Episode 94: How To Build A Music Fanbase From Zero

The leap from making songs to building a career isn’t magic — it’s momentum you can engineer. I pull back the curtain on how to launch a brand-new artist from zero data to investable, using a practical framework that blends creative clarity with disciplined execution. No hype, no guesswork, just a repeatable path that lowers risk and raises opportunity.

I start by nailing the lane: genre, subculture, and the core emotional promise that tells fans who you are at a glance. From there, we move into building in public, where behaviour beats vanity metrics. Watch time, comments, shares, and saves reveal what resonates before a single hits DSPs. Then we lay out a 36-week release plan: six singles, one every six weeks, supported by identity-led short-form content and optimised distribution on Spotify and Apple Music. You’ll learn why user-curated playlists are the first real lever, how a 10%+ save rate and listener-to-follower conversion flag a true lead single, and which analytics tools give you clean, comparable data.

Press matters too — not for bragging rights, but for web presence that algorithms can read. We explain how consistent blog features and reviews feed natural language processing, helping platforms map your music to the right listeners. With one full cycle complete, we repeat with informed variables, compounding what works and dropping what doesn’t. That foundation leads to proof: one hundred local tickets, organic merch sales, early subscriptions, and the moment you “catch” algorithmic support on Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Finally, we show how to package the narrative for partners — growth curves, peer benchmarks, release discipline, revenue per fan, and a clear plan for deploying capital across touring, content, and marketing. You stop pitching potential and start pitching acceleration.

If you’re serious about turning art into a sustainable business, this roadmap gives you the steps, signals, and language partners trust. Subscribe, share with a fellow creator, and leave a review with the one metric you plan to track next — what will you measure first?

