We Graded 12 Music Marketing Strategies (What Actually Works in 2026)

Today we are ranking 12 of the most common music marketing strategies that independent artists are using. We're gonna figure out what's actually working, what's not working, what's worth it. And we have interviewed over 250 people that are doing this like all the time. Like these are the authorities on what's working when it comes to music marketing. So we have like some kind of little opinions. I think we've learned some things, right? Well, I mean, I think they would all acknowledge the fact that no one really knows. Kind of true. If if everyone knew what was actually working, they would just spend all the money there and then they would call it a day. And it's very artist dependent. We probably do need to make that disclaimer. Like everyone's artist journey is different. There's yeah, so that's the self-awareness uh thing we've been doing. Everyone's journey is different, and you need to be very clear and very self-aware. That is the buzzword that we keep going back to because it is so important as to what it is you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are, and that's gonna determine where these kind of rank for you. But we're just gonna both give our opinions, hopefully land on a rank between S all the way down to D.

And let's just jump right into it, I think, right? Without further ado. First up, going with number 12. I was told that if we go in reverse order, there's like a retention thing. They're not in order. We're ranking the yeah, they're not in like a ranking order, but like makes no sense. People will stick around if we start with 12 because they're like, ooh, what's one? They're not gonna stick around. Trust me, trust me. Let's look starting with number 12. We're talking about playlisting campaigns. We're talking about shelling out some shekels, right? For those sweet, sweet editorials, algorithmic, whatever, fan-made, curated. There's playlisting services. We've even had uh the CEO of one of the biggest ones on the podcast before. So, what are your initial thoughts on paying for playlist placements? I don't, love it, man. You're not hot. I'm going to be honest. I don't love it, I think that I've had too many artist friends spend a lot of money, and I don't think it's really shade to the playlisting services, right?

I think they're doing uh the best job that they can. Uh, but we don't what I'm more bullish on, other than like using a playlisting service to obviously submit your music to curators that run these playlists. A lot of music marketing people have now been coming up with the approach of create your own playlist. Like, why pay to pitch to get on someone else's playlist when you can in fact build your own playlist that you curate, right? That you name, that you, you know, mix your own music in amongst other artists. That you want to be algorithmically related to. Exactly, right? So I'm way more bullish on that than I am like the traditional form of like playlisting as a strategy, uh, just because I mean, we've done it, right? With our artist friends. We've we've spent hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars. Not been great. And it just the results that you see. I mean, you know, you get rejected from certain playlists, they don't give you any feedback, you get accepted, you don't really see a huge pop. You don't know if the pop is legit. I know these playlisting services are trying to do everything they can to make sure that any playlist that's on their platform is legit, but it's just tough to tell like what the impact is, man.

So I don't know. I'm I'm going straight to D, to be honest. To the bottom. I mean, that's okay with it. Yeah, this is number 12, and it should be actually this might be in order now. I would like to say that there are I have heard of this working for a lot of artists. I think it depends a lot on many factors. I have. It's more rare than it not working. Okay. But I think a lot of it comes down to like your pitch, right? You need to have like a firm grasp on what your music sounds like, which type of playlist it should fit on, right? Really understanding the playlist you're pitching to. I think a lot of people screw up their pitch. Then there's that's a real thing. You know, you're not gonna get accepted to a playlist that you don't fit on. Or the targeting, like you said. Or your music isn't even good and you just don't know it. Okay, well. You know what I mean? There's like lots of reasons you might get rejected. Um, so I would like to see better feedback. Some of the feedback on some of the platforms are better than others, but yeah, there's just been so many misses, it's hard to bring this one super high. I I would say a C though. Could you meet me at a C? Ah, damn it.

Fine. Let's go. We're going with C for playlist campaigns. Moving right along to number 11. This is the tried and true. This is the old school. This is the we need our music to get heard. Let's just sign with a label, baby. Let's just put pen to paper and sign. It's not what I would have ever thought of as a marketing strategy. But I mean, I I get what you're saying. Why your music heard, I mean, that's what labels do. Yeah, I mean, I think really the benefits of doing so, right, is really if you need the support that a label can provide, right? When we talked about like some of these work for some artists and not for others, this might be the biggest one of those. This is probably the one that requires a lot of self-awareness. They all do, but this one might be the most. Yeah. Um, I think that when it comes to marketing your music, um, either you need to be extremely proficient in it yourself or your team does, or you need to have the money to hire a company that is proficient in marketing music, right? If you cannot do either of those things, right, then I do think that's when kind of a label type of situation makes sense for marketing support alone. I don't want to unpack the whole other things that a label may or may not provide, right?

Uh, but as far as marketing goes, because that's what we're talking about here. Um, I think if you if you have the conversation with yourself around whether you and your team can do this type of stuff yourself, or whether you have the bag to invest in a third party to do it for you so that you can still retain your you know ownership and you don't need to break off a label then I think I would I would suggest doing those two things but I'm also not anti-label bro. We're not anti-label here I know it's controversial. Yeah we're not anti-label. No there's a lot of reasons why it makes sense. It's a lot of super dope labels. There's great labels. Like everyone loves to just think of the labels as like the big bad like well there's shitty labels. There are a lot of shitty labels Out here scamming artists giving bad deals on purpose. For sure but to meet their bottom line that's real too but there's a lot of really dope labels that are still doing a lot of really dope artist development that are still doing a lot of really dope digital marketing. So yeah man I don't know I'm I'm honestly like leaning towards like an A on this bro like really I don't hate signing to again like I don't hate it either. Again like the right label and the right artist right but I mean I don't know A, B I don't want to sit here and slide it to the other side of the scale.

