Before we get started, this is part 2 of a music marketing series. You might want to take a look at the first part about building a community around your music.
Make Music You Enjoy & Make It Great
When I say great, I don’t necessarily mean the production, I mean the songs, arrangement and performances themselves. A great song and arrangement recorded with mediocre equipment will always trump an ordinary song with mediocre arrangement recorded great.
Need an example, The Beatles recorded with what is incredibly lo-fi equipment by today’s standards yet the writing and arranging stands the test of time. Need a modern example? Bon Iver’s Grammy winning first album was recorded with equipment that probably cost less than $1,000 USD.
Make Music For Your Audience
If you are trying to build a career in music, I am a strong advocate for making music you enjoy first. It’ll be authentic and will sustain you far more than any of the other perks on the journey gathering your community.
At the same time I also think it’s important to consider the people who you want to gather into your community. This includes recognising that your music isn’t for everyone but those it is for you need to consider when writing and arranging. This probably means some editing and massaging to make sure your music is accessible to your community.
I’d even go as far as saying that if you’re building a community, with the view to having a career in music, that the music you should be making should place more emphasis on appealing to your audience at first. This will help you to build the community at first. Sort of like having some good signature burgers people love before introducing that weird omelette burger that you’ve been wanting people to try …
You’ll Probably Need To Work At It
Some people seem to have a knack for writing accessible songs right out of the gate. Sometimes their very approach to writing lends itself to songs that are more accessible. Others, myself included, need to work at mixing our idiosyncrasies with accessibility.
I’m not talking about selling out or compromising your vision, I’m talking about the realisation that the more obscure you make your music, the more challenging it will be to build a community. BUT if you focus on accessibility for your music for the people you want to engage with you can build a community that will then follow you later if you decide to get a little weird.
It can be a tricky balance working out which bits of weird to keep and which bits don’t need to be there. I don’t have a definitive answer about how to write accessible music and it varies greatly from genre to genre. I’ve shared songwriting tips from hit songwriters before and these concepts can be adapted to the genre you’re working in to create more accessible songs.
Things Have Changed
If you’re into podcasts, they are the modern equivalent to waiting for the next episode of your TV show every Wednesday evening. Due to the way music is consumed, your music is like your next podcast episode. You need to release regularly (every 2 – 3 weeks) as you’re building your community.
For better or worse, things have changed when it comes to releasing music. If you’re an emerging artist wanting to make a career in music, releasing an album isn’t a viable way of building a community.
Release a song, make the song visible through social media, then release the next song and repeat the process. It works.
(Side note, if you’re reading this and don’t want a career in music, you can disregard the above. If you’re just starting out or just enjoy making music for fun and not really worried about who hears it, this advice isn’t for you)
49,000 Songs Per Day
Yep, that’s how many songs are uploaded to streaming platforms on average every day. There’s a lot of people (and AIs) busy making music.
Now before you despair are that figure you need to consider that not all of those songs are competing for your communities attention. Also, probably only about 5 – 10% of those songs will get any significant promotion. BUT the key takeaway is your song needs to stand up with the best of them in your genre so your songwriting and arranging needs to be in focus.
Write Frequently So You Can Release More
Developing a songwriting habit is something I have written extensively about. I’ve even created a 10 week mini-course to help songwriters build a habit so they can write and release more songs.
The point of writing more is so that you improve your songwriting chops through consistent practice AND also have more music to release. The release part is important. This is where you get feedback. You don’t have to release a whole song, sharing some of you work is a great way to get feedback as well as grow your visibility as an artist/band (more on that later).
Remove Obscurity
I’ve worked with many talented artists over the years and the 2 consistent issues I find when mixing reasonable songs compared to great songs are the writing and arrangement.
Often it can be simple things like tightening up the structure, removing vocal or instrumental parts that are obscuring the gold, adding some more support from vocals or instruments which brings out the gold etc. Getting great performances help a lot too.
These are things that can be fixed relatively easily. The tricky part when you’re writing and recording yourself is being able to see the bits that are obscuring the gold. This is generally the job of a music producer or a talented recording engineer but with so many people writing and recording themselves, this aspect of the process can be lacking.
Key Takeaways
We’ll wrap it up there for the moment. To recap these are the key takeaways:
- Make music you love, keeping your audience in mind especially as you’re building your community.
- Write consistently to improve your songs. Develop a songwriting habit.
- Release consistently to get feedback on your music.
If you’re releasing music but finding it hard to find traction. The next post is going to help.
0 Comments