As we enter the ‘fast fashion’ phase of streaming, artists are throwing an awful lot of musical spaghetti at the wall in hopes that some will stick long enough to catch a ride to the top of the charts. Here we pop open the music marketer’s toolbox and explore over a hundred resources designed to help increase these chances.
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Guest post by Amber Horsburgh, VP Strategy at Downtown Records.
The Spotification of releases means we’re working in the fast fashion era of music – where artists are throwing new music up every single Friday in the hopes that playlisting will super-surge it to a hit, and if it doesn’t then they move on to the next one.
Gone are the marketing days of comfortable lead times and planning.
Enter the music marketer’s toolbox – a collection of 100+ resources to save you time and get ahead now in the fast-fashion of music.
This is part of my email series, Deep Cuts that focuses on strategy, resource sharing, and campaign deep dives. If you’d like access to the full toolbox, subscribe!
Here is my choice of 10 tools to use right now if you’re not already.
- Spoton Track (analytics)
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For when you want to see the Spotify playlists your track or others are currently and previously in, Spoton Track is great. Seeing the placement of competing tracks gives you a way to benchmark releases based on the growth of competitive tracks, as well as monitor its own performance upon release. Spoton track is essential for creating a KPI framework for Spotify.
- LinkTree (analytics)
- A simple tool that lets you add more links to Instagram bios by essentially creating a microsite within the link. This is useful for promoting multiple buy/stream links (iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, SoundCloud etc) without giving preference to one outlet.
- WAVO (advertising)
- WAVO makes media buying and planning easy and effective. This is definitely one of the best places to park media dollars when promoting videos and singles. Before I used WAVO, I would spend generously directly on platforms like Facebook, YouTube but what WAVO offers that the others don’t (unless you’re really sophisticated at targeting) is advertising to a music audience. It places content across its own network of music blogs as well as handling retargeting campaigns across YouTube, Facebook, etc, and splices budgets accordingly.
- Spotify Adstudio (advertising)
- A self-service media buying tool to promote tracks and tours on the free tier of Spotify via :15 and :30 sec audio ads. The minimum media buy is $500 and targeting is very limited to only genre, your own following (for the top 5,000 artists on platform) and playlists, but a start for Spotify’s ad-platform nonetheless.
- StudioCDN (productivity)
- The safest way to send unreleased music to partners without risk of leaks.
- Grammarly (productivity)
- This is an absolute savior for folks like me that adds commas at any chance I get. Grammarly is a
google chrome extension that provides spell and grammar check for copy written across the web. So if you’re a copywriter handling tweets, status updates, email, blog posts Grammarly keeps you not looking like an idiot.
- Show.co (promotion)
- Provides a social unlock mechanic for campaigns, which is a tried and true method for stoking sharing and growing lists through exclusive content. It’s sales-ey but with a little creativity, it can be very effective.
- POP Bots (social media)
- A messenger bot for Facebook product focused on servicing the music industry
- IFPI (research)
- Provides the state of the music industry every year in a white paper. It’s pretty dense so a good internal project can be to summarize the key bullets and present in a company wide meeting.
- YouTube Space (content)
- YouTube has a few studios dotted around the world that gives creators studio space to shoot and edit videos in for free (!!@#$!!) You can do elaborate music video shoots, livestreams, or simple performances here. It is only available for artists with more than 10,000 subscribers and the studios are in NYC, LA, Berlin, London, Mumbai, Paris, Toronto, Rio and Sao Paulo so if you’re passing through any of those towns on tour and need a video shoot then add it to the itinerary.
For more strategy, subscribe to Deep Cuts and follow Amber at @amberhorsburgh.