So many factors with this one. Like if you really need to understand who you are and what type of things you want to be doing, there's artists like Russ who are out here just absolutely dominating it independently. He's able to hire for the stuff that he needs. He's able to control the narrative and do and spend the marketing dollars and do all the things and he just doesn't like it's a D for him right yeah and then there's some artists too that might just need the advance like let's be real like some of you guys might be just in a tough spot. What I would say is well pertinence just said that what did he say? He talked about the fact that the reason why he did a label deal was literally to fund his tour. He didn't need any marketing he didn't even need marketing support you need money for some one shot thing yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's an A for you. And really, I think one of the most important things is to make sure you have like the right leverage before you sign any type of deal, if you can, because your contract is only going to be as good as the momentum that you have already started for yourself. Like these labels aren't just signing people that have nothing going on anymore. They just aren't. Yeah. I mean, I I wanted to how you know before we land on a final uh sure, you know, tier rating. I want to disclaim this with like do everything you can on your own, right? But like if you hit that breaking point or you see where a label can come in and fill the gaps that you haven't been able to fill for yourself, like stop being so proud.

I don't know. I think I feel like there's like a lot of pride and like I'm not gonna sign, but it's like the fuck you're broke. You might need to. You're broke and nothing's working. It's actually might be a great opportunity. So like potentially. I don't know. Okay, so where are we landing on? If you're between A and B, I would lean to B. Just because it's a B. Let's go B. It's a D for some. Let's go B. It's a C for some, it's a B for some. Let's go B. It's a B. We're landing signing with a label at a B, moving on to number 10, another old school, real traditional type of method. We're talking about PR, Ben. We're talking about the traditional, we're getting in the blogs, we're doing the press runs, we're cashing out to be seen on the stages that we want to be seen on. I mean, as a media platform, I'm going straight to S tier, bro. That's cap. I mean, all jokes aside, honestly, I mean, I do think there's a ton of value that can come from press and media and getting uh featured on certain blogs, platforms, Instagram pages, whatever, right? Um, I don't think you should be paying uh and God, our publicity and PR friends are about to we're sorry.

We literally were not getting any recommendations for guests anymore. Um, I don't think you should be necessarily paying for these services uh early on in your career. Um, I think that there's a ton of platforms that you can get on just by putting in a little bit of outreach work, right? By just hitting up people in the email, hitting up people in the DMs, networking with people that maybe know the people that run these platforms, run these pages, whatever. Um, so yeah, man, I don't know. I think it's really important. I do find it valuable to be doing these types of things, but I don't really think that you should be like spending a bag to the like PR publicity people to set these moves up for you. Because this can get expensive. This is one of the more like you know, potentially very like need the bag type of strategies, and the results can be very mixed. Again, like there's gonna be a few of these, and this I think is the first one where I think that it's gonna be most valuable when you have something going on already, right? Kind of same with signing as a label. Like if you have created a moment and you want to expand on your moment and you want it to reach an even wider audience, that's gonna be a lot better than trying to create a moment, right?

This is not a substitute for creating a moment. This is not gonna start your fire. This might add a little gas, but if you're just cashing out on PR because you don't want to like make content and do it yourself, you're you know, you're trying to light a wet log and make a fire, and it's just I don't think it's gonna work out for you very well. I think the reason that people should get on these platforms, and I think uh the reason why I beat up some of our past guests when they come on our show and they don't you know use the content that we gladly will provide them in high quality versions. Yeah, um, it's like if you go on a show, right? If you go on a on a podcast, if you do an interview, if you do a live performance series, whatever, um, use the content, right? We're all complaining about the fact that we don't know what to post, we don't know what to post. Post the shit you already fucking did, bro. Um, so I would just say like be wise about that as well, right? If you are going to, you know, invest your time or money to get featured on these types of you know media outlets, just make sure you make the most of it, bro. Let's talk about it. Like if you don't,

If you don't say anything worth posting, we have a whole bigger problem at hand, bro. Massive problem. So I don't know, where are you landing? You're probably down there, huh? I just think that this is, you know, eyeballs like are just not on these type of places as much as they used to be. I think you're way more, you're just as equally likely to see a TikTok from a random dude than you are a major platform. So I'm going like probably C type of range. Let's go see. Yeah. Let's go see. But I I do think like, and I think we'll probably touch on like influencer marketing, which I think is more like the music curators and the tastemakers and shit like that. So like their platforms, you know, we'll get to it probably, and I have a whole different outlook there. But oh, we're gonna get to it. Yeah. That's why you guys gotta stick around. Make sure you like, comment, subscribe. If you're finding any value in this, if you like what we're doing, you know. what I mean? And drop a strategy that we probably have forgotten when we get through all these 12. But you're gonna have to get through the whole video to see if we forgot it. So shame us for forgetting your favorite strategy. Stick around.

Um, still in the realm of the dinosaur strategies. If you will. Are we gonna talk about any good ones or like any like modern ones. I'm mixing it up for retention, bro. Retention. Don't let them leave the video. Ben, We got a couple good ones coming up. But this one is the radio and DJ type of ecosystem. Okay. We're talking about either paying for, or maybe if you just know some people and have some good working relationships to get these spins on the FM radio stations, the college radio stations, the mixed shows. We're getting the local DJs involved, the digital radio. We're just we're getting in rotation. We're paying to be heard that way. How do you feel about that initially? I mean, I feel like I'm way less bullish on it when it comes to like, you know, no offense, college radio or like radio side of the DJ culture, but I'm way bullish on it when it comes to like DJs that are playing stuff like at the clubs, at the bars, at the strip clubs, right? Okay.

