The Music Industry Podcast
The Music Industry Podcast
What We Look For In An Artist To Make Them Successful as a Music Marketing Company
We take you through everything we look for in an artist knowing that they have something that will allow us to promote their music and take their career to the next level.
Being one of the largest music marketing agencies, we get artists inquiring with us every single day, so we have to be pretty selective with who we choose, from independent artists all the way up to major label artists. We are kind of picky with who we work with, otherwise the working relationship just doesn't work, and these are the main things that we do look for.
Speaker 2:First one I've got written down is having a long-term mindset. Now we talk a lot about long-term strategy and that, to me, is different. I think having a strategy is valuable, but your strategy can change. So something isn't working, then fair enough, you can change your strategy. However, your mindset cannot change, in a sense where if something doesn't work, or having too high expectations from a release and expecting to blow up overnight, then that is more of a short-term strategy. It's understanding that it's not going to happen overnight and that you are going to build on every release, build on every piece of content that you're going to put out. That, for me, is an artist that I know is going to build their fans over a long period of time and therefore have that core foundation to break.
Speaker 1:That patience as well, kind of works hand in hand with loving the process. So a lot of artists may enjoy making music, but only because they want to see the repercussions of that. They want to see fame, they want to see money. However, an artist that is patient and genuinely loves that process because they want to see the repercussions of that, they want to see fame, they want to see money. However, an artist that is patient and genuinely loves that process is so much more likely to succeed because everything they're doing is for the right reason. Plus, from our perspective, it's so much easier to be creative with content, to have a long-term strategy, like you said, in mind, because they're willing to dedicate the time to it.
Speaker 2:And that takes me on nicely to our next point, which is willing to experiment and have it fail.
Speaker 2:So if you put out a piece of content, if you put out a track that maybe isn't quite what your audience is used to seeing and it doesn't work, then it doesn't affect you. You're not scared of that happening. You don't mind if it does happen, you just keep moving forward, keep experimenting with different things, because then you're not scared of that happening, you don't mind if it does happen, you just keep moving forward, keep experimenting with different things, because then you're going to discover what is unique about you, what is unique that you can do. And without doing that, if you just always, always copying what other artists or content creators are doing, then you're always just going to be similar to them or another one of them. So willing to experiment, I think, is holding an artist in good going to be similar to them or another one of them. So willing to experiment, I think, is holding an artist in good stead to be successful, have a track or have a piece of content go viral?
Speaker 1:yeah, there's an artist we've been working with for, like, let's say, eight months now maybe eight months to a year called isaac butler, and he's an artist that came to us with an irish fan base but wanted to break outside of you, outside of break into the UK which is actually more difficult than it sounds for people that aren't based in the UK and he is someone that has been so experimental and if you look at his socials you can see this and he's still experimenting to this day, even though he has over 100k on TikTok, over 25k on Instagram.
Speaker 1:We're throwing ideas at him constantly and he does all of them. So, yes, he might have 10 reels and only six of those are kind of 1 000 to 5 000 views. The other ones are the ones that reach a huge fan base, and that's because he was able to experiment. I think a lot of artists are so scared of that because they don't want to be embarrassed, they don't want friends and family to see them failing, but the idea of experimenting is being able to kind of find what content you enjoy making, find who is gelling with your content and who actually wants to be a fan, and so it's kind of needed mentioning Isaac's give me a good segue actually, to the next point, which is trying to look more established than you actually are.
Speaker 2:And I find that we get a lot of artists hit us up trying to, firstly, I'd say, try and backtrack on their history and try and make up like they've been doing this for years.
Speaker 2:And there are more established artists.
Speaker 2:I think they want to be able to go down to the pub and have a drink with friends and be like, yeah, I've been doing this for years and I've got this, this and this, and they're trying to like rewrite their own history.
Speaker 2:That's never going to happen and it is a, it's a strategy that is just never going to work and help you break as an artist. It's just going to make the drinks that night a little bit more validating for you and that's it. But if your content is something where you are accepting of where you are, just like Isaac did, and he had that reel go viral where he was simply showing a song to his dad and playing it live the first time and it's a small venue and therefore that small venue and the dad being there watching his son play was endearing enough to make that particular piece of content go viral and I think overall, there are just so many assets to an artist when, or advantages to an artist when they know where they are and they're creating content based around it and they have that mindset of exactly where they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you would not believe the amount of artists that just straight up lie to themselves and lie to us.
