If you’re going to invest time and money into promoting your music, you’re going to want to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Tracking the ROI from your marketing efforts and successfully managing your fanbase is a massive topic, and one that goes way beyond the scope of one article, but it’s such an important area that we will cover a couple of fundamentals here.
Measuring Performance
Spotify for Artists
The first place to start is Spotify for Artists.
Here you can access in-depth analytics about your Spotify performance. You can monitor your streams, followers, and listener demographics.
Additionally, it offers insights into playlists where your music is featured, enabling you to target your promotional efforts effectively.
Spotify for Artists is available to anyone on the platform, it’s free, and you also have the option to share access with any team members or collaborators. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be set up here.
Advanced analytics tools
While Spotify for Artists is a great tool, it doesn’t really provide you with the bigger picture beyond your Spotify performance.
Artists today tend to be multi-platform, spread across not only multiple DSPs, but also across multiple social media platforms.
Monitoring your growth across all these channels at once can be tricky and that’s where more advanced analytics tools come into play.
This is where you would want to consider using an advanced analytics tool such as Chartmetric or Viberate.
These tools provide insight into your performance, allowing you to see how your metrics are changing over time and helping to make sure things are moving in the right direction.
Managing Fan relationships
Managing relationships with your fanbase is one of the most difficult parts of the marketing process.
This is because for the majority of artists, their fanbase is fragmented across multiple platforms, and communicating with them all at the same time can be tricky.
Not to mention that you don’t always have an understanding of who these fans are, especially on streaming platforms where you have no way of interacting with them.
That’s why we recommend from an early stage to try and get your most loyal fans into a place where you have a more direct line of communication with them.
While this could mean your social profiles, one of the most direct routes to contact is email addresses and phone numbers.
These two methods of contact have the highest success rate, and they give you the most control over your fanbase data.
When you are just starting out, you’ll likely be more concerned with algorithms and spotify streams, but as your audience grows, your ability to communicate with them will become much more important.
So keep this in mind when building your audience, and make sure you have a contact method in place for your most dedicated fans.
