The artist is nothing without the fans

There is no shortcut in acquiring fans. It might seem tempting to play the numbers game and buy those fake Facebook followers, but that number does not convert into anything. Those fake followers will not pay to see you perform live, those fake followers will not buy your albums, or stream your music on Spotify.

Your value as an artist is directly related to having quality fans. So many of us are stuck in the mentality that it is the promoters job to fill the venue. But ask your self this, if the promoter has a list of bands that will fill the venue by just announcing the gig, why would they book someone who will take a lot of hard work to barely break even?

When you have quality fans, you as an artist have value, it is as simple as that. Once you can fill venues, the people in the business will become interested in you. So when you start a new project in music, you need to dedicate some time to build a fan base. This will take time, there are no short cuts. But as long as you have quality recordings of good quality music, with a bit of clever grass root market this can be done.

And as I and so many other music marketing experts have repeated so many times, your email list is the key to doing this. You use social media to start a conversation, share some interesting content and get them interested in you, then get them to sign-up to your email list in exchange of some free content. And the same thing in the live shows, collect people’s email addresses.

That is in the nutshell what you need to do all the time. Make it a part of your job. I know it feels like a lot of work for a very little payback, but a year down the road you will see a real difference.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE