MusicPro ’26 was a 3-day conference and workshop for independent and emerging artists that took place at Hollywood's Musicians Institute this past March. Through a diverse array of panels, workshops, demonstrations, keynotes, live interviews, and performances, the event is built around helping drive artists through career development and growth in all directions.
One such panel caught our eye, and we're so happy to present to you the full conversation that happened on stage.
This panel, "Evolving Music Marketing Tools & Tactics to Reach, Engage and Grow Your Audience," featured three experts who each shared their thoughts, perspectives, and advice for independent artists on the tools they need to survive and thrive in today's music economy:
Jay Gilbert (moderator), a music industry consultant, educator, host of the Your Morning Coffee newsletter and podcast, and co-founder of Label Logic; Ryan Vaughn (speaker), founder of Backline Creative and the Chief Financial Officer of Head Bitch Music; and Benji Stein (speaker), founder of Innovation Syndicate, the team behind Booking-Agent.io, PlaylistSupply, and RadioPromo.io.
Below is the full discussion. Please enjoy.
RYAN VAUGHN: I'm a recovering drummer with about 20 years in the business so this is a very familiar environment. Then I migrated over to being an artist manager, and then launched many verticals in the music industry including a label distributor business that I run with my wife, and we also have sync, custom music and my little management incubator.
BENJI STEIN: I'm an artist manager-turned-kind of music tech enthusiast, building music tech tools now to solve problems that I’ve had as a manager and to empower other artists with that tech.
JAY GILBERT: We were having a little conversation here a minute ago about data, so I want to start with that because there's so much data out there for artist managers, labels and distributors. You can go to Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, Chartmetric, Viberate and Luminate. There are so many sources of this data. Some of it is actionable that you can actually use to grow your business. Benji, talk a little bit about what data points you look at, where you see them. Which ones do you find are useful?
BS: As an artist it's really easy these days to get caught up in social media numbers. Even on the industry side, there are a lot of people placing a lot of importance on reposts, Likes and engagement. But it's really important to focus on any data that can prove that you have real fans. Instagram Likes and Followers don't actually mean people are listening to your music. They don't mean you have someone going to buy a ticket to a show or buying a T-shirt. There's no real definitive data point that says, “This person is a good fan and this person's an evangelical.”
I would focus on things like authentic comments and people that reach out to you. I might have 50,000 Instagram Followers, but how many real fans do I have? Are those actionable fans?
RV: As a manager, one of the only things I look at is the Spotify Popularity Index (SPI), which is an unknown metric for a lot of people. It’s not really in Spotify; you have to go through an aggregator like Chartmetric or Songstats because it tells you how sticky the copyright might be across the Internet.
One thing I'm the most enamored by, which makes me feel old, is the importance of how many emails you have and what your open and click-through rates are. It's coming up more often as people are realizing all these other metrics are useless and that they’re getting way better results sending to my email list than by posting on socials or DM’ing people. So it’s about how we pull superfans out of all those social media and then run them into your email.
JG: I’m glad you brought up email because it's not sexy, but it works. I do a weekly newsletter and am constantly looking at, “What are people clicking on? Where are they at? How are they engaged?” You gotta keep that list! I've got one artist who's had a Google doc for 10 years and everybody they meet – from the person at Shure microphones, the person at the venue, to a songwriter – they put in their name, where they live, their dog’s name, their birthday – all that stuff. Now, when they roll into a town, they hit those guys up: “Hey, we’re playing at the whatever club.” It’s grown their base. That intimate thing is really important.
So what are some calls to action that you use? Maybe it’s “Follow me on Spotify” because then your music might drop into Release Radar or Discover Weekly – that kind of thing. But also “Subscribe to my YouTube channel” because then they can get notified of new videos. In terms of marketing, what ways do you capture and own an audience?
RV: There are two platforms I’ve been using. First are the SET. tools including Set.LIVE (live capture), SET.Fan (digital capture) and SET.Bio (for Link-in-Bio). I love SET.LIVE, which is a free tool you can use for playing a show and uses geo-location technology. You can do all the work in advance. You're on a show, and your artist is calling out, “Who likes free shit?” Everyone yells back, “I do!” They open SET.LIVE on their phone, which asks, “Are you here to see this artist?” They reply “Yes,” check in, follow a bunch of prompts and giving permission to enter a raffle to win a free merch pack. They’re volunteering all of their info and location, which can then be put into the artist’s email list.
The SET.Live team is interesting because they study the data and might say, “We noticed that a lot of your artist’s fans in LA also drink Coke, so we're going to approach Coca-Cola about commissioning a potential partnership.” This is meaningful because you’re not only collecting data and engaging your fans, you’re also getting a macro picture that can be monetized and turn into brand deals.
The second one is FanVids.io (which enables artists, labels and managers to collect UGC in the form of fan-generated videos and photos from live shows to increase ticket sales and merch).
After a show, an artist can ask, “Hey, who was at the show last night? If you took any content, upload it here.” By doing that, the fans give the artist’s team permission to use their content as a co-owner, so you don’t need their approval. You get all their contact information, and FanVids also creates a social media tab page of that content so your superfans uploading their content can interact with each other and it starts a snowball effect.