Transcript

Defining The Goal: Investable Momentum

Phase One: Find The Lane

Phase Two: Build In Public

Phase Three: 36-Week Release Plan

Playlists, Metrics, And Tools

Press Creation And Web Presence

Phase Four: Iterate With Data

Phase Five: Proof And Early Revenue

Catching Algorithms And Investor Logic

Phase Six: Pitching Acceleration

Budgets, Partners, And Next Steps

Art As Data And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:16

And welcome 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 myself. I'm a music producer. I'm an industry consultant, an artist manager, and a senior lecturer in both music business and music creation. Wherever you are and whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of this community. I'm here to try 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 this week's episode, the focus is this launching an artist, right? Going from absolutely nothing into something investable, right? It's perhaps one of the most common questions that comes to me from music creators. How do I get my music out there? How do I become more known? How do I do this? And it all kind of, there's a lot to it, isn't there, right? So the goal today for me is to try and simplify this, right? Launching a brand new recording artist with like zero data into something investable is less about necessarily breaking a hip, but it's more about engineering proof of momentum, right? Investors don't always need superstardom. Record companies do, but investors don't always need superstardom. What they need are repeatable signals that reduce risk, right? So this is all this is about building data. And my goodness, I know how boring that sounds, right? Because as an artist, right, you're creating art, but I think there's a very important mental shift to think about here. As an artist, yes, you're an artist, but it's also good to think about yourself as an asset, an asset that has data built in with it that is investable, right? That's ultimately how the art turns into something that is a business, right? Um, I hope that doesn't sound mundane, by the way, when I say it like that. But I know that the goal of many is to turn that art into a career. And that is what I'm going to focus on today. Now, if I were a young artist, right, I'm not young and I'm not even an artist, but if I were both, this is exactly what I would be doing. Okay, phase one. Hatch to scratch, right? And what I mean by this is actually starting something from nothing, right? Understanding what the act is and its link to fans. Now, this might be something which happens very quickly, or it could be something that takes years. It can also be confusing because you might think you've got there and you haven't. So this is the first phase, right? Defining the lane, right? Identifying the genre or subgenres of that genre, identifying the subculture, the emotional promise, right? The clear aesthetic, summarizing the act in a sentence. Now I know this can be difficult sometimes because it's like my music is this, and hopefully this is what it does. It's on you to try and explain what it is that you do. And I know that you want the music to do the talking for you, and eventually it will, but until that point, it's about understanding what it is that you're selling, right? So the idea of going, well, this could be for fans of this act and this act, but with a little bit of that one over there, right? Once you can start to do that, it's at that point that you can start to go, okay, we can start building towards something that people are going to be able to identify with and know that it fits into this category or that category. Okay, phase two, building in public, right? Now get your heads around this because views do not matter just yet, but behavior does. So prior to controlled releases, and by controlled releases, I'm talking about official releases onto the DSPs, right? Before all that, there's another phase. Now, if you miss out this phase, you miss out on a lot of crucial data that you need more than investing needs right now. So this is what it looks like. So prior to those controlled releases, it's about building something in public, right? And you need behavioral data. So I'm talking about platforms like YouTube, and that's for short and long form, also TikTok, Instagram, and potentially even SoundCloud, dependent upon what your genre is. Content strategy. So at this point, we're looking for studio footage, for songwriting, for storytelling, for hooks, for snippets, identity-driven content, right? Humour, right? It could be humor, it don't have to be. If you're not funny, don't force it. But it's understanding getting across your beliefs, right? Your aesthetics. I would say two posts per day across those platforms is going to be enough for at this particular phase. But what you're looking to measure are watch time, comments, especially repeated comments, shares, and saves. Okay, let's move into phase three. This is the bit where people actually start releasing music. So let's build it, not just from here's a single, but here is an overall entire strategy that runs over 36 weeks. Okay. Controlled releases, 36-week timeline. Okay, so releasing a new single every six weeks with six-week gaps in between them. So six singles that run across 36 weeks in total. Each single has 20 pieces of short form content, no album, no EP, no distractions. Distribute everywhere, but optimize for Spotify and Apple. At this point, it is about that next level of data creation. The next part is about playlists. Playlists are crucial, aren't they? And I know sometimes we think about all of the editorial playlists and all those great things that they can do. That will come. Sometimes it happens on debut releases. I can think of two artists in the last two years that have gotten a major editorial uh playlist on their debut release. But truthfully, they got lucky and they know they did, right? So it's not always about shooting for the highest hill off the bat. That comes later. This is what it looks like to begin with. The playlist strategy within phase three, within that 36 period, the goal is to get on user-curated third-party uh playlists, right? And that will feed algorithmic growth and also repeat listeners. Now, the key things to look out for are looking to gain a save rate above 10%. Now, one of the things to think about here is that some of those songs, the ones that you thought might be the best, turns out maybe they are, but they might not be. And it's about being open to that because eventually you'll start to gain an understanding of what your lead single is. And the lead single is loosely defined by the one that has the highest save rate and the highest listener-to-stream ratio. Understanding what the listener-to-follower conversion looks like is also really, really important. But what's also very important here is the week-to-week listener growth rate and knowing what that looks like. So it's not about looking at the total, it's about looking at the growth rate. That acceleration data is key to what comes next. Quick thing about trusted tools on this. I'm talking about things like Spotify for artists, Apple Music for Artists, Spot on Track, and also Chartmetric. These are really, really trustworthy tools that I fully endorse the use of. Also, when it comes to playlist partners, and I know that this can be a minefield in itself, right? But um Groover, Submit Hub, and Playlist Push are all extremely good platforms that I stand by for a multitude of reasons. I can also tell you, by the way, in a very sort of artist-centric ecosystem that we're now in, those tools are used by artists and they're also used by labels. I I could tell you about some big name labels that use those exact platforms when gaining new growth, especially for new artists. Okay, the next phase of phase three, a phase within a phase. He's still following me, I hope so, is about press creation. Now, press creation is a