Use These Free Tools to Discover Your Music’s Niche

There’s Lettuce In The Dishwasher?

Imagine walking into a supermarket and finding the dishwashing tablets alongside the fresh lettuce. And then next to the dishwashing tablets were some rolls of toilet paper. It’d be weird. You’d be weirded out. You might just walk out of the shop and not buy anything.

When it comes to buying our groceries, clothes, electrical appliances etc we appreciate when the decision making process is made easier by laying out the store in a way that makes what you’re looking for simple to find.

Providing genre and influencing artist information does the same for people trying to find music they like.

Genre & Influences

For some artists, asking them what genre their music is or who their influences are can be like asking them to nail jelly to a tree. Far from putting your music in a box, genres and influences are helpful data points to help you market your music to the right people.

Sure you can ask some people what genre your music is and who it sounds like. This is definitely worth doing. But having some tools that are data driven can be helpful as well as yielding some interesting results.

What Genre Is My Song?

This tricky little question has become a little easier to answer in recent years. In this case, AI is here to help (contrary to some popular opinions). 

There is a great little tool tucked away in a platform used for playlist and music blog submission. You may have heard of it – Submit Hub. Regardless of your opinions or experiences with Submit Hub, they actually provide some helpful resources for musicians for free.

The “What’s My Genre” tool allows you to paste the URL of your song from Soundcloud, YouTube, Disco or Spotify. The tool analyses your music and compares it to 400 genres identified on Discogs.com. Using AI developed by the Music Technology Group it will give you an output of 5 different genres by percentage that your song fits into.

Using myself as a guinea pig I put in “NYC Northbound” by Doxkyn. 

I think it’s safe to say that this track fits snuggly into the Synthwave genre. The tool also gives you a list of curators that feature your particular genre too. Now that is handy. 

Which Artists Do You Sound Like?

Discovering your own unique sound is important as an artist but it’s also helpful to know where your music sits in the musical landscape. Identifying artists who sound similar to you can give you valuable insights into your genre, target audience, and potential collaborators.

One free tool that can help you uncover these soundalike artists is the Chosic playlist generator. Here’s how it works:

1. Start with Your Music: Head to the Chosic website or app and enter one of your original songs. You can also try entering a playlist of your music to get a broader analysis.
2. Discover Soundalikes: Chosic will analyze your music and generate a playlist of similar artists. This playlist will often include both well-known and up-and-coming artists who share sonic similarities with your work.
3. Explore and Compare: Take some time to listen to the artists on your Chosic playlist. Pay attention to the genres they’re classified in, the instruments they use, their vocal styles, and the overall mood of their music. This can help you pinpoint specific sonic elements that you might want to incorporate into your own work or areas where you can differentiate yourself.
4. Use Your Findings: Knowing your soundalike artists can inform your marketing efforts, help you target the right audience, and even guide your decisions about which artists to collaborate with. You can also use this information to refine your genre descriptions on streaming platforms and social media.

Remember that Chosic is just a tool, and your soundalike artists are just starting points.

More Similar Artists

This next tool is just fun and you can discover some new music you might like in the process. The Music-Map is a project by GNOD (Global Network Of Discovery). They do a bunch of AI driven tools which are a lot of fun to use. 

The Music-Map is a visual representation of a main artist and then artists that other people who like this artist. Here’s what it looks like when I search for Com Truise:

I know Doxkyn’s tracks have some Com Truise vibes and people who like Com Truise also like Doxkyn. I also discovered “Gunship” through looking for music fans of Com Truise like. They’ve got some great music if you’re down for some authentic 80s retrowave jams.

The Music-Map helps to uncover a lot of fascinating musical associations as well as being a helpful tool to focus your own marketing.

So How Can We Use This Data?

Pitching To Playlists

If you’re submitting to a playlist it can be helpful to have an unbiased opinion of what genre your song fits into and what other artists you might work in a playlist with.

Playlist Creation

If you’re trying to get your own music heard you can create playlists of similar popular artists and put yourself in the mix. 

This is actually a classic radio technique called “sandwiching” or “clustering” which Charles Duhugg relates in his book “The Power Of Habit”. 

Radio programmers noticed that listeners tended to change the station when unfamiliar songs played. To combat this, they began placing new songs between two popular hits. The familiar songs acted as a hook, keeping listeners tuned in long enough to hear the new song. Over time, repeated exposure to the new song within this positive context could lead to listeners enjoying and even requesting it. This strategy helped radio stations introduce new music to their audience and shape their preferences.

Press Releases

If you’ve ever written about your music you know it can be like grasping at water. Having some idea of genre and influences can not only help you in formulating a press release, they can be helpful to connect your music verbally with media contacts you’re reaching out to. 

This gives reviewers, bloggers, playlist curators etc. reference points for your music to pique their interest.

Paid Ads

Paid advertising has been a mainstay of music marketing and it works. Knowing the genre your music fits into and understanding similar artists can greatly help you target your ads to the right people. 

I’ve run the same ad to audiences who like different artists and the difference in engagement can vary dramatically for the exact same song.

This post isn’t really the place to go deeply into this aspect of strategy so I’ll leave it for another post.

Social Media Strategy

This is another deep well of ways that genre and soundalike artists can be used to inform your social media strategy. Here are some ideas but this could be its own post:

• Hashtag ideas
• Song covers in the same genre or complimentary genres. You can have a lot of fun with this.
• Engaging with people on sound alike artist social media channels (without being spammy)
• Collaborations (best to reach out to those who have similar or slightly larger followings as a rule of thumb)
• Behind the scenes video
• Genre-specific content: What are the peripheral things that people who like your genre of music enjoy. For example, I make synth jam videos for my Doxkyn socials because people who enjoy synthwave enjoy synths and the songwriting process.

The Takeaway

Hopefully you see how useful the free tools above can be in giving you actionable insights. Really genres and sounding like other artists should box you in, what it should do is help you find how you fit uniquely into the musical landscape.

All the best with your music making.