Like I think that being the soundtrack to someone's night is can be huge. For sure. Right? That's the stuff we remember. But I'm not sure that like the passive listening of radio in its traditional sense, and you know, geez, dinosaur. That was a crazy. Our radio people are hating us now, too. Sorry. You're literally just out to make everyone in the industry not like us. I just meant this strategy's been around for a while. Not that it's not relevant anymore. Agreed. Well, because it's a tried and true fucking dinosaurs not fair because it's not extinct. We learned that actually. It's not even extinct. extinct at all. But um, but no, I mean, I'm pretty bullish on like the in your city or I mean, or in any city, right? Like, just again, kind of being like in the places that like cool things are happening, and like, dude, the DJs are still really big tastemakers in the music scene, right? So, like I personally, and I know a lot of you know, music fans, even in general, people that aren't in the industry, they follow DJs that are once again like curating the vibes for them, right? And like they become like the popular DJs at all the different spots, and they're on all the event flyers, right?

Because they're the ones that know what's fucking hot, right? I would add to the city thing, like I think this is a regional thing too. Like, if you're having a moment in a place, that's when, like, an FM radio, right? Or a place that like local or college radio makes the most sense. Like our friend LaRussell dropped a song recently, you know, about the bay. He's shouting out all the counties, the area codes in the bay. Might make sense for him to get spun in you know on radio stations in the bay, right? So there's like a regional kind of thing that could make sense too. Yeah. It's another one where, like, if you are already having a moment, this is kind of more of an amplifier than a fire starter. Um, and then also like I'm just worried about some of y'all out here that just want to pay to get on the radio one time and like get in your car and take a picture of you being on the radio and then post it as a flex. Like, that is a complete waste of money. But I mean, just on that note, I mean, even paying these DJs to like spin you in the strip club and like at the club, like it's expensive. This is not a cheap one.

This is not cheap. This is not a cheap one too. I then that and for that reason alone, it lowers it. I agree. Like it would be if it was a little more cost effective. I do think it can be impactful. So I don't know. I'm uh I'm more like C for this one. Between B and C, kind of myself. Yeah, let's go C, bro. I want to go C maybe like a high C. I don't think we're doing like delineations between the letter grades, but I would call it a high C. Remember high C? That's a good drink. Yeah, that's all that's where my head was going. Get some fruit punch after this. What do you think? Okay, let's go. Sounds good. Moving on to number eight. This is a more modern one. We're kind of switching it up a little bit. Thank God. I was like, Henry's stuck in the nineties. We're talking about the Spotify in-app promo tools. So if you guys don't know, there are certain features and ways that you can pay to be promoted more within Spotify, right? So you're showing up at the top of Spotify, you're getting pushed in just random when you're just playing songs on Spotify, you're popping up more, right? They have things like marquee, showcase, and discovery mode, I think might be the newest one. Um, you're just paying to appear more in Spotify.

Okay, so my my knee-jerk reaction says, Don't spend any money that's gonna somehow get you paid more times 0.003. Oh, because they don't pay anything. Yeah, like I don't know. It's not really no, this is not about yeah, getting more streams to get paid more. It's really hard to like do the mental, you know, uh gymnastics of oh, if I spend $100 on Spotify, I'm gonna get $2 back in royalties. So let's don't look at it that way because you'll drive yourself crazy. Uh but is this is this what like helps artists pop up uh on my like homepage in Spotify if I've listened to an artist before that like reminds me that they've dropped a new song, is this. It's a good point. I think yes. So artists because you're thinking like it's probably not gonna work as well for discovering new artists. I'm not clicking on a random artist, bro. Yeah, like an ad for an artist you never heard. No. Just based what if they have a fire picture? No, fire cover art, fighters fire song title, artist name. No, bro.

Yeah, but I'm in there to listen to what I want to listen to. But if there's an artist you already know you like, yes, and they're paying to now be their new shit gets shown to you, you might want to check that out. Yeah, that's valuable. That makes sense, right? So I feel like if you do have any sort of you know, audience, of course, like within Spotify, um, I would spend the money that way, right? Uh, I'm not, I don't even want to claim to be an expert on like these in app promo tools, right? Um they're constantly changing and they're and they're a little bit on the newer side. So uh do your homework there, but I would only be spending money on anything that's going to recommend you um, you know, to people that have already known who you are. Or again, like on the discovery mode tip, if it does help you get in the um kind of radio uh type of like, you know, algorithmic type stuff, right? Or like the AI shit they're even doing, right? That kind of like recommends uh stuff based on uh taste that a, you know, you know, that a certain listener has, I'd maybe spend there too. But yeah, I wouldn't be doing it to like get put on a home screen of someone that has never listened to you before. Like, what the fuck?

No one's doing that. this is also one of the ones that's majorly, majorly dependent on your strategy. Because I mean, we dropped an episode recently with Curtiss King that you know, and he this guy took all his music off Spotify. He's not even on Spotify, he's doing direct to consumer. We'll put a little card, a little link right up here to that episode. You might not even need Spotify, in which case this is an instant D tier, but there's plenty of strategies that are you know acceptable that include Spotify and streaming and DSP royalties as a part of your business model, and for that, this could be beneficial. I'm still pretty I might still be D tier. I'm BCD. Okay. I think we landed in a C. Let's go C then. I don't think it's B, bro. Spotify in app promo may be good for you. It depends on your self-awareness. By the way, can we just get the word self-awareness at the top left of this video, just for the rest of the video? Just leave it up there for the entire rest of the video. I just want y'all all to know all this is you have to know who you are, what you want, what you're good at, what you love, or this is all just noise and bullshit. Yeah, you know what I mean?

Like, comment, subscribe if that made you feel anything. Moving on to number seven, we're talking about influencer marketing. We're talking about creator seating, we're talking about UGC, aka user-generated content. We are paying, you know, anywhere from micro influencers, just people with small tapped-in audiences, all the way up to the biggest and baddest influencers to incorporate our music naturally into their content so that people may discover us and fall in love with us. Ben, How do you feel about this? Okay, well, so let's share some ways that this can be done like incorrectly. Okay. What are some ways that you think this can be done the wrong way? Anything that comes to mind and spend uh a hundred thousand dollars for Mr. Beast to say my. name one time in a video. Okay. So yeah. So I think like dropping a big bag on like one single macro influence. Is that what they're with no direction? Even if you had the most direction, I think you know, you and I have chatted about this a bunch. It's like, bro, algorithms are algorithms. Like the biggest influencers in the world have shit that flops.