With both sites, you can “peel back the onion” and get to these different levels of data and data analytics to start building a picture on your fan base. I really love talking about those two sites for the live business side because it's a fun way to capture fan data and it doesn't feel icky or passive like a pre-save – fans want to do it.
BS: This might not work for all genres or all artists, but when I was managing an indie rock band, we built a Discord server that was explicitly for their fans. Email is a way to communicate with people one-on-one, but the idea is to build a community around the artist brand that the fans can also live in and talk to each other, where the artist can talk directly to the fans. It’s almost like your friends’ group chat, but just for this artist. It makes it really easy to activate that fan base when it comes time for a show or a new merch launch. Often artists who are making the same kind of music or who like the same kind of music might have other similar interests, and they might become friends. When you have people engaging and becoming friends because of their new favorite rising artist, those are fans that might come to shows for the next 20 years.
JG: Do either of you ever use Bandsintown?
RV & BS: Yes.
JG: In all transparency, Bandsintown is a sponsor of my podcast, but that's not why I use them. It’s got 100 million registered users connecting over 700,000 artists with their superfans. It’ll say, “Jay, you like Ryan and he’s going to be in town in a couple of weeks, so get your tickets here.” On the touring side, it's really cool because I've seen shows that I would have missed. On the marketing side, artists can message a certain number of their “trackers” (ticket buyers or event RSVPs) for free and send as much as you want when you're dropping new music or a video or tour. The part I love is that I can target other artists that I know fans of my bands are going to like. Talk about how you use it.
RV: My wife and I have a company called Head Bitch Music (she’s the Head Bitch!). We did a showcase one night at a hotel café with 20 artists, and each artist played one song. Marketing is always the hard question: How much money do we have to put towards this? Will we break even? As a manager I wanted to make sure we used Bandsintown if you want your shows to show up on Spotify, on YouTube, on Apple Music. So I set it up so that all their sites were integrated. (Songkick is kind of a dead soldier.) I built the event and tagged all 20 artists, and that alone probably sold 10 tickets because Bandsintown automatically pushes notifications for free to all 20 of the artists’ fanbases and shows up on all their Spotify profiles. Bandsintown even created a playlist on Spotify using all of their music, which was free marketing. To hedge my bet and increase frequency of exposure, on top of the free emails we were allowed, I spent $1,000 on their paid marketing side to target fans of the most common affinity artists across the 20 artists. I was able to reach 20,000 more people. It’s another touch point when you're building your marketing plan because you have to cast a wide net to see what’s working. Bandsintown is non-negotiable if you're an artist; your tour dates have to go there. There are so many wonderful things that we could do a whole panel on it.
JG: We did a tour, and you can see the conversion of people who actually got the message and bought a ticket.
RV: It’s free, so why wouldn't you do it?
JG: Exactly. I want to ask you guys if you use Play MPE on the radio side and then on DISCO on the sync side?
BS: I haven't used Play MPE before; I've heard of it. I have used DISCO. I didn't mention it before, but some of the tools that my team has built include PlaylistSupply.com, BookingAgent.io and RadioPromo.io. All of those involve outreach, and DISCO is really cool for building a nice package that isn’t just like an email with an mp3 link, whether for a radio DJ, a playlist curator (or particularly a music supervisor). You can add the link and information about the track. I’m a big fan of that tool.
JG: Talk about your platforms a little bit and what the differences are.
BS: All of the tools that we've built aggregate data and make it more actionable for artist playlists. For example, PlaylistSupply aggregates playlist information and user-curated playlist quality. That is, it scores the playlist to determine if the listenership is real or if there might be bots. We pull information about Spotify editorial playlists, but the outreach to those is through Spotify, and it's much harder to get onto them.
With all of our tools we provide the data and other data points, so if you're an artist trying to book a show, you can find the talent buyer and which artists have performed there in the past. This information enables you to do more broad-market research and a lot of the outreach yourself.
JG: I love these tools, and they've even changed while we've been having this conversation. I do presentations at the college level, and I have two pages in my deck of some of these tools and tactics, and it’s on Version 88 because they're evolving. Sometimes they work well and sometimes they don’t.
Ryan, in artist management, it's a different ball game now. There's not a ton of revenue in streaming for most developing middle-class artists. Talk about where your artists are finding they can actually make money today. Is it touring? Merch? Sync? Brand partnerships?
RV: Yes, all of the above. It’s the best of times and it's the worst of times right now. I grew up 20 years ago when Myspace was new and we were slinging CDs out of the back of our cars as we got out of the coffeehouse gig. Now I can access an audience in Southeast Asia where I’d have had no clue we were going viral in Indonesia, and then actually capitalize on that with offers to tour there.
So how do you make money? I tell artists that there's a lot of things that are just already known that you have to do whether they sound fun or not: Register all your stuff. Know all the performing rights societies. Know all your copyrights and the exploitations of the copyrights. Make sure you're collecting all of your royalties, whether it's public performance (songwriter royalties through PROs), mechanicals (songwriter royalties through the MLC or publishers), neighboring rights (digital performance of sound recordings through SoundExchange) or the good old-fashioned TuneCore royalty (share of streaming/download revenue from digital distribution of master recordings through a distributor like TuneCore).
