spent just like you would on the playlist and they are all real streams and fans of the music. However, it is essentially economies of scale. It's going to be much cheaper for you and it's going to get you a lot more Results than you can on your own. So I'll leave a link below if you want to inquire. Are you interested in that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and with our playlist they got English speaking countries, and I think if you're going to do this yourself, make sure you're going out to English speaking countries as well, just because, although other countries are cheaper, you're most probably not going to play live there, and I think people get pulled into this a lot with ads. They, they run the worldwide. They find a country that's really cheap and just go heavy there.
Speaker 2:I see that a lot in the about section suddenly go about section the top.
Speaker 1:Brazil.
Speaker 2:Brazil is Brazil or Argentina. I don't know why you would accept that as an artist and think you're doing well from it. You know you need to start building real fans.
Speaker 1:Add to another useful one for promoting your track once it's released. You only want to run ads. When the tracks released, we see people advertising presaids. It's so pointless. You have nowhere to push these people. You're wasting your money. When it's out, you can run ads, and that's on tiktok, that's on YouTube music video and Instagram. Instagram reels, I'd say, is your best bet, because that's where people are consuming that kind of content and they sound on yeah, yeah, and they've.
Speaker 1:They've also come quite cheap as well. But tiktok's great one for ads, I think. Well, for us personally, we found community interaction ads really, really strong, and it's not one that most people have taken advantage of. They'll run spark ads and see like Some crazy views on these videos, but that's it, community interaction ads. The aim of those is to get you followers, so they are slightly more expensive, but the conversion is so much better because you're actually getting followers who care about you. So if you're gonna promote on tiktok and run ads, I'd say definitely go with that style.
Speaker 2:For me, instagram ads are about. If you're going to run direct ads and not on the real, I would rather see you retargeting more because that so, for example, if you've got a real that's had ads on it and then that is going out to a wider audience, I wouldn't expect many followers from that. What I would prefer to see is that you are retargeting the audience that's either saw that real that went organic, viral, or you have pushed out that real and then you're retargeting now to get a follow. I wouldn't expect followers and fans to come just from one ad on a real.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the content you choose as well is so important. You cannot run an ad on the artwork of your single. It needs to give a new viewer something, whether that's a really catchy chorus, whether that's something aesthetically pleasing, whether it's the narrative, whether it's something that's funny. It needs to give back to the audience, because they don't know who you are and if you're retargeting they might know you kind of, but they're not A dedicated fan yet, so it really has to pull them in. So if you are going to run ads, the content is the most important thing, even before looking at the targeting or anything else. So those are our tips for promoting your track once it's released. I hope you found the video useful if you did give it a like. If you haven't subscribed, make sure to subscribe and we'll see you in the next one.