But yeah, but I mean, I think if if you did it right and Mr. Beast like used my song and talked about it for a second. No one here is getting a Mr. Beast plays. He's not doing that, anyways. We're talking hypothetically somewhat. Sure, but I just mean, even if you pay like a pretty big TikToker, right? Like these people charge like five figures for a video type shit, right? I would not recommend that. There's people out here with fake engagement as well, too. I mean, That's a whole even real engagement, bro. I hope you guys are enjoying the conversation. I want to take a quick moment to tell you about our pals at DistroKid. You can't get your music onto streaming platforms without a distributor, and DistroKid is an excellent choice to handle that for you. For the ridiculously low price of $23, you can upload unlimited music for an entire year that is less than $2 a month. I tripped on $2 walking down the street earlier. They have countless features to help you out on your musical journey. One of my favorites is splits. Instead of my collaborators hitting me up all the time saying, Where's my fucking money? I can input everyone's percentage when I upload the music, and DistroKid will handle it.

I've personally used DistroKid for many years and can genuinely recommend them as a great tool to get your music out into the world. And if you sign up at omtdistro.com, you'll get 30% off an already insanely low price. This is absolute peanuts for unlimited uploads yearly. We wish you the best with your creating. Let's get back to it. I would not put all my eggs in one basket here, right? So then we start talking about like, all right, cool. If we spread it across, you know, micro. More influencers, right? Yeah, micro-influencers, whatever you want to. Let's get 50 of these motherfuckers. I still think another way that you can do this wrong is if you just pay these influencers to use your sound. I think that's probably the biggest mistake that I see a lot of you know our artist friends make. If you're like just you just use the sound. Yeah, just pick any influencer that is accepting like song submissions. I mean, even like the platforms we were talking about, like Groover and SubmitHub and shit, like they let you hit up like TikTokers and stuff and just literally they'll just use your sound in any type of video that they already make. That's a big no-no for me.

I think that like you want it to be natural content to the influencer, though. And but again, even if they're a makeup influencer, right? And maybe even if your song fits well with makeup, it's like I still don't think that's like the right play, bro. Like, I'm way more bullish on paying influencers that are actual curators and tastemakers, right? You think about like the Annabelle Kleins, that good shit types of the world. You think about a kid's takeover, you think about I breathe music all day, like any of these people. They sound expensive. Again, like uh they're gonna be more expensive, but there's also micro influencer versions of these people, right? There's people that are just getting their start. Like, take a bet on 50 of these people that have really small followings, but they're hyper focused on like your niche, for example, right? Like if they're trying to post about underground rappers that are next up and you're an underground rapper who thinks they're next up. Like, find those people, bro. So, like being very, very, very strategic and intentional with who you're spending money with in the in influencer, like, you know, UGC type of space, that's like the biggest key for me. But I think it can work.

And that's why self-awareness is still at the top left of this video. Um, I would add too that like it is important that you have like a direction or a thing about the song, right? Whether it's like a funny line or it's just like a mood, you know, if this is like a danceable song or if it's a late night drive song. Like, have an idea of what the song is supposed to look like in content, if that makes sense. Yeah. So that there's already like something for them to go out. They're not just, you know, so they can still make it fit with what they usually already make, but that it still makes sense with the song and the feeling and the branding of the song. It's a touchy one. It's another one you gotta really like do it right, but it can pay off, I think, handsomely. Yeah, I mean, you need to be in control of the narrative. Yeah. Right. So, like if you want your song to be presented in a certain way, right? With a certain message, like that needs to be in the contract with the influencer. Again, you don't need to tell them like what set to use for their video or whatever, right?

But you need to be very clear on like certain bullet points that you need to be um, you know, taken seriously and to like be implemented in the into the agreement um before you spend any money. So that that's like the last thing I would say. So I don't know I'm pretty bullish on this one, man. Where are you going? I'm pretty like A. I'm A B. Let's go A, bro. You want to go A? Yeah, bro. I think it's huge. It's an A. I think it's huge. I think it can be huge. Again, self what's the top left here? Self-awareness, guys. It's other hopefully I'm pointing at it. Oh, it is, yeah. You put awareness. You pointed the wrong way. I have to point right to point to the top. I know what I'm doing. You pointed it the wrong way before. Yeah, I gotta, we got it this time. Anyway, we're going with A tier for influencer marketing, moving on to number six. This is one that you're all very familiar with and are probably terrified of. It's the paid ads, Ben. We're talking about getting into meta ads manager, Google ads, Google Words, whatever they all, TikTok ads. We're paying for our content to be shown to people directly. What are your initial thoughts?

S tier, bro. We're not at the grade yet. I'm going straight to the S tier. We're not there yet. I'm sorry, man. I'll spoiler alarm. I'll explain why. I'm so sorry. I mean, again, you can you might call it a D. I don't know. Uh, we'll get your take. But hot take. I'm not. Look, man, all businesses, regardless of industry, uh spend money on paid ads. That's just facts, right? You want to get in front of the customers that are going to buy your shit, right? Um, so I just think it's part of the game. I think you don't have to spend tons and tons of money doing it, right? There's there's levels to this shit. Um, I do think that you can uh spend, you know, five, 10 bucks a day, right? Um, and see real, real results. Sure. Um, and I just think it's really about targeting the right people with the right offer and again uh understanding like realistic outcomes, right? So if you're just trying to uh make sure that people are like constantly thinking about you and your brand, you're gonna have a lower cost for just awareness to do that.