That’s the base. Set all that stuff up so at least the money's coming in. How you augment that? That’s when we get into exploitative partnerships, meaning partners who are exploiting the copyrights on your behalf, ideally for commissions so that you're not paying them. This is also where your sync agent comes in. And the publisher that’s helping exploit those copyrights – not just collecting the money, but actually pushing them out and finding other uses. A radio plugger is another copyright exploitation, getting radio airplay and earning money. SiriusXM is also radio, but it also pays on the sound recording, whereas terrestrial radio in the US does not.
Then there are brand partnerships. Do you have a significant social media following where you can monetize that? If you’re going on tour, how do you make money? On the average tour I'm running, where the venue cap space is 300-500, it costs about $10,000 a week just to go on the road.
JG: Remember that fuel prices are higher now.
RV: You need to reverse-engineer to project your costs. I guarantee you will lose money on the road if you are charging $20 a ticket. Taylor Swift is charging $700 for nosebleeds; she's not losing money. Why are we still charging $20 a ticket? It doesn't make sense.
Then there’s e-commerce. We were joking how most e-commerce models are spending a dollar to make five, but in music we spend five to make one … because we're awesome! There are funnels for merch sales, concert tickets and physical music. CDs still sell a lot, and they’re very inexpensive. Vinyl is the best-selling merch item right now in the States, but it's also expensive to print and it’s unpredictable in terms of the manufacturing. But I can order a CD from Discmakers and not expedite it, and it’s here in a week. It costs a dollar a unit and I can sell it for $10.
You don’t know what your fans want, so it's our job to pull them into our sales funnels and learn who they are – their name, the names of their spouse, kids and pets, where they live – and then build a profile on your average fan and create merch they want. They might a cassette person. It’s crazy to even talk about cassettes making a comeback, but people are buying cassettes again. You can buy a cassette player on Amazon for $20.
JG: There have been articles about how the younger generation now is buying film cameras, looking at DVDs.
RV: First-generation iPods are becoming collector’s items.
BS: That speaks to a broader trend of music becoming more commodified. If you have a good manager, they'll teach you this early. If not, you don't need a manager anymore because you have the Internet and ChatGPT. But music is a business. A lot of artists that get attached to this idea of music being some kind of magic or some ethereal thing where you just make a hit song and everything just works out. It’s not like that. It's a business and you have to sell someone something and the thing you're selling is your brand and yourself, so it's even harder to communicate. So you really have to go back to the basics of any business and think of the business plan, the marketing funnels and the sales funnels. All of that stuff is essential for that magic moment when someone listens to your music and commits to being a fan for a lifetime. When that happens you have to be able to capitalize on it and have all your ducks in a row, so you can say, “I’ve got that data. I know who that person is. Next time something comes out, they're gonna get that again.” it's a business like anything else.
RV: And may I add that it's gotta be a great song?
BS: Right! It does have to be a great song.
RV: We're assuming that's the entry point.
JG: Exactly. I stole a great quote from Jonathan Daniel (founder of artist management firm Crush Music), and I lead every presentation with it. Jonathan manages Sia, Green Day, Miley Cyrus, Panic! at the Disco and many others. He was the bass player in an awesome ’80s LA hair metal band called Candy. Jonathan said, “If you give me a great song, my job is easy. If you give me a good song, my job is impossible.”
Just as you were saying, we're assuming you have great music. Everything we're talking about in marketing is after that fact because when you put out music today, it's now alongside Drake and the Chainsmokers and Chappell Roan. You gotta look buttoned-up, you gotta sound buttoned-up. It’s a different world.
We talked about CDs and email. That's old school, but it works! Don't get so caught up in the new technologies that you forget it's all about engaging and growing that audience. I want to talk a little bit about playlisting. I had some T-shirts made that say, “A playlist is not a marketing plan.” When I sit down with an artist, and I know you guys do this, too, the first thing you ask is, “You’ve got great music. What are your goals?” When they say, “I’d really like to be on Rap Caviar or New Music Friday.” OK, there’s a week. What’s after that? Talk a little bit about how you handle playlisting. Everybody wants to be on playlists. There are user-generated playlists, there are DSP-curated playlists. We’ve all been on some great playlists, and they've helped move the needle a little bit. How do you approach that?
BS: I had a lot of frustrations with playlisting four or five years ago, and that's what forced me to build the PlaylistSupply tool. There was a lot of lack of attribution. Five or six years ago playlisting was still kind of this new thing, and the labels were hip to it, but the rest of the market wasn't. The labels were just dumping a ton of money on it, and some of it was botted. We’ve all seen the headlines about Drake and Kendrick and bots …
RV: … And Digster – the major label playlists …
BS: Yeah, 100%. You have to imagine that these labels have the biggest market share and because of that, the platforms that do streaming are not going to be as likely to crack down on them because they like that market share. That brings a lot of business to their platform whether it's fake or not. It leaves a big gap where the indie artists and the people who are just trying to break through have an even harder time.
In the past few years, that's changed a bit. Spotify has done a lot more filtering, and there are a lot fewer bots, but there are a lot of dead playlists – playlists that look like they have following and traction, but they don't.
So you’ve got to pay attention to nuance more than ever before. As you said, Jay, playlisting isn't a marketing plan, but it should be a facet of any rollout because it leads to streaming.