Speaker 1:They'll come to us being like yeah, I've got like 200 000 monthly listeners, I've got 20k on instagram and we have softwares in place where we can look at where kind of the streams are coming from.
Speaker 1:We can look at the engagement on things and I'd say most of the time they are fake and I don't know if they've kind of lied so much that they believe it themselves, which is kind of sad. But that kind of mindset is so toxic because when you try to do things legitimately, it's going to kill you because you're never going to get the same results. You're not going to have 200 000 monthly listeners if all of those are fake. You probably have like a thousand, if that. So kind of being honest with yourself first and then whoever you want to work with, you have to be honest with them, because they cannot start making a strategy if they don't know what the real numbers are and who the audience are. Because especially if you've got fake streams, if they're coming from random countries, you're going to think, okay, they have fans in this country, we're going to market there even harder, but really they would just fake all along that's a good point.
Speaker 2:Actually, we haven't even got that written down. But I think that is the thing that pisses me off. The most the artists would ever do was try and fake their streams and say they've got, like say they've got a million streams on every track, and they say they want to aim for five million. We put down a strategy together wouldn't think okay, you've got millions of streams on each track, I think that that is a reasonable target. And then you find out they've been faking the whole thing and then putting pressure on you to get five million streams, but they've actually got about a thousand real ones. So going from a thousand streams to five million streams, it's a completely different strategy to a million streams, to five million streams. So yeah, we do have faced that a lot and it's quite difficult.
Speaker 2:So we do vet everything now and make sure that everything has been real up until that point, otherwise it's just. It's just a car crash. Sorry, is that too soon? No, I only just got what you said but, you thought the point was too soon yeah, maddie was in a car crash a few weeks ago rough, bad choice of words. Uh.
Speaker 1:Next point is uh, no long intros, uh see, I feel like we can agree and disagree on this one because I know where you're going with it. Yeah, like for the algorithms perspective yeah, I completely agree.
Speaker 1:If you have like a minute long intro, people are going to skip it. They don't know who you are like. There's that the kind of idea you'll get. Yeah, completely agree. However, I'm also all for the artists being creative with their music, as long as they genuinely believe in it. Like we have had some artists that have slightly longer intros but the tune is such a banger and they do not want to edit that intro any further.
Speaker 1:Fair, like I'm not going to get an artist to completely change their song for the sake of a marketing campaign like I'm not going to get an artist to completely change their song for the safer marketing campaign. However, from a marketing perspective it's just harder and it's when we're looking at music that comes to us. We, we do make note of it and we tell them as well. If we really want to work the project, we will say, like any chance, you can maybe make that intro a little bit shorter cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've said my point and argued with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like my life having conversations with myself literally my life working with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, cool, uh. The next point is, uh, having full trust in us. Uh, in a sense, where if we put forward some ideas, that's because those ideas have been researched. We do have a social media trends pdf that go out to all of our members. They are well researched put together. We know what is going to be viral in a couple of weeks time and therefore, we know information from what works yeah, so therefore, having the trust in us and they've decided to sign and work with us.
Speaker 2:Therefore, that should be a collaborative thing where we can help them and they can work alongside us rather than pushing against us.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, it's difficult because, at the end of the day, an artist is paying for a marketing campaign, so it's kind of seen as, like you work for me, which I get, you've handed over a lot of money. But that's also another reason to really listen, because you've hired these people as experts, like we do this day in, day out. So being able to take on the criticism and work alongside us is so important, because the minute you see it as you're being like personally criticized, the minute you're not really taking on these ideas, it's kind of a waste of your money you're paying us to criticize you as well like.
Speaker 2:We're not going to lick your ass just because you've given us money. We're there to find out what you are doing wrong and why you haven't progressed, so you should be happy to take the criticism yeah, I think we had a consultancy call with one of our members probably a couple months ago and we did exactly that.
Speaker 1:We kind of just spent like half an hour just criticizing him and at the end we were like this isn't a personal attack and he's like no, I literally paid you guys for this like this is what I want. And you should see it like that, because if we're not criticizing you and we're just saying that's great, that's great, that's great, you're never going to grow, because otherwise you wouldn't be hiring us in the first place.
Speaker 2:Next point is being romantic about how you're going to break and sticking with that. So say the next TikTok comes along. And if you remember when TikTok first came along and musically it was all dance routines it was just like girls in skimpy clothing dancing around and everyone was saying you've got to get on this app because artists are going to break from this, et cetera, and it was cringe.