Exactly for awareness type ads, versus if you're trying to get somebody to actually do something, leave platform and maybe buy a ticket to something, buy a piece of merch, et cetera. Way harder. There's ad campaigns that you can run, and a lot of people might not even know this that are in our audience, right? Because I'm just really diving into this shit because we haven't done enough of this, to be honest. Yep. We're like you only pay if someone takes a certain action, right? So you can literally try and find the person who's going to actually buy the concert ticket or buy the merch item. Um, and you'll only pay if they do that, right? Um there's the potential to hit that like infinite money glitch where you get your average cost for a sale of a hoodie down to like twelve dollars, but you're profiting like twenty dollars on a hoodie, and then you just there's like potential for shit to like especially if you're like selling a product, it's tougher with and and a lot, you know, when you're just awareness and shit, like how do you gauge that, right? Oh, that's tough.

You just there's no way to know. So flipping to like, because I mostly agree with you, flipping to devil's advocate, right? A lot of it is very hard to quantify how much it's actually working, and that's insanely frustrating, right? Like, I hope, I don't know, I'm spending money every day. And like you said, learning the actual how to do it correctly. Oh my god, like there's infinite ways you can run ads and target this and retarget that takes a lot of time. The money, obviously, it costs money, right? And the more money you put into it, the better. Yeah, it's literally called paid Paid ads. And I think it's very important to be only running ads on proven creative, aka like you're posting a lot of content organically, waiting for an outlier, something that has outperformed and shown to be interesting. So then you got to do that first, right? You gotta like have something hit before you really feel confident putting some ad dollars behind it. So there's a lot of drawbacks, but like inevitably I do think it needs to be part of any serious like music career strategy. Yeah.

Uh, but I mean, just even the the money glitch thing, the other way you can kind of hit the money glitch is like, look, yeah, maybe you spend a hundred dollars to acquire a customer to buy a $50 piece of merch. I get it. That sounds like a $50 L, but bro, that customer might buy your next job down the line at $50 and you made your money back. But how do you how do you keep track of that? You have no idea. Well, again, I mean, A, there are there are ways that you can keep track of that. There are there's actually yeah, there's actual ways to do that. So again, we're not gonna dive into that here. It's tough. But I promise you there are ways. But again, I mean, you know, that's just another way to look at it, is all I'm saying. Even if you look at it like shit, I just spent how much to sell one concert ticket. Like what you don't want to do is just set this shit up and then forget about it, and then you just a month passes by and you realize you spent $20 a day for a month and nothing has happened. Yeah, it does require a lot of attention. Uh, but there are companies out there like shit, our friends at Symphony, they make it pretty easy, right?

Like very artist-friendly, yes. They've kind of simplified the whole process, they're using a lot of AI and automation and and like giving you feedback and telling like tips on oh, you should kill this, you should run that, you should spend more here, like, etcetera. There's like agencies you can pay, right? If you really don't want to do it, but you got a thousand dollars saved up and you want to run some paid ads, they're gonna take a cut of it. Typically, they work on like percentage of the budget. So if it's like if it's a thousand dollars, they'll take I don't know, 20, 30 percent maybe of your budget for their own like profit, but then they're gonna spend the the remainder of the thousand dollars on the actual ads. Hopefully smarter than you would spend. Yeah, and then they'll show you the the results, right? So if you think that someone's gonna do it 30% better or whatever, you know, then I don't know, is that even the right math? Whatever. If they think they're gonna do it better than you, or if if you think they're gonna do it uh, you know, better than you are, then yeah, maybe spend with an agency. So I'm trying, I'm gonna drag you down to A, though, I think. Just with all the I was being like kind of you know dramatic, but very dramatic.

No, I just think like everyone that's legit is doing it, bro. And that's because it works. It just works. People don't do things over and over again successfully because they don't work. All we're doing is attention hacking, and guess what? The attention is on these platforms. And you can pay to be in front of where the eyeballs are. So it's just naturally it's there. So we're sticking with the A there. Moving on to number five. This is a fun one. This is a controversial one. This is what I'm calling clip flooding. This is where you're creating a network of accounts, right? You're creating alternate social media accounts. This can range anywhere from like kind of what the labels are doing, where it's like fake, just straight up bullshit, like fake people, fake fan accounts, um, all the way to like doing like theme pages or making maybe making pages around some of your other interests outside of music um and flooding clips that also incorporate the the music in some way. The point is to be putting up more shots.

If you look at posting short form social media as like lottery tickets, we are maximizing our lottery ticket purchases with flooding clips to just as many pages as we can. And we had an episode recently with Ari Herstand who told us about how the labels are doing this with their artists, and it's kind of working. I hate to say it, they're doing the like straight up fake shit a lot, having interns make fake accounts and uh just the nature of you know, you see someone on social media five, six times, you start to wonder who is this motherfucker, right? So, how do you feel about it? You know, make me go. Yeah, like where do you go? I kind of hate that it works. It's a tough one, man. Like why do you think it works? Just because again, like lottery ticket attention game, bro. They're just maximizing their chances, and I get it. And if I was running a label as a business, like I'd probably float that too. If I was an independent artist, um, and I don't have 50 interns at my disposal to be just reposting all my shit all the time. I'm probably leaning more into like the theme kind of pages, right?

I'm making accounts around just any maybe just all of my other interests and trying to incorporate my music smartly. And this also, again, self-awareness comes down to if you're a person that has a lot of content already. It's gonna be a lot easier. If you don't already have a ton of content to post, then this is just not gonna work for you. You have to be able to have no this is a numbers game. Yeah, is what this strategy is. Yeah, it's literally a number of accounts game and a number of pieces of content game. 100%. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. I I just can't see a lot of people doing this that successfully, bro. I think it's a lot of time. Um unless you're already making a lot of content. And you just wanna that's literally people's number one gripe is being able to make enough content, bro. Like, I just can't see again, like without the support of a team, right? Or a label, I just this one sounds hard, bro. It's also a way where you can just flood all types of content and get instant feedback on the content that works. Like maybe you have five different clips from a music video and you post them all to this burner, and one of them did way better than the other.