So the tool that I built allows you to do is it allows you to search for the “discovered on” playlists that are on a particular artist profile. I've been listening to a lot of (British rap artist) Blade recently. If you go to Blade’s profile and look on the front page of his Spotify, you'll see a section that says, “Discovered on”, and that's where new fans are discovering that artist. Spotify's algorithm has indicated that, and that's why it displays them there. These playlists might only have 100 followers, but they're showing up on that profile because those 100 followers are listening a lot, and some of those are new Spotify accounts that have just gone to that artist, and so that's a new fan.
There was once this notion that a playlist with 100,000 followers would be a good one, but that’s not the case anymore. You have to pay attention to the nuance. That is, make sure you’re looking at playlists that are well-curated, have good engagement, have a good algorithm. The tool I made allows you to do a lot of that, but it can be done manually as well, it's similar to Instagram five years ago when you saw someone with 100,000 followers. You thought, “This person’s famous.” But now, you wonder, “Is that fake?” It’s the same thing with playlisting and Spotify listenership these days, unfortunately.
RV: I can talk about the editorial side because I work on that on the label side a lot. To Benji’s point, there’s a big chasm between active versus passive listenership – dead playlists that don’t have active listenership. Spotify is purposely suppressing passive listenership.
A case study to prove my point: Last year we released an album (and I love it when artists release an entire album in advance). We’re rolling it out, and the artist is a rebrand. She started out with zero monthly listeners and followers. In April 2025, the fourth single in, we pitched everything. I have a great relationship with all the editors and specifically Spotify. Spotify put this unknown artist on 40 playlists. They just loved the song. It was wild: 20 New Music Fridays, 20 of the biggest editorial playlists including Pop Sauce. She was on the cover of three of them. She's like, “I won the lottery! Let’s go! I'm gonna be famous.” I said, “Take it easy. Let’s push everything back a month and let me show you what's about to happen.” Now, back in 2016, had you gotten 40 of the biggest Spotify playlists, you would have had millions and millions of streams.
So we gave it two months, and in June, we re-evaluated. How’d it go? She had 400,000 streams in two months from 40 of the biggest playlists on Spotify, and by then she’d fallen off most of them. Granted, every release thereafter Spotify supported. But it didn’t do anything. A lot of it was passive, which creates all these algorithmic problems. I usually tell artists New Music Friday is the kiss of death because it hyperinflates something that no one sees is called the skip rate. I thought, “No one's going to New Music Friday to listen because it's so wonderfully curated.” It’s not a good (long-listening) playlist; it’s a discovery playlist because people are skipping through it. The bigger artists can handle that influx of negative data, but indie artists can’t.
If you don't start finding other ways to bring in real listeners, it's gonna get stuck in this algorithmic purgatory that it can't recover from because there's so much bad data pushing it down. The algorithm just goes, “Oh, people didn't like this. They skipped it, they're not saving it, they're not sharing it, they're not listening to it.”
So it's really interesting: How do we navigate Spotify editorials? It’s like PR. It's fodder for social media. And for your parents, it looks really cool … it feels really cool, but it won't move the needle. It’s not a business strategy or a marketing strategy.
JG: It's one of those seven impressions it takes to get people to make a decision to act on something. With a lot of publicity, there's certain outlets that don't push the needle, but it's nice to have them for another impression.
BS: With the artists I've worked with most recently, press is literally just for a cool look.
RV: No one reads it.
BS: It doesn't convert anymore at all. You could get a Billboard front cover, and the number of people who are actually going to become fans off of that is very small. It’s cool to show people a story and to say, “I was in that,” and it might open some doors, but the conversion on press today is nonexistent. Even if all the playlists work out great, streaming doesn't necessarily pay out, so it's not gonna return to your business in a big way. And it also isn’t definitive of success anymore, either. So you really gotta find ways to connect on a deeper level with fans as artists.
JG: Some friends of mine at Warner did an analysis on all the different outlets like weekday morning shows, Saturday Night Live and CBS Sunday Morning and NPR over the last five years where their artists had been on those shows, to see if they had any lift. Not surprisingly, there was very little lift on any of them. In fact, some of them saw decreases. The ones that were consistently positive where those you might think of, like NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, where you’d see a blip.
I want to jump to budgets because when you have a budget, it opens up a whole new world of things that you can do for marketing. Things typically cost money. When you guys are working with an artist, let's say a new developing artist, and you either have zero budget or a very limited budget, talk about what's in your toolbox as you start to try to grow and engage an audience.
BS: I'm encouraging the artists to get creative early on and not spend their full budget on your first release on Facebook ads or Instagram ads or something like that. It's very hard to calculate substantial return there. All the tools I've built have artists in mind, and so they're very affordable. So, of course, the self-plug is to go sign up for PlaylistSupply.com or RadioPromo.io and or hit me up. We do all kinds of free trials and stuff like that for people who want to check it out.
I'm telling artists to put that money towards creative to have the biggest impact in that aspect. If you have a really great song and you think it's a hit record, that money is better spent on a cool video or content that can help build the creative world into something bigger, as opposed to all Facebook ads or Instagram ads.
I've seen some really cool outside-the-box, low-budget creative return way more than ad campaigns. It puts the role back on the artist: Now you gotta get creative, you gotta think outside the box. Think of the last TikTok video, Instagram Reel or YouTube video that you thought was so cool that you had to send it to someone and how you build that moment on a budget.
