Press and Promotion

10 Ways to Avoid the Void and Find Your Fans

Over 20,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day. But there are thousands more music listeners waiting to discover their next favorite artist.

Here are 10 tips to find your fans, both online and in your community, and make a splash in everything you do: releases, concerts, merch drops and more.

1. Make a strong release plan with plenty of lead time

Most artists wait too long to start building hype around their release. We recommend beginning promotion 4-8 weeks from your release — that’s in addition to a 2-3 month lead-time for your release itself. Plan a mix of social posts, studio clips, pre-save links, press release sends, and other auxiliary assets that create a story and build anticipation. 

You can refine your promotion by assessing your current audience, identifying your goals, and taking stock of content creation opportunities and prompts. Spotify for Artists has analytics that provide insights into your audience. Make a list of ways to reach your audience (channels, topics that resonate, and content comfort areas), then create a content plan for your release.

2. Define your ideal fan

No matter where you are in your career, start to take note of who resonates with your music. Whether you’re on an international tour or just playing your first show, marketing your music to “everyone” is incredibly difficult and sets many musicians up to fail. By targeting your promotion to your ideal audience, you’re more likely to find open ears. 

Defining your fans can be a different process depending on your career stage. An established artist might have access to a wealth of analytics and a team to help leverage them. For a newer artist, this process might entail looking inward. Target your marketing around your genre, aesthetic, comparable artists, and your scene/community (local or global). Getting smarter with your marketing can save you valuable time and ensure your efforts pay off.

3. Meet your fans where they are

Attend shows in your scene, build relationships with local musicians and industry workers, and organize events of your own to engage your audience. All these activities present opportunities to grow your target audience and organically develop a fanbase. Meanwhile, keep tabs on where you’re seeing engagement online and double down on successful platforms. See where your audience is willing to meet you. 

Two golden rules to consider. First, presence matters more than perfection. Providing potential fans with the opportunity to experience your music and meet you will always be valuable to your career – don’t get lost in the pursuit of perfection. Second, you must engage an audience before promoting to them. Prime your audience ahead of blasting them with promotional content by documenting your time in the studio, capturing live shows, and building up a story around your release.

4. Seek out co-promotion opportunities

Some of the most powerful promotional techniques are collaborative. Adjacent artists in your scene can help by sharing your songs to their audience via social media or artist playlists. Tastemakers can help by putting your songs on their most popular playlists. Other creative ideas include co-hosting Instagram live Q+As, doing remix swaps, or collaborating with a local businesses on a limited edition version of their product with your branding!

5. Don’t just post, create moments

If posting to social media begins to feel tedious or aimless, consider whether your content is enriching your artist story. There’s a good chance that you’re passing up valuable storytelling opportunities if you’re only chasing trends or making promotional content. You can grow your online community and gain passionate followers by documenting special moments, revealing more about your artistic journey, or offering behind-the-scenes looks. An overall guiding framework is to think in sharable experiences.

6. Build a home base you can control (more than socials)

Your social media is a platform for fan acquisition and engagement, but you need a home base for your audience—a space you control. Whether that’s a website, landing page, or email list, build a tool that allows direct access to your fans, on your own schedule.

If you feel that’s ahead of your current stage, your home base can be physical as well. Do you have a residency at a local bar, run a house venue, or routinely meet up with friends in your scene at “the spot?” Lean on those places to help get the word out. In addition to flyering there and spreading the word, consider hosting a release party or artist mixer night to build community around your release.

7. Experiment with targeted ads to test and scale

If you’re sitting on some funds from gigs or merch sales and you’re looking to invest more in your marketing, paid ads are a great place to start. Begin with testing $20-50 on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube and leverage the available targeting filters. Ad content can range but some great starter ideas include snippets of upcoming songs, music videos, or footage from a live show. Think through your call to action – you can drive viewers to your social media pages, a ticket landing page, a song pre-save link, and more!

8. Harness the power of short-form video

Short-form video has become the predominant form of sharable, bite-sized content in today’s social media landscape. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts can distribute attention-grabbing, authentic content, making them ideal for sharing everything from lyric videos to song breakdowns and live performances.

Creating this content is easier than ever, too. You don’t need expensive equipment or fancy editing tools. With a smartphone or camera and the native video editing tools on many platforms, you can instantly create content that offers a glimpse into your artistic or candid world. Getting started can be difficult, but don’t aim for perfection. Begin threading video in as a variant to posts you’re already making—merch drops, show promotion, song teaser clips, and interviews.

9. Consider your fan’s journey

How did you discover your favorite bands and how has your relationship with them evolved over time? Perhaps you caught them opening for another band you love or your favorite streaming platform made an astute recommendation and you were instantly hooked. From there, how did you engage further with the band? Maybe you checked for upcoming tour dates, caught their next local show and bought merch, then signed up for their email list to stay up to date on the band’s latest.

That’s an example of an ideal fan journey. Now assess whether you have the touch points available for fans to navigate a similar pathway with your work. Orient your online footprint through the lens of a journey – from a fan catching a snippet of your song on their daily scroll or the fan that stops by the merch table after a show, consider how you’re going to retain them.

10. Engage fans between releases

Make the most of your time between releases. In the leadup to your release, be mindful of capturing content to post for the future. Record moments on tour, journal about the process of writing a standout song, and make a habit of following up with journalists in the wake of a release for delayed coverage. Taking an artistic approach in the storytelling and presentation of even your most mundane songwriting aspects can serve as entry points for new fans. A few ideas on how to engage fans between releases:

• Update your artist playlists on Spotify

• Hold an AMA on your social media or with a relevant Reddit community!

• Collaborate with other publications or artists to produce a mixtape or host a conversation about your creative process

• Drop a b-side or remixed version of a previously released track

• Record a previously released song in a different arrangement

In conclusion

Consider these tips as focal points for improvement throughout your career. Not only will you gain more experience to approach each of these aspects, your fans will change, as will ways of reaching them.