Speaker 2:And now artists are trying to break on TikTok. So therefore you have to not be romantic on how you're going to break, because the chances are in your head how other artists have broken. That's actually moved on now and it's not fashionable.
Speaker 2:So you're not going to break by suddenly having a radio dj pick up your track and having you on track of the day for the entire week and then suddenly everybody knows about you. That's not going to happen anymore. Therefore, don't try to push for that and then push back against whatever is trending, what the next thing is, just because in your head you don't really want to tell your friends or you don't want to live a career where you broke from tiktok or whatever you think is cringe at the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I literally put this on the burst of my instagram story the other day, um, and it was. It was something along the lines of like if you're not embarrassed, you're not doing it right and that's because all of the things that have broken an artist like look, all these legacy artists.
Speaker 1:Like elvis presley was hip thrusting so much that tv wanted to ban him they would film him from, like, the waist up. Um queen had bohemian rhapsody, which everyone declined and said it's way too long. It's way too long. They released it anyway, which is kind of the link to like the intro thing. Like, if you want to do something different, just do it, because if you find it a bit embarrassing, it's probably because you're breaking the norm which is how you are going to make a name for yourself and that's what we fully support. Like we want to get behind artists that just want to experiment and do some crazy stuff, because you're so much more likely to get an audience that way. That's how you stand out.
Speaker 2:I knows what a good aesthetic looks like, and I put this one in because it's very difficult to work with an artist. Yes, we've got graphic designers. Yes, we've got video editors who can put together an aesthetic, but we can't consistently do it for an entire artist's career. You need to know you can do it, but you are a huge advantage by knowing what looks good, what's going to look good on your feed if you need to do a video, what's going to look good, what you're going to wear for your aesthetic, and therefore it cuts out a lot of the work because you already know what looks good.
Speaker 1:So having a ready-made aesthetic or you already know what is looking good, therefore you create better things going forward is just an immense asset for an artist final point is isn't too similar to a big artist, and this one is very difficult because there's so many tracks out there, however, like whether that's sound, whether that's aesthetic, whether that's message, whether that's brand something just a little bit different for us to be able to like, cling on to and use as part of the marketing campaign.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's so difficult, but we've got an artist at the moment really incredible music, kind of an indie artist. However, how many indie artists are out there? He, as a hobby, is an acapella in an acapella group. That is like such a unique little thing that we've been able to use as part of the marketing campaign and all of our artists. We look for something which is unique and that can be the music, but so often now it's not because there's so much music out there. So, having something which means you're not just a copy paste of all the other artists, whether that's in content, whether that's with brand, aesthetic, the music, we've just got to find something a little bit different yeah, and I don't mind if you sound like an artist from the 70s, 80s, 90s, that's OK.
Speaker 2:I mean, sam Fender essentially sounds like Brian, is it Brian Adams he gets compared to? So that's OK. It's if, say, harry Styles has got a new album out and everyone's listened to it and you're an artist who kind of sounds like Harry Styles, it's going to make it very difficult, but artists often think that's going to be an asset for them because everyone's listening to this style of music. Therefore they want more of it. That's not true. In the long term you're just going to end up as kind of a Harry Styles from Wish.
Speaker 1:What's really funny is I put money on it. The comments will be flooded with people like oh, have you listened to the charts? They are all copy and paste, but the thing is they weren't, and that's how they broke. So, for example, justin bieber like the swish, the swishy haircut he had and the way he dressed with his hoodie and the purple cap, and the way he sung on youtube. Like he sung on youtube, people didn't do that then. So that's how he broke.
Speaker 1:Like ed sheeran he was the normal guy, like the normal ginger guy, and he like rapped. With example, he like did some youtube videos there. Like that was the normal guy, like the normal ginger guy, and he like rapped. With example, he like did some YouTube videos there. Like that was unique. He had like rap in his singer songwriter music. Like these artists yes, you might think they sound all the same now, but when they broke they found something that made them unique. So in this stage of most artists career, like the really early stages, they just have to find what that one thing is absolutely, totally agree.
Speaker 2:Um, happy to end it there. Yeah, happy to end it.
Speaker 1:See us out yeah well, thank you so much for watching or listening. If you're listening on podcast platforms, make sure to subscribe, if you haven't already, and we will see you in the next one.