RV: I usually say, “Don't spend any money.” That’s the No. 1 advice I give to my management clients and my distro clients. I tell them, if I were to pour a bunch of gasoline on some sticks, it's not going to ignite. It’s just fuel, but there's no fire burning. You’re just wasting fuel, so you need a spark before you add an accelerant.
TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are your three biggest, algorithmically driven free marketing tools, so just start there and really get to understand how they work.
TikTok is really interesting because everyone thinks, “Well, I'm posting, I'm posting, and I'm not going viral.” Or “I'm going viral, but no one's listening to my music.” That’s not the game anymore. Channel promotion vs. sound promotion are two very different things.
Sound promotion has nothing to do with you or your brand. Can you get your sound to align with a cultural moment, a trend or a meme? That’s when you see the correlation of, “Wow, this sound is going wide,” when people are using it as the new hashtag to participate in the trend, and then a certain percentage of those people go to Spotify to listen. Outside of time, it shouldn’t cost anything.
Per Benji’s point, I would say that if you have any money, I would invest in create more content, media, creative. “Content” doesn't have to be dirty word; we can just use a different word. I like “media.” You're creating more media to help sell your product, When you have critical mass, you'll know when it's time to spend money when it's time to go, “All right, shit’s really happening now. We should invest in an ad strategy.”
In one episode of Ross Golan’s podcast, And The Writer Is … rapper Russ talked about his model, which whether you like it or not, it was interesting. He said, “I’m releasing a lot of stuff. My favorite song is usually not the song that does well. So I stopped creating visuals, I stopped hiring a team. I just focus on releasing the music and owning the music. I try to do something every four weeks, and then I look back and go, “Oh, wow! That song’s doing really well.” Then I go back and make a music video, then I hire a publicist, then I hire a radio person. I work the thing that’s working because the audience is telling me by their consumption, ‘We like this.’ I may hate that song, but if I put all my money into the song I love, it still would be dead, and I wouldn’t have any resources to invest on something that’s working. Money is finite. We don't have time, we don't have money. It’s too hard to compete with labels or trust fund kids who have millions of dollars. You're not gonna win. But if you're a little more nimble and protect your resources, you can actually compete at a high level.
JG: I like that analogy because then you’ve got a fire to put that fuel on. I couldn't agree with you more. Let’s talk a little bit about collaborations. I’d like to know what your take is on collaborating: playing, co-writing and creating with other artists. How does your stable or artists tackle that?
BS: Obviously, you don't force it. You want to work with people who you're creatively aligned with, but one of the coolest parts of working within the music industry is being in the studio with another artist's camp and just seeing what happens. It’s the way artists can come together and make something totally new that might not have worked together before. From a business standpoint, there's a ton of market research that can be gained by working with people that might have a different audience than you and seeing how they react vs. artists that have a similar audience to you and seeing how they react.
Some artists I've worked with have made the most progress collaborating with bigger artists by joining them on tour as openers. It’s so valuable having a built-in audience and a built-in kind of elder band that can say, “OK guys that was a nice show you opened for us with. But here’s our feedback and how you can learn and grow.” I don't think I've had a single artist where collaboration didn't really benefit them.
JG: You touched on collaboration with that 20-band, one-song-each event, which I think is brilliant, by the way, and I'm totally stealing it because now when I'm going to see that one artist, I'm gonna sit through three. It's called base-swapping – the oldest trick in the book. One of my first shows was Kiss, and Cheap Trick was the opener, and I became a lifelong fan.
RV: When it's authentic right, but when you go to a show and there's a buy on, you think, “Who is this? This is terrible. It doesn’t fit, it doesn’t work. Some artists think if they were to hire, for example, Wiz Khalifa or Lil Wayne to feature on a track that they're going to access that artist’s audience. But that audience doesn't care about you. It’s not authentic.
To Benj’s point, it’s about actually aligning with other artists who are your peers and with whom you have like similar audiences, tastes and music. I tell artists that they’re more likely to get a tour with a similar artist a little bit ahead of you if you just DM them and be like, ”Hey! I'm a big fan I love your music.” You'd be surprised who writes back, “Oh, my God, I'm a fan of your music.” Don’t use me as your manager to reach out to their manager, because then we enter a kind of formality funnel and nothing gets done . When it's personal, it's authentic. It can really change a career.
JG: That's great. You touched on short-form video. There’s a line at 30 seconds because that’s when you get paid. I look at YouTube analytics and see that decay curve, and five years ago, everybody was hitting past that mark. But no one has any attention span anymore – it’s the eight-second canvas. Talk a little bit about short-form video because you don't just throw stuff out there; there's a method to the madness.
RV: In my experience, a lot of artists are “spraying and praying,” just posting and hoping for the best. They're not looking at the back-end. TikTok’s No. 1 metric is retention, and if you get into TikTok for Artists, the only metric they’re posting back there is 100% watch time. They don’t give you metrics for 80%, 60%, 40% watch time because they don't care. It’ either 100% or you’re done.
My marketing guru friend says if you are getting 0% watch time, go back to basics and just post five-second videos. When 90% of them are getting 100% watch time, congratulations! You’ve now graduated to seven-second videos. Then work up to 10 seconds. You have to learn to keep people’s attention, and TikTok, YouTube and others will tell you when you’re losing them. If that’s happening at 25 seconds but your video is a minute long, try making 20-second videos because you're clearly not keeping people's attention. And in this attention economy, that's all these aggregators want.