Now you know that's the one to post maybe on your main account. It's like a cheap way to test some stuff. You just kinda convinced me. Kind of cool, right? We're talking about cheap testing here. Okay, so what tier are you going, bro? Risk-free. Where are you going? Before I give a grade, I will add that there's talk that a lot of the platforms are kind of cracking down on this, even though it is a very big strategy right now, it is working for a lot of people. Platforms are kind of catching on and they're using AI or whatever to detect like duplicate content, and they're trying to crack down on these fake profiles, whatever, burner profiles, and there's potential for this one, you know, in the near future, even who knows how soon, to not work at all. You know, this could go, it could it could work for years, and maybe that's all you need it to work. You can to use it now. But it's a risk is kind of what I'm getting at. So I just know that it's working. So I think it's something you should think about. I think it's a good strategy if you have a lot of interest, you're able to make pages, you're good at social media, you have a bunch of videos of yourself, you're you're happy to like let shit fly. Maybe you're scared to let shit fly on your main account and you want to let shit fly on these burner accounts and see what works.

Uh I think it could be good for you, but it's gonna take some time. Um, it's you know, it is free to like make new social media accounts. Yeah. So where do you go? I think I'm landing it like I'm between a B and a C. I kinda wanna go B, man. I think there's like value there. Okay, let's go B then. You good with that? I'm not gonna fight you on it. You can drag me to a C if you want. I feel a little bit more like it's a C, but I mean I think it's time consuming. I think it's time consuming, and I think those same artists that are too nervous to like post shit on their main page, like these posts can still reach real humans. And so I think that whole insecurity that makes them not want to post something to their main page, it's not gonna go away just because it's on some other page. It's still them doing whatever the fuck the thing is in the video. That's true. So I don't know. Yeah, but they didn't post it, so it's fine. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that's a stupid ass way to look at it, but I don't know, man. I mean, I'll stick, I'll stick, I'll ride with you at B, bro. B minus for now, but like be careful.

Self-awareness. Moving on to number four, we're talking about what I'm calling audience swapping. Okay. We're talking about doing collabs, maybe cashing out on a feature, doing remixes, right? Maybe getting hopping on a remix. Sometimes it can be free, but a lot of times people are out here paying to get a verse, right? To hop on a remix, to do whatever. Hopefully, with artists that you are positive that your audience would overlap. And that artist's fans are the type that would be fans of your music as well, right? And maybe it can even be mutually beneficial in a lot of cases. Okay. So let's talk about a few ways that people can do audience swapping, right? Because I think there's ways I'm literally just thinking of right now on the spot. So uh remixes, right? Let's go with even like on social media. Think about like open verse challenges. Yes. And if Morgan Wallen had a fucking, you know, uh rapper, you know, uh Atlanta rapper cousin, like whatever, right?

Like insert whatever is you and then insert like the audience that you're trying to basically capture, right? So there's a lot of free ways that you can do this type of activity on social media, right? Um, there's a lot of like just inherent tools that these platforms give you to basically like remix other, you know, stitch other people's stuff, remix other people's stuff. It's not directly collaborating with that artist though. No, but it's algorithmically getting to those people, sure, right? Uh again, if you do it correctly, it can reach the same people that you're trying to again like try and capture. Um, I think the collaborating side of it, you can A collaborate with other, you know, producers that make sense, collaborate with other artists, obviously, that makes sense. Um, but something that just came to mind that I think people were sleeping on is collaborating with other content creators. Yes. Okay. So put a TikToker in your music video, put a YouTuber in your music video, shoot a piece of content with a social media, you know, content creator, right? So there's a lot of collaborations that you can do outside of the music space that I think again, you're trying to get the people that like that influencer and like that content creator. You're trying to get their fans.

So, like it's not about like fans of an artist always. Like, let's stop thinking about it that way. We're trying to get fans of other people's, you know, stuff, right? Like, if if your audience likes dirt bikes, maybe collab with a fucking dirt biker, you know what I mean? Um, or like a skateboarder, exactly. That that's valid. No, it's actually a good point. Let me give you a little yeah. I mean, dude, I'm just saying, like, sometimes we really get focused on like, oh, all the all the music people that we can collaborate and like audience swap with. But it's like, bro, there's people out there that are just fans of some other shit. Go collab with them. But on the artist thing, yeah. I do think that there is There's a lot of value on. So I'm I'm very bullish on kind of going laterally, right? Like finding artists, you know, around the same level, really anyone that will just kind of fuck with you for free. Um, I think there's so much value in working with people, making music together, dropping music together, posting content together, uh, just tapping into each other's audiences, like we're audience hacking almost is what it is. I mean, we do that 100%.

We literally have people on our show whose audience that like they know our audience will fuck with them, and we know their audience will fuck with us. We'll put a card right here for the no labels necessary episode. Like we love those guys. We interviewed them, we do similar things, like of course we had them on. Yeah. Uh, so there's a lot of value there, and that can potentially be free. I also kind of think there's value if done right of cashing out for like a big feature in the right situations, the right time, as long as the terms are correct, you're buttoned up on how it's gonna look and you've planned what you know. Is it gonna show up on their Spotify profile? Are they gonna post about it? You've covered all the boxes and you have a budget to get a big feature and you're positive that their audience would love your music, it can work, bro. It's been done 100%. No, that one gets the the worst rap, bro. Because honestly, it's done wrong all the time. People do it the wrong way. Absolutely. You this is where shout out to our guy Ryan Schmidt Esquire, one of the like best entertainment lawyers. We'll put a card up to his episode right here.

