The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry, all through the lens of a music creator for the benefit of other music creators. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business at BIMM University UK, director of The SongLab Ltd and the author of The Music Business for Music Creators.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 31: Music Marketing Partners For Recording Artists
This episode explores essential music marketing strategies for independent artists aiming to elevate their brand and connect with audiences effectively. I briefly discuss funding options before moving onto the importance of enlisting freelancers and highlight the importance of platforms like Tone Den, Unhurd Music and Audiomack to assist artists in their marketing efforts.
• Understanding the importance of funding and art to marketing
• Benefits of freelance collaboration for marketing efforts
• Overview of Tone Den's social media marketing capabilities
• Highlighting the features of Unheard Music as an all-in-one tool
• The role of data in understanding audience trends
• Emphasising the importance of building deeper fan relationships
• A vision for the future of music marketing in an artist-centred ecosystem
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www.jonnyamos.com
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The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy. Hello everybody, a very, very warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy With me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback and ebook format. I'm a music creator with credits on a variety of major and indie labels. As a writer, producer, I'm also a senior lecturer in music business and music creation. Wherever you are, whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of the community around it.
Speaker 1:I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. Okay, so in today's episode, we're talking about marketing artist brand marketing. Now, I would be as bold as to say that the biggest request I get and the biggest question I get is from artists that say how do I get my music out there? Now, a simple question that has many, many, many levels of answers to it, right? But one of my aims is to try and simplify things a little bit, right? So that's what I'm going to try and do today. Now I should start by saying this.
Speaker 1:Back in episode 27, I interviewed a guy called Keith Jopling. We talked about longevity, we talked about strategy and it was an absolutely fascinating conversation. I mean, truly, I'm just, I'm really glad that that conversation was documented formally as a podcast and that it wasn't just some kind of like conversation in a pub over a pint as much fun as that would have been with keith. I'm so glad that it was documented because he offers such an advanced level of insight when it comes to music strategy and understanding how artists are broken to a mainstream audience. He's seen it done on a major label level and he's seen it at his time at spotify and he just offers such an enormous insight into how it all works and where it's all headed. So much so that the follow-up episode after that was focusing on fintech, which is one of a number of subjects that he talks about in a blog called Music's Three Futures and that. If you just Google that right, just Google Keith Jopling, j-o-p-l-i-n-g. Keith Jopling, Music's Three Futures just Google that and you'll find the blog. It's about fourth or fifth down, you'll find it right, and in there he talks about three different subjects. The first one is fintech, which is why I did a follow-up episode on that subject. But the other stuff is really, really interesting too. It's all around marketing. So I thought I would try and chew that up and simplify it a little bit for you and then put it into an episode so that we can spread the word on the things that he talks about, because he's pretty damn close to what I would consider to be a genius.
Speaker 1:So let's get into it, ok. So, music marketing. So let's just remove funding for a minute, right? Because there's kind of there's a few different paths to funding, isn't there? There's the self-funded route, there's kind of going through a record company, there's getting a bank loan, there's getting some kind of fintech funding, there's getting sort of public sector grant funding or something like that. So let's just assume that there's a little bit of money there to play with. And, by the way, one of the ways that you get money from, say, like a grant fund or something, is by telling them exactly how you'd spend it if you were to get it. So even if you don't have the money in your pocket right now, it's very important to understand exactly how you would spend that money when you can. So that's what we'll focus on.
Speaker 1:So, you know, artists have choices here, right, in terms of marketing services from the providers of their choice, right? So that means from a record label or from an artist services player or a marketing agency. But Keith refers to the savvy option being to assemble a team of brilliant freelancers. Now, freelancers don't necessarily need to be individuals that are assembled as part of a group that you put together as an artist. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. It can also be in the form of a marketing agency.
