This doc aims to become an introduction to ways for artists and their music to be discovered by people out there. The goal here is to get more people aware of your music, more listeners, and more fans.
Eventually more listeners might turn into more income, but we discuss income strategies in another doc. We also don’t explain where to publish your music, which should be covered in a separate doc.
How your music is discovered
(((Just aiming to identify the areas. Each point to be developed with a short description and a dedicated page.)))
These are ways how your music may find its way without your direct intervention.
Metadata - description, genre, bpm, hashtags, license… Make it easy for shops, search engines, social media boosters, playlist makers, curators…
Playlists, compilations…
(Online) music radios and podcasts
How you are discovered
But really, your music will be better discovered when you are involved as an artist or a band. When you are the one(s) being discovered.
Website
Social media - (a sane approach to)
Fanbase - (clearly a page on its own)
Closest scene(s) - being active in your local scene and/or your genre.
I started the draft above, certainly not with the aim to transform music. But does it help getting to where you want to get at, @Mel. I don’t know much, and this first draft just aims to be a proof of concept, hopefully encouraging those of you who really know to edit it further and create dedicated pages as needed.
I think we are in unknown territory, tbh. No-one, not even major labels, know how to “break a new artist” () if the DSPs (read: Spotify) don’t support them. Or if they don’t go randomly viral on TikTok or whatever.
Source: talking to the music industry over the last 10 years, including people at major labels.
Therefore, I think we need to nourish our parallel DIY music scenes, and help artists on the Fediverse to reach more people.
How do we do that? That’s what we are in the process of finding out! Completely new ground. I am hopeful.
Not sure if a “knowledge base article” is the best place for some incomplete side thoughts by me, but here I am
Just to underscore this:
I’m currently reading “A People’s Guide to Publishing” by Joe Biel because I’m 100% at capacity but the way my brain works is like “I could totally start a publishing business” (I can’t). Anyways, it’s a pretty useful book I think, and it also deals a lot with discovery. It emphasizes that there are 500 books published every hour, and that it’s the role of the publisher to make their author’s book succeed. The book also advocates against self publishing unless what you’re doing is a vanity project, primarily because a publisher helps you determine if it’s worth the effort to put in the time and money to make the book (granted there is a bias here considering the author).
That number, I’m sure, is much larger for music. I’ve had some good conversations with label owners over the past year, and the majority of label runners I think see their role in a similar way. I think there’s a tendency to equate labels with majors, but that’s certainly not true for small labels, collectives etc. There’s a lot curatorial going on, and this is the same for music blogs, etc.
I’m wondering if it’s useful to have a conversation about “why discovery matters.” Is the aim to get listened to by more people, or is it to be able to make time to make your art? I’m genuinely curious what people’s reaction to that is (and if they have responded to similar questions elsewhere I’d love to read it).
IDK, but labels, no matter how small, seem to be no more rapacious than large labels. I prefer to do my own insignificant marketing, rather than be subjected to a label’s interference with my artistic direction. After all, just on some of the DSPs and social media, I have almost 11,000 followers and I’ve gotten 1.25 million impressions in less than 5 years. (Impressions are streams or track and album purchases).
Promotion strategy : Collaboration
Play with other musicians, talk to them, meet up with people who like what you do, who play in the same small genre, make split records, featurings, side-projects, cross-promotions, share dates and tours together, help with a broken instrument, be generally helpful and kind and people will remember you for that and… freely promote your material and help you in return !
This mays sound like not much but if you look closely there is certainly some artists who had a wonderful music life while never becoming well-known. I’m thinking of song-writers, composers, beatmakers, people who have been part of bigger projects, but never (or seldom) the center of it.
Or maybe promotion is only aimed at making what you do known to the public, and not making your stand in the long run ? I don’t know, when i read promotion advice some of it sounds a lot like one-time spotlights that make you shine for a brief, very brief moment, but not much i said about how to stand in the long run.
Currently finishing one of the longer album projects and thinking about the topic of outreach and promotion. For years I’ve been doing Soundcloud + Bandcamp routine and now thinking about cancelling my paid tier in Soundcloud and considering other options. A friendly person here suggested Mirlo but after few tries I’m still not able to register, so I guess that’s not a viable option. That’s the problem with these new services labeled as fair and musicians friendly etc. These systems need to work as well as their “non-friendly” alternatives.
(And even if they eventually do work, at the end of the day, it’s probably just another platform with just another company behind it and just another CEO with an exit plan. I know nothing about these ppl and I’m probably very unfair in my assumptions but I do remember the time when google was the good guys.)
Earlier, KristofferLislegaard mentioned Jon Makes/Talks Beats suggestion that every musician should be in Utube and while it’s probably a good idea, it’s massively underestimating the workload involved with regular video uploading schedule. It sure helps if you have an editor, but it’s a pain if not. It’s probably possible for every musician to eventually become a utuber but will we still have time to make music?
One of the less involved alternatives seems to be live streaming. For me it looks more as a musician friendly option (this is actually what Jon is mostly doing), however this is even more platform specific activity with only few major hosting platforms. I was exited few years ago when Bandcamp started their own live streaming service but then they were sold and sold again and not sure what happened with that.
In their vid Jon also mentions the typical record-label social media approach to massivieley repost anything to death and I have to agree it’s not the most effective. I presume it’s only the bot farms who are reading these posts. I see some artists trying to do the same with their artist (or even worse - personal) account and it’s even more useless because ppl will just mute this annoying noise.
Not sure where it leads me. I have an increasing urge to fully disconnect from the social media and for the last few years I’ve been developing a simple static homepage for my music to live in. So far this works well as an archiving tool but not as a promotional tool.
I agree with you about livestreaming. We have a good ecosystem here with Peertube and Owncast to livestream on the Fediverse. There’s a bunch of streams happening in July. We have a community calendar on https://cal.gravitons.org if you wanna take a look or get involved as a streamer. Happy to give you a stream key for https://stream.gravitons.org if you want to try it out!
I also think your style would go down great with the Golden Shrimp Guild. They organise regular Twitch events, we tend to get a lot of people watching: https://gsg.live/
Hoping to eventually have more GSG events on the Fediverse too.
thank you @Roberta and @Mel for solid suggestions, you are far too kind. Seems like Mirlo is also working for me now, so I stand corrected about this option (thank you @simon for sorting things out for me).
I missed this, wow. That website has been around for so long and just now finding out about it. Same deal with Kunaki. I love finding old things. dodiy.org feels aligned with https://beyourownplatform.site/ (BTW thank you @prinlu I love this, it’s been fueling a lot of my thinking lately)
Promotion and discoverability do feel at odds with federation and decentralization. The Web broke something, now it’s expected to be able to see everything globally. Or maybe it was already broken by the recording industry. Every one of us only has so much attention to give, and so many possible things to give it to. I think Step 1 of addressing discoverability is setting expectations for what discoverability means and what artists are really trying to do. We are so used to being endlessly spoonfed by corporate platforms that we don’t even know what we want.
But does it help getting to where you want to get at, 
) if the DSPs (read: Spotify) don’t support them. Or if they don’t go randomly viral on TikTok or whatever.