Um, get yourself a Ryan, bro, before you just go out there and pay for a feature, like get a featured artist agreement, right? Spell out all the things that you were kind of alluding to, right? Make sure that they agree to have this as primary artist uh rights on their streaming profiles, right? You want this song to show up on their catalog, right? That's number one, or pay way less if they're not gonna do it. Facts, right? Exactly. If they won't agree to that, then you should negotiate the price. Number two, make sure that they are willing to shoot X amount of pieces of content with you, and that they are willing to post X amount of pieces of content promoting the record, right? That's another thing. Um, what else something they should be? Yeah, I mean, collab posts, I mean, like fucking, you know, do a live with me, anything like get creative with it. Whatever it is that you do and they do, find the overlap. Facts. Yes, just again, get it in writing. Yes, get this shit in writing, get it in an agreement, sign it, seal it, deliver it, right?

Because I mean, bro, yeah, it it is so important that you get all those ducks in a row because you will get fucked. That's true. We've all heard it, bro. People will pay for features, and then the artist will blame the fact that they're signed. My label wouldn't let me put it up. My manager said you already got paid, and it's like, sorry. I'm between an A and a B on this one. Dude, let's go A. You want to go A with it? It's huge. I'm surprised. And Even for like just the like collab side of things that you were mentioning in that and that I was kind of unpacking, right? I think that's like the feature thing aside, but the feature thing again, if you do it right, I think it could be huge. Let's go A. Just be careful. Yes. Don't go because I heard on the one more time podcast. I should spend 50 grand to get fucking derp a derp herp, little burp a derp on my song. Like, no, that's not what we're saying. Little burp a derp is crazy. Little burp-a-derp. New EP goes insane. EP goes insane. Okay. It's an A. It's an A. Moving on to a very fun one indeed. Number three. This is what I'm calling relationship marketing. This is the hand-to-hand combat.

This is getting in the DMs, sending all the text messages, going out into the real world. There's a world out there, believe it or not. Meeting people, getting your music into the hands of, you know, just talking about your career, just relationships, right? Let's just be humans and let's be people, man. I don't know. Be humans and be people. Very eloquent. Um, no, I mean, this is this is the future of music, bro. Um, I think like having a direct relationship with your audience is what it's all about now. I don't care if you're Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, or if you're someone who's about to release their, you know, first song. Um, this is everything. So I think that I mean, this is huge, y'all. Um, building email, mostly free, by the way. Well, it is free. The way I'm describing it. Don't Do that, but I think it's important that we break down like, you know, what all is gonna be. There are very, very cost effective ways to do this, and then there are very, very expensive ways to do this. Okay.

Very cost effective. You can literally Taylor Swift meet and greet. You can very cost effective. You can literally DM every single person that follows you initially. Yeah, right. Every single person that comments on a post about your music saying anything about it, you can literally DM them for free. You have hundreds of people in your phone that you have not texted in a while that you could just hit up and say, Hey, how you doing? I've done this, by the way. How are you? You know, how's your mom also? But like, you know. No, exactly. And then there are very expensive ways to do this. The second that you start building a really significant email list or SMS text list, um, these marketing services are not cheap, a lot of them, right? Uh, we like to use Flodesk for email marketing. Um, they don't put a cap on like the number of email contacts that you add to your uh to your email list. And they don't have all the crazy, unless you're trying to get deep into email marketing. Exactly.

It's very understandable for a commoner. Yeah, exactly. But someone like a MailChimp, bro, like you'll spend your life savings on that shit, bro. Um so I think there's like levels to this as far as how much you spend and what you're gonna get out of it. But yes, I just think building that. I mean, dude, we're we're living in a world where like AI music is about to be a real threat and like is a real threat. So that human to human connection, whether that is still like happening virtually, meaning like in the text, in the DMs and the emails. Yeah, bro. Uh or whether it's happening live, meet and greet, uh, just pop up type of events, whatever, like experiential type of shit. Um, I'm real bullish on this one, bro. And just the opportunities it can lead to. I mean, you could meet a producer and hit it off and end up with a crazy placement. You know, you could like get a beat from a crazy producer that you didn't even know. You could meet someone that you could be, you could get opening tour slots from this. You could do anything, man. Yeah, you're talking like you're talking like networking to do.

It's networking. Yeah, if you're doing, I mean, networking, I don't like loop it in as much in into this relationship marketing. I more go to like the direct to fan, direct to consumers. But it's peers. Those are valid. Yeah. I mean again, like getting, to just talk to people. Label deals, even are like it's not what you know it's who you know type shit. This whole thing is if the most talented people just you know got the best opportunities, we'd be in a way better state. So There's hope for people, people that just can do this. I would caveat with this can get spammy. You never want to come across as spammy. You want to lead with the value whenever possible. You want to make it, you know, you don't want to waste anyone's time. You're gonna see way better results. So, and that part of it is a little time consuming. But with all that being said, I just don't see how this doesn't make the S tier, Ben. Let's go.

Right? I'm going with it. Yeah, let's go. It's again, I think it's legitimately the future of music. So relationship marketing, baby. Moving on to number two. You knew it was coming. You've all been waiting for it. You knew it had to make its appearance. We made you wait until number two so that you would watch most of the video, and then also wonder like what the fuck could number one be because it's number two. It's organic socially specifically organic short form. I was like, I social media. I didn't know the list here, yeah. Content. You knew. I mean, the way I introduced it. I mean, I knew now, but we're talking about we're talking about posting reels, we're talking about posting TikToks, We're talking about posting YouTube shorts. God, they clicked off. You talked about retention, they just clicked away. they probably want to know what we had to say about that. if they know us, they know what we have to say it's everything, bro. It's kind of everything. It's I I didn't make these rules. No, it is everything It's not how we would do it. Again, I think you and I talked about this a lot, uh, just amongst ourselves, right? It's where discovery is happening across the board, though.

Anything, not just music. Literally. It's where the eyeballs are, it's where the attention is. It's where people are learning about things. And I don't mean in that in the educational sense. I mean literally just like coming to know about something, right? The latest sports highlight that happened, a movie that's coming out, a guy. Politics, a guy got shot down the street. It's all happening on social media. How many group chats are you guys in? How many DMs do you get every day if someone sent you a reel or a TikTok or a YouTube short? It's just you guys know that we don't have to explain this, but like really think about it. Like it's the news, right? It's yeah, it's I mean, it's literally everything. I think if we get outside of ourselves and actually just think about like our own experience, you know, finding out about things and then becoming fans of other things. Like again, fuck music, but just becoming a fan or like a consumer of something else. Like if you're real with yourself, bro, you know where it's happening. That's where it's happening. you know where it's at. And it's fucking free.

It's free, bro. Could it be anything but an S tier? It's fucking free, bro. It's an S tier if I've ever heard one. I think there's a lot of bad habits you can fall into uh with social media, you know, just posting the same shit forever and it's not working. There's clearly like so much strategy around making a video that hits the rules, you know, and what's working is changing all the time. It's super complicated. It is gonna be a little bit of a time suck, like learning what works, shooting the shit that works, but at the end of the day, you know, we're just telling our stories. Yeah, hold the phone up and speak your truth. It's free to post, it's free to make an account. And that's where literally everyone is looking. That's the it's the best place to put your shit. S tier. Okay, this is the last one. This is an interesting one. No, it's number one. And let's talk about the fact that why did you do this in a revert retention? This was so dumb. Because they're still listening. That was and if they're not, then they didn't hear me say that they're not still listening. So they didn't listen because of the fucking backwards order, bro.

We are in number one. The order didn't mean anything. We just hope it helped you listen a little further. And uh this is long form content. This is content that goes on YouTube, long form videos. We're talking about doing podcasts. We're talking about content that is searchable, right? It's uh rank driven, it's potentially evergreen. Okay. Okay. So this is stuff that you're gonna connect deeper with people automatically, right? If the if it hits and people end up watching a 20, 25 minute video or an interview or a vlog or whatever you're doing of you, they're naturally gonna have a deeper connection with you because they spent that time with you. It's it's more intimate, right? Okay, but this is stuff that you think should go on their channels, right? Because you mentioned interview, but like that's that's more like the press shit, right? Like this is more probably like I I should be making YouTube videos, maybe I should start a podcast. Yes, right. I should make my own, I should invest in my own long form content. Correct. Because I think it's going to impact the you know, the music trajectory and be around forever because like you know, the short form content is great as it is. No one's gonna find the reel that you posted a week ago if it didn't go viral.

This stuff at least has a chance, you know, of being discovered forever. Yeah. YouTube is a search engine. Yeah, so I feel like initially I struggle with this, you know what I mean? But I as I'm thinking through it, I think it could be huge. Um, I I think just if you if you look at like the the connection that you can build with someone through long form versus what you can build with someone uh through short form, that alone I think adds some merit to this, right? In my mind, short form needs to be leading them to some type of long form. I mean, what are we doing if we don't if we can't spend time with people? Yeah, maybe you have an album that someone really falls in love with. But these days, don't you want to know who your favorite artist is? I wanna spend some real time with them. Dude, some people will argue that they don't say the mystery thing. They like the whole like mystique shit, man. And again, like I I'm not here to convince those people either way. I don't agree a hundred percent with that at all. But um, for me, I think, you know, w we're here to support musicians of all kinds. So I think that if you're a musician, for example, let's just give a few more examples so we can kind of like really add some like color to this.

Um, if you're a musician, right, who plays instruments, right? Or you're a producer, like maybe think about doing how-to tutorial type videos, right? Cooking. Um, or maybe you start, you know, um remixing 10, you know, like 10 favorite like remixes, remixes of like folk songs or whatever. If you're like a folk artist, right? So like maybe making long form versions of shit that you were already maybe doing on short form. Yep. Um, there's just a ton of different ways that I think that you can build that connection and you can really like give people a glimpse into you know who who you are outside of just being the artist or being the musician. Um, even if it even if it is music related, it's still a chance to show your personality throughout it. You know what I mean? Um, because that's what that's what people are buying into is personality, bro. That's all we got left in a world where everything is commoditized. That's that's I think the perfect tie. You know, that's the perfect ribbon to put on this, right? Is that like, look, your music, whether you all want to admit it or not, I think the smart artists admit that they don't sound perfectly unique, right? Like that there are other people that sound similar.

People can spend their time getting folk music from folk artist number one or folk artist number two. But what's gonna make them choose one or the other, it is I think the story, bro. It's the it's the process, it's the journey, it's the personality, it's the human elements that like again, something like an AI is just not gonna, it's not gonna compete with it. I will point out this is another free one, potentially, which is great, but the time time suck, bro. The time going into shooting, I mean, we've been shooting this episode for almost an hour, and then there's the editing that we're not gonna do. Hopefully, we're gonna pay for it. And then there's the learning the YouTube. We've been doing that and optimizing, and that is a whole world. This is not a simple thing to jump into. Uh, but the impact can be really deep, bro. Which is why like I wanted to go S, but I think with all things considered, I gotta go A. Oh, I kind of sit like a B, bro. Shouldn't it be? You wanna get how you want to rally for A. Pretty feeling pretty good about bro, DTC, like deep connections.

Let's go, A. Let's go A. man. Let's go, A, bro. I just I think it's hard. Yeah. I think the benefits are there, but I just know what we deal with. And I just think we're not even trying to be artists on top of this, right? So, like, it's a lot, man. So shout out to any of you guys that are gonna take the leap of faith and start, you know, trying to make long form videos because it is a lot. Uh, but I do think it can really move the needle for sure.