BS: It is tough because there is spray-and-pray going on. For some people that works, and for some it doesn't. I believe it comes down to the creative behind it. A good example is Vic Mensa, a rap artist I used to co-manage. If you check out his recent Reels or TikTok activity, he's done this personalized, sometimes very politically charged heart-to-heart between him and the listener. It’s a very repeatable format that he does all the time, but it’s still very gripping. It allows Vic a window to touch on current events, but it’s completely separate from his music and lives on his social media channel. It’s a reason for his fans and new people to engage with him, and is something he can rinse and repeat once a week
For something like this, an artist doesn't need a full production team or the manager on hand. Find recipes where, as an artist, it’s still spray and pray, but you still enjoy it, it’s authentic, it resonates with your fans and doesn't require a massive budget. Ask yourself, “What is a style of content I could do once per week and have fun doing?” If you’re having fun, that's gonna come through to your audience and they're gonna have fun, too.
JG: I want to go into our “lightning round,” so these are quick answers. Ryan, what is one tool you can't live without right now?
RV: Songstats. I look at it on the hour.
BS: Claude.
JG: What thing that worked five years ago is sort of dead today?
RV: NFTs.
BS: Streaming.
JG: One prediction where music marketing is headed in the next two years.
RV: Because volume is the problem, it’s automation, and there are a lot of wonderful tools now where you can use AI to help battle that volume. If you're getting a flood of comments from your fans, that's amazing. Create automation where AI can read and start DMs with certain people based on their comments. Another program can learn your “voice” and start interacting with your fans in the DMs. Gradually whittle the volume down to where you as the artist can come in and take over the meaningful chats. We have to start automating stuff because it's just not humanly possible to have every touch point with every fan around the world on every platform.
JG: I love that you brought that up. There's a great book by Rhian Jones and Lucy Heyman called Sound Advice: The Ultimate Guide to a Healthy and Successful Career in Music. It’s written about the industry from a woman’s perspective, and the reason I bring it up is because there are mental health implications. I used to tour in bands, and it was easy back then. You got popular in your city, state or region and might not even leave that area because you could make a decent living. Today, with all the things an artist has to do, from short-form video to looking at all the data and learning AI, it's smart to surround yourself with people who have skills and take advantage of your street team, whether it's your boyfriend, girlfriend or whoever it is doing those things, and not try to do everything yourself.
AUDIENCE Q&A
Attendee Q1: I resonated with and was interested in what Ryan said about sound promotion vs. channel promotion. Could you talk more about that?
RV: In TikTok, there is your artist channel where you post videos and where you can attach original sounds, which are uploaded by the user, and commercial sounds, which are sent to TikTok via the distributor or label. The commercial sounds are how you get paid as an artist; that’s the monetized copyright. Let's say your video goes viral. Most people are probably not looking at the sound or listening to the sound because the video going viral probably has nothing to do with the sound.
The big thing that's been happening the last two years (and it might be dead later this year), is taking the sound and troubleshooting and beta-testing a lot of ideas such as, “What part of this song aligns with what type of trend?” There are dead accounts everywhere, where the major labels and digital marketing companies are trying out these ideas. When they see one getting traction, they start adding influencer marketing: “Hey, guys, this sound and this type of trend are working really well. Here’s the idea, and here’s some money. Start seeding the idea in your own way.” Then the influencers start doing it, and people who watch the influencers start doing it, and then the people who watch the people watching the influencers start doing it, and then your parents start doing it.
This wasn’t a paid promotion, but the most interesting one I saw last year was the rock band Pierce the Veil, who are friends of ours. At the time, they were ending their release cycle and had no more budget. They were not planning on this, but a niche group of young Goth women did this silly 10-second dance of a B-side that went super-viral, from one niche to another – low-hanging fruit that everyone could participate in. It was super easy. The song had nothing to do with the trend; it was considered the audio hashtag for the trend. So in order to be seen participating in the trend, you had to use the sound. My friend showed me their Spotify for Artist account. Before that song went viral, it was doing 10,000 streams a day. By the peak of the global trend, it was doing 1.1 million a day just on Spotify.
But just because your video goes viral doesn't mean your song’s gonna go viral. And if your song goes viral, it doesn’t mean anyone's gonna go to Spotify or Apple to listen to it. So it’s about understanding how a sound is attached to a viral moment, and then exploiting that to drive traffic to the places where you can actually monetize it.
Attendee Q2: Branching off from that question, you put a big emphasis on following trends. When you're trying to get a new artist more traction online, specifically, would you recommend that they use more audio and channel connection towards their own music, or would you suggest that they hop on the trends?
RV: Don’t follow trends. I was talking about starting your own trends. I’m about being your authentic self and find your voice, find your fans. Use these tools to learn how to better use them. Most people don't look in the back end to see what they’re doing wrong and why their stuff’s not working. They just say, “Argh! TikTok shadow-banned me again. I'm never gonna go viral.” No, it’s because TikTok is interest media, it’s not social media.
If you’re posting and your fans aren't seeing it, that has nothing to do with followers, which are a dead metric anyway. Is your content matching the consumer? Is the video interesting? If it’s not, the algorithm isn’t going to support it. That’s why rage-baiting is so popular because people are interacting with it. So you have to look at your content. Is it getting and keeping people's attention? It doesn’t have to be negative; it can be authentic and brand-building. If your goal is to grow, why isn't your content going wider? You have to look at the back end.