Speaker 1:Ok, now, this is where it gets interesting, because I'm going to tell you about a couple of companies that were mentioned in the blog, and also, I must just add, by the way, these two companies that I'm about to mention that may well be quite useful to you. They're not paying me to mention them, you've only got my word for that, but I can assure you that I'm offering a very, very, very unbiased approach here, because there are two companies that I have noticed before. One of them's, tone Den, and the other one is Unheard Music. Now, tone Den are basically a sort of social media marketing platform, right, they focus on, like events and e-commerce and driving people to a destination online, but I think that they also have their place in music because they also have a creator's option. So, you know, maybe, just maybe, artists are creating the right kind of content but struggle in actually connecting their social content to the right audience. Now that's a big problem, isn't it? And it might seem simple and it might seem accessible to piece together your own adverts, but actually I really don't think it is. I think it's actually quite complex, not necessarily the actual content side of it, but in terms of what you do with it. Now, just because we can have access to the tools that enable us to be able to build, like, some meta ads or things like that, there is so much complexity to it, especially when it comes to understanding similar audiences or demographic detail. You know, you can spend a lot of money on a marketing campaign using ads online, but if you're not focusing on the right demographic, then you're going to miss it and you're going to then think, oh well, I tried that, but it didn't work, but maybe it was tried in the wrong way. So partnering up with a company like Tone Den could actually be pretty useful when it comes to social media marketing management options.
Speaker 1:Let me now mention another one. Right, unheard Music. Now I've heard a lot of great things they're based in I think they're based in Tile Yard in London. For anybody that doesn't know, tile Yard in London, it's a very sort of action-packed community of kind of entrepreneurs and companies, and not just in music but in the whole of the creative industries. They're based there and UnHerd Music so that's U-N-H-U-R-D, unherd Music, so heard with a U right, and they're kind of this all-in-one tool for artist marketing. They do have a free plan, but they also have a pro plan which I think is about like, maybe like eight or nine pounds a month or something like that.
Speaker 1:But the things that they do are not only really really, really good, but also perhaps a bit of an insight as to where further marketing agencies will go in the future. So they have, for example, within their package they have playlist pitch control. They have partnership setups. They have social media ads. They also have ways to be able to understand and target particular trends. Target particular trends. Most importantly, they have a very, very complex data analysis set which can also trigger other understandings of where it fits with trends or which genres are moving in the right direction for this to be pitched at this time.
Speaker 1:It's all in one kind of hub of different tools that artists can access what I think is quite a reasonable price. You know, the last thing that artists want to be doing is to kind of spend money on things that don't really work. Now, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of artists that will go well. Yeah, I don't need that. I'm doing it all myself now. There's nothing wrong with that either, except you need strategy, don't you?
Speaker 1:To build the right strategy, you have to sometimes have the right tools and the right ins, and you can bypass a lot of the I don't know the right people by using a platform like that, because it effectively removes gatekeepers, for example, on the playlists. You can go on places like Groover and SubmitHub and connect with the right playlisters. Those are really really good platforms as well. These are platforms that I endorse. They work. I know they work because they've worked for me. They've worked with many people.
Speaker 1:I know right, but the difference between going onto a centralised platform like that and going through somewhere like Unheard is that there's a separate filter right that will filter out some of the stuff that's less relevant for you, that you then should not pitch for perhaps, and also makes you aware of other curators, other playlisters that you go? Ok, I didn't know about them. If it wasn't for UnHerd, they wouldn't have been on my radar, I wouldn't have thought to have pitched for them. And I've got on that and I've got 20,000 plays in the first three days Brilliant, ok. So not only OK. You may not. These might be passive listeners, right. They might not necessarily be sort of instant super fans. They almost certainly won't be. They may not even follow you. But, of course, if you've listened to past episodes where I've talked about kind of, you know, crowdsourced data and stuff and I've gone into a lot of depth on some of the episodes on that, you'll know that when you start getting more streams, collaborative filtering kicks in on the Spotify algorithm, right, and it starts kicking you out to more and more and more people. So it's at that point that this kind of stuff starts to work.
Speaker 1:Now, the thing that gets really interesting, beyond all those tools, in somewhere like unheard music, is what they refer to as the fan hub. Now, the fan hub, you know, instead of kind of spending lots and lots and lots of money on um, you know a slick killer website, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you look at major artists, they don't often do that. It's the major labels that do that for them, and there's probably a good reason for that, right? Because they cost a lot of money. So instead, with a fan hub, it's all about reflective thinking, right, and drawing in an audience. So think about things like picture archives, merch, exclusive tracks, also a kind of a little bit more flexibility when it comes to relinquishing perhaps even a little bit of intellectual property by making certain sounds or maybe even stems available. Maybe even it's about creating experiences or diaries or some kind of reflection on you know where your mind is at as an artist. All of these things are build content to build up that fan to audience relationship. And this is where it starts to kind of become almost like a kind of hybrid between pr and marketing.
