3/17/18 SONGCAMP 2018: MONETIZE YOUR MUSIC Best Practices for promoting your music to playlisters Hi, Andrea Young, Founder and Chief Playlisting Officer of Koral Young here. We re a team who help artists get their music discovered on the streaming platforms and with playlisters. And today I ve got some best practices for you, in promoting your music to playlisters. Music consumption is at an all-time high. As noted in a Spotify blog a few months ago, the pie is getting bigger and there are more slices going around. Spotify, Apple and industry analysts are predicting exponential growth in online listening in the years to come. This is due to the global music marketplace as it opens up, new listening technology like home smart speakers that make it easy for everyone from 5 year olds to 95 year olds to play their favorite music with just a voice command, both inside and outside the home by the way Toyota announced recently they ll be adding Amazon s Alexa to their autos in 2018. And at the same time, the former gatekeepers of radio stations and major record labels are no longer the only way to get your music heard in the marketplace. As an artist, since you get a payout every time someone listens to your music online, if the market is going to grow exponentially exponentially in the coming years, then your revenue from online listens can grow as well. Now what do you get paid right now when someone listens to your music online? Payouts per stream vary, according to streaming platform, whether you re an independent or major label artist, and by the percentage of rights that you have to the track. Right now, Spotify is said to pay out an average of four hundredths of a cent per stream to independent artists. Apple and other streaming sites have higher payout rates. Using Spotify to value streams, that means for every thousand streams, you get around $4, 100,000 streams would bring you $400. Now that might not seem like much, but I also want to quote the head of Kobalt, one of the biggest music service companies in the world. Today, artists you ve never heard of are making a living off of streaming revenue. In the next couple of years, the number of artists that make a living off of these services will grow from 5,000 to 100,000 artists, right along with the growth of streaming. Willard Ahdritz, Kobalt Founder & CEO and AWAL Executive Chairman To increase your revenue from streaming, you either need to have more people listening or you need a bigger payout rate. There are a lot of people in the industry advocating for a bigger pay out rate. But what is under your control right now is to make yourself more discoverable, make your music more discoverable on the online streaming platforms. How do you do that? Page 1 of 6
One of my favorite inspirational quotes about how you do that comes from Rick Barker, he was Taylor Swift s manager very early in her career. Rick Barker said, If you want to sell 500,000 albums, you need to meet 500,000 people. Well times have changed but let s use that as an analogy for online listening as well. If you wanted to get 100,000 streams a month, and people listened on the average 4 times/month to your track (and maybe it s a lot more than that, maybe less), you would need 25,000 people listening on a monthly basis in order to get 100,000 streams or $400. So right now you would need 400,000 streams per month to begin to make a living from online listens. This isn t as impossible as it sounds, given again that the global marketplace is opening up and there is going to be more and more opportunity for people to listen and find your music online. Right now, it is about making your music discoverable online. And you do that by Covering some playlisting basics Promoting yourself inside and outside of the streaming platforms. And doing it consistently and persistently. So here are the playlisting basics along with lots of tips on how to get your music discovered online with playlisters: Have Great Music Distribute it Everywhere Engage on Socials Have a Release Strategy Invest in your music. All of these basics are designed to increase your following inside and outside of the playlisting community. The playlist community does not operate in a vacuum. Whatever traction you have going on outside of the streaming platforms will translate into more traction on the streaming platforms. I m a longtime radio show host and producer, a playlist curator and manager of our team at Koral Young where we go out every day to help get your music discovered with playlisters, so I ve got experience from more than one viewpoint. Pay attention to quality playlisters who are overwhelmed with submissions are not likely to listen to a track that isn t well produced or that is off pitch. Realize that many times a playlister will only listen to about 30 seconds before making a decision whether to skip or continue listening to a track. So, make the first 30 seconds the best it can be, and think about the impression that might be making on people who are listening. To make your music more discoverable, you also want to be sure to DISTRIBUTE it everywhere people are listening online. It is relatively inexpensive to distribute your music these days, and you ve got options beyond the do-it-yourself Tunecore and CD Baby sites. Page 2 of 6
Don t just distribute on the sites that are best for your genre or sound, distribute across platforms everywhere possible. People are listening on multiple platforms these days, for example, maybe Spotify on their desktop, Alexa in the kitchen, Sirius Radio in the car. Playlisters are publishing across platforms now as well they may have a playlist on Soundcloud also duplicated on Spotify for example. Radio stations and blogs are starting up their playlists on the streaming platforms. When your music is up on all the platforms, it makes it easier for the playlister to find and feature you. Also, be sure to have at least a lyric video for your track up on YouTube. This can be as simple as the artwork with the music behind it. YouTube to date is known to be a big music discovery site, but the interesting thing is, people who say that they discover music on YouTube also say that they listen afterward on the other streaming platforms. Get up on Pandora if possible. Pandora has great artist marketing tools did you know every time someone creates a Pandora station for your music, that the platform then plays your music for another 40+ potential fans they identify? Soundcloud is also an important platform for playlisters, make sure your tracks are available there as well. And consider other apps too such as musical.ly. By the way, pay attention to your metadata, that s Artist Title, ISRC, ISWC and other identifiers. Get with your distribution company to understand which royalties and streaming payments they collect and which they don t and register directly with those collection agencies not covered by your distributor or publishing company. It can turn pennies into dollars for you. The next important basic is to engage on your socials. And first I want to quote Troy Parker, he s Spotify s Global Head of Creator Services. He was interviewed at the music biz conference last year in Nashville. His interviewer asked him: Nate Rail: What strategies can be utilized by unsigned artists without the fire power of a large label to increase their chances to get on major Spotify playlists Troy Parker: I would say work your socials, really really work your socials. Work socials and everything else and stay in it. Source: musicbiz.org 2017 Did you know that Spotify s systems and editorial team look at tastemaker blogs, they look at activity outside of the streaming platforms for ideas on music to include on their playlists? This and Troy Parker s statement should give you a clue as to what you need to pay attention to, you need to pay attention to your socials. Send people to the streaming sites from your socials, send people out of the streaming sites to your socials. The most important thing you can have going is to have people talking outside of the playlisting community about your music. Page 3 of 6
Another tip is to include links on your website to the streaming platforms, just as you do for the social media platforms. The next thing is to have a planned release strategy. Playlisters are always looking for new fresh music. Look on Spotify s New Music Friday, Discover Weekly, Fresh Finds, - the playlists where they actually highlight emerging artists and you ll see that most of those tracks have been released in the last few months. There are new music playlisters who will tell us that they won t even consider a track if it s been released more than 30 days ago. I think this is crazy the old norm used to be that it would take 18 months to break an artist or a track. But the fact that they think something is old after 30 days and the importance of continued engagement with your fans means you might want to consider pulsing your music out rather than releasing it all at one time. There are many ways to do this, one being to release 1 or 2 focus tracks from your album prior to album release if you release an album at all - and maybe even hold a track or video for release after the album release, as a way to engage with playlisters. Put together a calendar of assets, tracks and videos that you are planning to release in the next year, and schedule them at intervals so that you have frequent opportunities to engage with your audience for your music. Notify your distributor way in advance and lean on them to pitch your tracks to the streaming sites for editorial coverage. Schedule releases around other activities like touring always have something up on the streaming platforms that fans can listen to after they ve heard you live especially the tracks you perform. And, maybe be a bit flexible in your release schedule -- we always look at the response in the marketplace once we get started. If a track is hitting big, we may want to extend our promotion focus on it a bit longer than originally scheduled, for example. INVEST IN YOURSELF Finally, as far as covering the basics in playlisting, I want to note that it is really important to invest in your music. Whether you do it yourself or you hire a team behind you, invest in your music. Some people in the industry say that you should spend as much on promoting your tracks as you do recording them, some say you should spend double as much promoting as recording. If you re an emerging artist, you need to invest in promoting yourself and your music to playlisters and curators on the streaming sites. Whether you do it yourself or do it with a great team behind you supporting you, YOU NEED TO MAKE YOURSELF DISCOVERABLE TO GET YOUR MUSIC HEARD. Here are a few more tips on getting your music heard on the streaming platforms and with playlisters. And here s a quote from a senior editor at Spotify recently: Every piece of data that is used on Spotify is driven by audience consumption. We re not leading the algorithm; the algorithm is being led by the consumer. Austin Deboh, senior editor at Spotify If every piece of data that Spotify uses is driven by audience consumption, then you need to get your music heard by the fans, by your audience, above the thousands of other tracks that are released every month. Page 4 of 6
Here are 3 actions on the streaming platforms that you can take and that you can encourage your fans and your audience to take to get more attention for your music online. These actions support playlisters and the streaming sites and it s what the streaming site systems sometimes look for. 1. Ask your fans to SAVE your music to their own music library once they listen to it. 2. Ask your fans to add one of your tracks to one of their own playlists. And even better, ask your fans to add one of your tracks to one of their own playlists while listening to it from another playlist, from a playlister s playlist or a Spotify playlist. 3. Ask your fans to follow the playlisters and playlists that your music is featured on. CULTIVATE PLAYLISTERS Another thing you can do is cultivate relationships and connections with playlisters yourself. There are 3 different types of playlisters and playlists 1. Owned and operated 2. Aggregated 3. Independent Owned and operated playlists are those created by systems and curators at the digital service providers like Spotify, Amazon Music, Google, YouTube, Deezer. Aggregated playlisters are sites, owned by the major labels by the way, who amass their own and independent playlists both and drive people to listen to those playlists through their site which is a gateway to the streaming sites. Ok, just check out Digster, Topsify and Filtr, those are the three main playlist aggregators. They have hundreds of thousands of listeners, and getting your music onto one of their playlists, just like getting your music on the owned playlists can exponentially increase your listens! Independent playlisters are people and brands who create playlists independently outside of the curation and editorial teams and systems at the digital service providers and aggregators. These are people like you and me, people who are into music, who are passionate about music discovery, who are music tastemakers. They can have anywhere from a few followers to hundreds of thousands of followers. They are all important. Independent playlists are one of the places that other music playlisters on the editorial teams, at the streaming platforms and the aggregators look to for music discovery. The more independent playlisters who feature your music, the more chance you have of being discovered by the streaming platforms editorial teams and the aggregators. You can find independent playlisters on the streaming sites by genre, theme, mood and other qualifiers. Your job is to find the niche playlisters who might like to listen to your music Don t expect immediate results from your efforts. Be persistent. It can take quite a while for playlisters to pay attention. It took us over 6 months to get an important playlister to feature a track for one of our artists. It can help to have a professional voice represent you It helps to Page 5 of 6
have someone they trust bring you to their attention, for ex., Scooter Braun s friend told him to watch this kid Justin Bieber s videos on YouTube, and that s how Justin Bieber was discovered. The more active you are on the streaming sites, the more attention you can get for your music. Consider creating your own playlists to highlight your music and the music of other artists. To summarize, Cover the basics so that you are discoverable everywhere, and stay in the game! Be consistent and persistent in releasing new content, engaging with your fans, and approaching the playlisting community. Cultivate listeners online, cultivate relationships with playlisters and be active on the streaming sites. There s so much more to know in the playlisting space, and its changing so quickly, this just begins to get to it. For more information feel free to contact me. Thanks for listening! andrea@koralyoung.com. @koralyoung Page 6 of 6