really, really, really, really interesting one because I think a lot of artists that I speak to kind of go, Well, what's the point in being in that blog? No one reads it. Doesn't matter. Right now, that doesn't matter. What matters is web presence. So a new press release should be created for each single release on a 45-day cycle to tastemakers. That's four weeks in pre-release and four weeks in post-release. And platforms like MuseoSoup are built for that. Blog features and press reviews are the goal, not paid influences. Web presence is the key component of discovery. What's going to happen if this works well is that that data then informs other things, natural language processing for large language models. In English, what that means is that the DSPs, like Spotify, like Apple, they don't want you to grow really, really well on that platform and not anywhere else because it makes you more higher risk. So one of the ways that they negate that risk is by actually understanding data on you outside of that platform. One of the fastest ways, most accurate ways of doing that, is to analyze text. But in order to analyze text, they have to see what other people are saying about you. So a good press release where you actually get across the point of what you're trying to sell and who you are and who you're trying to appeal to could well be copy and pasted into blog reviews, ultimately meaning that you can infiltrate how that algorithm actually sees you. I know that's a lot to follow, by the way. Okay, on to phase four. So phase four is a really interesting one because by this point you'll be able to actually calculate where you're at. And it's good to just pause after that 36-week period and go, right, what does the data look like? At this point, you're still holding back from long-form audio products, right? So no EPs, no albums. By the way, there's another tactic there, right, is to hold those things back until you've got strategic partners in place that can handle those bigger marketing punts. So phase four is about repeating phase three, but with variables, right, that switch based upon the informed approach that that data from phase three actually provides. So another six singles, that's what we're talking about. Another six singles over another 36-week period with just singles, right? Just singles, no album, no major marketing punt, and just a ton of useful data which will be used in the next phase. Okay, so that leads us on to phase five, where there starts to be proof, right? Proof of data, proof of audience, proof of belonging. Okay, phase five, right? Partnership work begins once an act becomes more investable, right? So key indicators of growth at this level could be things like 100 tickets sold to local shows, right? Ticket purchases that come without heavy promotion and also merchandise sales. I'm talking grassroots low-level stuff right now, but that's the key driver right now. Early revenue options include things like subscriptions, limited merch drops, sync licensing intermedia, and direct to fan sales. When we talk about the catch, let me just tell you what I'm referring to, right? So when I say we're going from scratch to catch, scratch, everyone knows what that means, right? It means we're going from kind of nothing, right? Just an idea into catch. Catch is where you catch an algorithm. So Spotify is a great example of this. When you actually catch that algorithm, i.e., when Spotify gets a better understanding of who your audience is, they are far more likely to put you in front of that audience through algorithmic uh playlistings such as Discover Weekly, Release Radar, etc. They're not going to do that if they don't know what your audience looks like. So it's nigh on impossible to achieve this without the previous step. What investors want to see is that if they add capital, revenue scales. Again, I know it sounds really, really business-like, but it's an important part of understanding this stage of the process. Okay, now we're into phase six, and this is where things start to get a little bit interesting. Bear in mind what we think about the timeline of what we've been through so far. Because I know I'm kind of trying to summarize this and pack this in as neatly as I can, but the reality is we're talking about a quite a large span of time, right? Things change across that point of time. Uh, maybe, you know, band members, mix engineers, people come and go, right? Because that's life and that's music and that's business and that's how it rolls, right? But by this point, you've shown huge commitment to what you're building. So let's take a look at what phase six looks like. Phase six, at this point, you're no longer pitching potential, you're pitching acceleration. So it's about narrative packaging, right? So a pitch to partnerships begins. So key metrics, things like audience growth charts, again, not the totals, but the growth flow. So the way in which it's moved up. Benchmarks to peers, i.e., how do you stack up against others that are in your style, in your not even necessarily in your geographic location, but more so this artists that are in your genre and where do they stack up against you at this point? Release cadence and discipline, right? Discipline by this point, just think about what you'll have already made happen already. It's difficult to kind of fully project this kind of stuff until you're there, but by this point, you've committed to something, and that's well worth a lot of respect from a lot of people. Also, your revenue per fan trajectory. So the other thing about this is about it, it could be at this point that you know an act is talking to booking agents, uh, to managers, to music publishers, to distributors, to record companies, to a fintech company. I did an episode on that recently, right? But also it's about going, right, if we get investment, what is that actually going to look like, right? If we were to get£10,000, how are we going to spend that? It's very important to try and build an understanding of how that money would be spent. That could be touring, it could be content creation and videography work, it could be marketing. No matter what it is, it's good to be able to then get in a position of understanding at that point. This is about converting art into a landscape that capital can understand. Okay, a lot of information there, right? So the things that I've spoken about there at that particular point, right? What I'm going to do is I'm going to do another uh episode where where I talk about what happens next after that, right? Because after that it gets really interesting, but you've got a lot more options by that point. When I talk about this, by the way, uh today, it doesn't just, this isn't just kind of like my, oh, this is my opinion. It well, I suppose it is, isn't it? But what I mean is, is that it's informed through an understanding of the landscape of this marketplace at this current time, right? So it's informed not only through my own views, but also in my observations of others and who I am around. Uh, and that includes and extends itself, by the way, to those that I talk to on the podcast and the strategies that people use in this current era. Uh, you know, art is crucial, right? We know this, you know that. That's why you're here listening to me, whittle on in this very moment, right now, because art is important, and my goodness me, we need it, right? We always have and we always will. But we're in a time now where art is data. And I know that's a lot to wrap your head around, but when you do and you start seeing the artist as an asset and a data asset, then you're at the point of investment. Okay, I hope that has been useful to you. Uh, feel free to reach out to me, right? You've probably got questions, in which case, do reach out, right? I'm here to help. I hope that's been useful. I will continue with this particular narrative on another occasion. But until then, have a great day, and may the force be with you.