Attendee Q3: An artist I work with has 20 songs recorded, and I’ve set up all the accounts. Do you prefer that they do something for a few months on their own and then come to you as a consultant or manager, or should they come to you from the very start to set up the vibe correctly for what you visualize that the marketing should be?
BS: It totally depends on what kind of music they make and what the artist brand is. Most of the artists that I've worked with are coming into it with all the accounts already made. There might be like a rebranding element where I'll play a role in or help with or provide guidance to. Then there are other cases where an artist has all the channels made, they have their own vibe and it’s about building on what that vibe already is.
If you’re a new artist and just starting out, find a way to populate all the channels. Do some basic branding. This goes back to that rapid-fire question Jay asked. There are so many AI resources out there where you can ask, “OK, I'm releasing my first song. I’m a new artist. Ask me 100 questions on how to build my brand and make it marketable.” Answer all those questions.
Then ask, “I know the music I like to make and who I am. But what is my brand and how can I build that? What artists who are similar in my genre doing on social media?” That's another really important thing I love talking to artists about. All artists think they're super unique – that they’re the first person releasing this kind of song that no one else has done before. Most everything's been done before; there's someone who's in your lane whom you can study for market research. See what's working for them on socials and on their channels and their accounts, and do the same thing. Great artists copy – not literally, but look at the cadence, the style, the length. That's going to give you a lot of hints as to what’s resonating within your genre of artists who make similar music as you. That already puts you more in the box of stuff that's gonna win for you.
Attendee Q4: (Asks questions about running ads or paying services to boost streams on Spotify playlists)
BS: I would skip all that stuff. Anyone who’s running ads guaranteeing you streams, they're grifting and you should ignore it. There are no promises, and especially as an early artist with a small budget, they seem easy, like cheat code. But nothing is gonna return as much, in the long end, as bootstrapping yourself and investing in content and your own marketing methods, unless you have some personal connection to an agency or someone who has worked with them before who gives you a personal, extremely strong case study. Most of those who are running ads to get Spotify streams are BS.
RV: Running ads on Spotify is a waste. You can’t put a pixel in Spotify, so you’re running awareness ads at a conversion price point. You’re not collecting any data. As soon as someone goes, “Sure, take me there,” you have no idea what happens. It’s a waste of money.
BS: Even if it does work and you get some streams from it, what is that payout? It’s not going to be what Facebook took from you for the ads in the first place.
JG: It could hurt you. We talk about bots and spin farms. Maybe there’s a publicist who’s trying to keep their job and says, “I do playlist pitching.” You can get your music taken off by DSPs, you can get the wrong audience. There are so many things that can harm you.
Attendee Q5: (Hard to hear, but appears to be about Spotify’s Marquee program)
BS: As for the Spotify Marquee program, it’s all still very new. I’m not doing it, but I know a lot of people who have, and have had great results. A lot of these companies that run ads, there’s this layer that you have to set up the ads and input everything correctly. That’s all another opportunity for them to make money off you by setting up something wrong, and not reaching your audience. For artists just starting out, as opposed to spending the money on being a digital marketer and an ad manager, spend it on the creative, on grass-roots stuff. When the time is right, as Ryan says, when the spark is there, you’ll either have been around long enough to know when it’s time to start running ads, or there will be someone in your camp who says, “OK, I know an expert on that. These are the triggers we’ve seen happening. Now it’s time to get ads going.” But as a new artist on your first release, coming out the door swinging with digital ads is not necessary.
JG: Todd Snider’s song called “Easy Money” has a line, “Everybody wants the most they can possibly get for the least they can possibly do.” I get it: You want a shortcut, that silver bullet. But this is really good advice. Don't waste your money. And when anybody who promises you, “I'm going to get you on these Spotify-curated playlists” or “I’m going to get you a million streams,” run in the other direction.
Attendee Q6: I know an artist who did Facebook ads and it really worked for them to get started.
RV: It does work, but there are so many different ways, and it is a deep rabbit hole. It's not as simple as like running awareness ads such as “Streaming now on Spotify.” What a lot of digital marketing people aren’t disclosing is that 1) it’s very easy to set up because Meta’s AI now handles most of the work. But they’re the digital marketer are still charging top dollar as if they do the work but it's really about the creative, as Benji says.
Attendee Q6: She did say she had a problem. (At this point) she’s just a face and doesn’t have real fans, per se, but it did give her a big boost in credibility. My thinking is it can create problems online, and there are no shortcuts, for sure. But it could get Spotify to realize who’s listening to your music.
RV: That’s just algorithmic … you’re trying to stimulate the algorithm, and this all works with data. Spotify’s in-app tools are highly efficient when there’s a lot of data. Spotify Discovery Mode (a marketing service that helps increase an artist’s music’s visibility on algorithmic playlists among listeners likely to enjoy their music) works when there’s a lot of data. The songs that have worked the most in Discovery Mode for us are those that have had huge syncs. There’s all this organic data that has flooded into the platform from people looking for the song based on its appearance on the Apple TV+ series Shrinking. You put it in the Discovery Mode and it has a profile built on the fan that’s been listening, so it’s very easy to go wide. They’re all the same. Again, out of the gate, you’re going to overspend for very little results.
