With more and more artists releasing music on streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music & YouTube Music, how do you actually get new streams & listeners without ruining yourself in the process?
This is a question probably most artists ask themselves. Whenever they release a new song and the streams stop ticking in ones the closest family members and friends have unwillingly listened through your 15th track that still is below <1000 streams. It’s a sad reality and it’s hard to escape from it.
You can’t just release a track and hope for the best…
Let me ask you a question, if you started a company, any company, how would you obtain your first customer? Would you just post something on Instagram and hope that someone sees it? What if that someone doesn’t see it?
Everyone (almost) likes music in some shape or form. If your music sounds similar to some popular style, there is probably a segment for it. The problem is, it might not be your Facebook friends and that’s why you shouldn’t even try to promote your tracks to your friends in the first place, as they won’t probably matter at all in achieving your goals: getting new fans.
There are also other reasons to why you probably do not want to promote music to your family and friends, especially if you are genuinely good, but it’s a topic for another day.
So to the question: How do I get more streams on my music?
The Reality
I’ll try to be as transparent, genuine & objective as possible in this post. First off, I want to be clear that there is not really a free way of getting streams and listeners to your music, well in certain scenarios they could be free for you, but not for other parties. There is always someone or somebodies paying for your promotion:
- You
- Record Labels
- Playlist Curators
- DSPs (Such as Spotify)
Just like marketing any other business, it costs money. The current business model from streaming is also relatively low margin and risky compared to other business models, so it’s important to understand this side of the industry.
So there are no free ways to get streams?..
A part from being very lucky (few of us are), there is one way for you as a creator and artist where you can reliably get streams without spending any money on marketing directly from your own pocket, and it’s called a good Record Label. Many people falsely predicted that record label’s role wouldn’t be necessary anymore, now when it’s so easy to produce and distribute your own music compared to the past.
Actually, this is very far from the truth as their importance within the industry, especially independent record labels, is growing among smaller artists and acts. The main reason for this is because around the world, approximately 120.000 new songs are released every day This is a pretty huge number and without any marketing power, how the **** do you think anyone will discover your music?
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Even if your songs are really great, average or not so good, it won’t really matter. Most artists spend their time on perfecting their craft, when in the end, it’s far from the most important aspect in order to gain listeners.
I know a handful of songs that have millions of streams for different reasons, where the tracks sometimes are absurdly bad and/or often made as a joke. While your music quality matters a lot for other reasons, it’s often not the main motivation for music streams.
What I want to say is: Music Quality is important and it’s what defines you and you are project, but it’s far from enough in order to gain streams & listeners.
The reason why a good label is a great choice is that you will gain immediate access to marketing power that would otherwise be very costly for you to try to implement yourself. The reasons why this is possible for a label and not for you as an independent artist are simple. With just a handful of songs, it’s more or less impossible to get a positive ROI as the royalties per streams are just way too low. If you don’t have hundreds to thousands versatile tracks yourself, it will be very hard to implement the same marketing strategy as a respected label.
But I want to stay independent!
Sure and that’s perfectly fine. There are some benefits of staying independent, but you should be aware of the consequences and how it affects your goal of maximising new streams and listeners. If you do not happen to know someone with a large channel for your specific audience, it will be a tough nut to crack without spending a lot of money. Remember that 100% share of royalties on 0 streams is still 0$.
In a future article, I will go through this in more detail, but for now, I will briefly present to you one way I’ve seen works the best for independent artists. As previously mentioned, if you are not already friends with someone that gladly wants to promote your songs for free, for example a playlist curator or YouTube channel, then be prepared to spend.
Without a label, the top way I’ve seen to get streams is through Playlist Promotion Services. You are probably aware of some of them already and I will provide to you the ones I believe works the best. Remember that, if you go with this option, you’ll need fantastic high quality music with a clear direction regarding genre and style.
Playlist Curators with large playlists are extremely picky with what they choose to promote. It will be hard to get a positive ROI with this option as the campaigns are costly. While your songs won’t probably never reach the necessary amount of streams in order to gain back your money, if you have great fitting tracks, you will gain a lot of new listeners and organic marketing
Top Playlist Promotion Services
There are different types of Playlist Promotion Services, where the best usually have a match-based platform, where you submit your track and with the help of statistical methods and/or AI, show your track to the best curators for your type of music. While these platforms never guarantee any playlist adds, they guarantee detailed feedback from every curator.
The top Playlist Promotion Services that I’d say are trustworthy are the following:
There are more options, but the listed ones have the best results from my experience.
Conclusion
Why there are a lot more to this, the music market is a tough one to compete within and it’s even tougher for independent artists. If you really believe in your music and you do not want to risk your hard-earned money on any promotion service, you should consider a good label as an option for gaining new fans and music streams. Best of luck on your musical journey!