Speaker 1:What really mean by that is that, if we look at the way that major labels market things, it's it's big, heavy punt traditional marketing, not with every single company, but a lot of the companies that are subsidiaries of the major label conglomerates will use a very kind of campaign approach to marketing. What I'm talking about here is much more brand marketing. It's much more focused around building a niche of people, right? So that if you know Spotify dropped tomorrow let's hope it doesn't, but if it did, then where have those people gone? You know, I hear a lot of people talking about, you know, collecting emails and that kind of thing. I'm not against that, but I'm just not sure if that's actually effective anymore, because there's a lot of Generation Z and early adopters that don't necessarily check their emails as much as those that are, you know, sort of age 40 and above massive broad stroke generalizations, but perhaps some truth to that. So you know, that's what we're talking about here, right, between those kinds of companies. So when it comes to marketing, you're not on your own. You can't really do it on your own. Perhaps Maybe you can, maybe some people can, right, but for those that are wondering, how do I get my music out there, who do I work with? Well, I've given you two companies there that I think could be suitable options.
Speaker 1:Now I also want to mention a third company, which Keith mentions in his blog, and that is Audio Mac. So if anybody's not familiar with Audio Mac, they're basically like a sort of artist-centric platform which has a very cool sort of artist dashboard with, again, very sort of in-depth stats on how content is being consumed, let's say, right, and the focus is on independent and sort of emerging artists that can use the platform to cultivate growth through understanding how their music might trigger trends, right? It it's web-based. It's also app-based. It's free, but there's also an ad-free kind of premium membership option to it as well, but it's a very useful platform for sort of emerging artists, but also kind of fans, right? So it's a double-ended platform. Audio Mac it's used by people to upload their music, but it's also used by fans to listen to music, especially like early adopter fans, right? So kind of potentially people that could turn into super fans, or, in other words, people between the ages of 15 and 24, let's put a number on it who Spotify would consider to be early adopters. These are the people that are listening to music a lot more than people that are outside that age bracket and also are more suggestible, more impressionable and more take more ownership over things that they are discovering and sharing. So it's a great place for that.
Speaker 1:Again, audio mac are not paying me to say this. I've got to tell you that, by the way. It's. It's very useful, right, to be like kind of, to take a non sort of biased approach to this kind of stuff. And just look, because marketing is a very, very, very difficult task if you're solo marketing, so it's just good to kind of be aware of what those options look like around you.
Speaker 1:Now, the things I haven't mentioned here, of course, are are very important, but they're things that I spoke about on this podcast before. So the importance of having all your songs ready, knowing what your genre definition is, knowing what your message is, knowing what your values is, building the right kind of content these are all prerequisites to then plug yourself into these kind of options. Now, as time goes by, in the future I'm going to try and look more into these type of options so that you are aware of the kind of tools that you've got, because I think, as time goes on, further and further and further, two things start to happen to companies like the ones I've mentioned Either they get gobbled up and acquired by a major company that then uses their technologies and their personnel, or they remain independent. And that latter part is the thing that really excites me, because it then means that music creators have exactly the same kind of tools and access to growth that some of the big labels have, and as we move more and more and more into an artist-centered ecosystem, we can then start to go okay, right, the creators actually have, you know, a bit more control now you know, which is the thing that we've always wanted in this business, isn't it so, anyway? So there's a little bit of an insight into, kind of you know the artists' marketing options that are in existence and how they could be used, so feel free to have a look into those kind of you know the artists marketing options that are in existence and how they could be used, so feel free to have a look into those kind of companies. And also, it kind of feeds you your own ideas on the kind of things that you can be doing to work with them right, and how you get the most out of your money, you know okay. So that's about it for that episode.
Speaker 1:Credit to Keith Jopling for his blog, music's Three Futures, because it really inspired me to want to talk about this today. Have a great day. Wherever you are, feel free to reach out to me, send me suggestions for subjects that you would like to be covered in this podcast, or please feel free to rate the podcast and to send me any feedback at all. It's always great to hear from people. Wherever you are in the world, I'm interested in what you're doing, right. That's why I do this. Okay, I will go now. Have a great day. May the force be with you. The Music Business Party.