Attendee Q6: But you are going to make money. (Hard to hear exactly what he said.)
RV: Yes, but this is a business. Why are we spending five dollars to make one? That’s not a sustainable model.
Attendee Q6: To get traction, I’d say.
RV: Death by exposure.
Attendee Q6: Sure.
BS: There’s not a definitive answer like, “Oh, this never works.” I worked with a really cool rap metal artist who had really graphic content – gory and violent. Facebook ads were great at driving traffic, his profile and growing followers. He was just an interesting guy with interesting content. You might build some validity, and those extra followers might get you through the door into another room. But you have to be prepared to lose that $100 or $1,000 or whatever you spend, and then capitalize on every potential opportunity that I presented after that to make it even semi-worth it.
There are a lot of artists who think, “Hey, this song is a hit. If I spend $1,000 on Facebook ads, it's gonna return in some great way or lead to fans.” And that’s just really not true anymore. You find artists who spend that first $100 they saved up on those ads, and then they get demotivated and quit. Facebook doesn't need another $100 for you to quit making art. That’s why a lot of managers say, “Wait on the ads until it’s the right time.”
And it’s the same at the top of the industry. Labels just aren’t coming out the door, signing artists with massive ad budgets, either. They want to see that spark, too, before they open the gates and lay money onto it. They also want that data to be existing and to be set up. They know it’s only going to work if there's a moment that we're capitalizing on.
RV: They're not in the business of losing money, for whatever reason.
JG: It comes back to what you said about putting fuel on the fire. If you learn one takeaway from this, it’s that. When I used eBay 20 years ago, I found amazing things. Not so much anymore. Some of the rules are changing. John Wanamaker, who started the first department store in Philadelphia back in 1875, once said (something that’s stood the test of time), “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Attendee Q7: You suggested reaching out to artists to open for them. But this advice is for artists who already have their own audience, right?
BS & RV & JG: Not necessarily!
Attendee Q7: Let’s say I just started. Why would they want me to open for the?
RV: Chappell Roan didn’t have any audience when Olivia Rodrigo pulled her out. She said, “We have the same producer (Dan Nigro), and he said you're really cool and the music is really good.” Now everyone knows who Chappell Roan is.
JG: I tell college students all the time that you're living in this amazing world where if you want to be a producer, an engineer, booking agent – whatever want to do – you can go online and find people who are doing that.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Have you heard of the writer Seth Godin? He’s written 21 bestsellers such as This Is Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes (and in September ’26, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved). He’s hilarious and smart. I reached out to him one time and said, “Hey, Seth. I read your book and really dig it. I just wanted to let you know.” He wrote me back. I said, “I’d like to have you on the podcast.” And he did! It's the same with whatever you're doing. OK, you don't have an audience yet, but you already have great music, and we started (this conversation about the importance of ) great music.
Ryan mentioned this earlier, but you could reach out to someone and say, “Hey, I love what you're doing. I’m recording and writing right now. Do you have 10 minutes over Zoom for a cup of coffee with me? You'd be shocked at how many people reply.
I'll tell you this: I know these guys sitting up here get calls from time to time from people saying, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I like what you’re doing. I’m trying to learn this thing.” And they give their time when they have it, and I do, too. So use that arrow in your quiver.
BS: The music business isn’t like investment banking or other industries. People are way more approachable. They’re checking Instagram all the time and reading their DMs.
I had a band that got a really cool opening slot with the most perfect on-brand bigger band. It wasn’t because they had a bunch of followers or that the bigger band saw a growth opportunity in their audience. It was just because the band I was managing had released one or two cool music videos, and the other band saw the DM, checked their page and thought, “This is kind of cool.” What they saw was an opportunity to take a smaller artist and put them on the map and be a part of their story. There are so many bigger artist teams and bigger managers who want to do that. Most people work in music because they love music, and so if they see something that resonates with them, even if it has no followers, if they're in a position to bring that up, they're going to do it. It all comes down to just outreach and hitting people up. So you’ve got to shoot your shot. Send a bunch of DMs, hit people up on LinkedIn or email them. You never know what door might open because your stuff is actually good.
RV: Be authentic.
JG: 100%.
RV: “If you say, “Hey, I should be opening for you,” they’re going to delete it.
Attendee Q8: Would you recommend that physical media is super-important?
RV: It feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation. It just depends on how you're approaching it. You can’t sell a single at a concert, because who’s going to buy it? There's no real meaningful way to do that. I usually tell people you need an album because DSPs want to see albums. Forgive the pun, but the DSPs are singled out. Singles are wonderful billboards that an album or EP is coming, but then you need to have that thing you can print and sell live when you get out there.
It’s 99% preparation and 1% luck. Let’s say you DM that person you want to tour with and get the reply, “I love your music. We’re going on tour, and our support just dropped out. Can you go in a week?” How are you going to print vinyl that fast? So prepare: You might print CDs of your EP that you’re releasing and start selling them in advance. Fans can wait until the end of the year to hear it on Spotify or they could buy the CD at your shows.
I’d say to hedge your bets and look at your budget. Not everyone can afford to print vinyl right now, but maybe there’s something you have at a lower cost that those fans can take home when you meet them.
