Almost every month, music producers find tons of new tracks released by unknown artists. Much of this discovery is happening on social media networks where these new tracks are going viral left and right. We now find ourselves in a media landscape where literal legends are using TikTok algorithms to turn no-name artists into big names in just a few weeks.
In 2024, amid the threat of an impending ban on TikTok in the United States, opinions began to arise among many marketers that Instagram might be the new TikTok. A lot of musicians are talking about the same thing.
Newbie artists may get the impression that promoting their content on social media for free is easy and enjoyable. But, in fact, social networking algorithms “don’t want” to promote any content from ordinary users who don’t have many followers. And all of them, thanks to the shareholders and management of the companies behind social networks, are obsessed with vertical video.
And so, an aspiring music producer should prepare for the fact that he or she will have to spend an abnormally long time and a lot of labor on producing meaningless short videos to promote their music, rather than working on the music itself...
According to an IFPI study, people spend a lot of time listening to music. Take a look at some of these key findings:
You might read these findings and think that musicians, composers, producers, and artists would be thrilled at the realization that there are a ton of market opportunities out there. But…
In 2022, more than 100,000 tracks were published and uploaded to music streaming platforms (like Spotify and Apple Music) every single day. According to some preliminary data, in 2024, musicians from all over the world will publish more than 130,000 tracks daily.
And now let's see how much money music copyright holders receive as compensation from one stream on streaming audio platforms.
· Spotify: Rights holders earn approximately $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. This translates to about $3,000 to $5,000 for one million streams (Digital Music News).
· Apple Music: Rights holders receive about $0.01 per stream, which means they can expect around $10,000 for one million streams (Virpp), (Digital Music News).
· YouTube Music: The average payout is roughly $0.002 per stream.
· Pandora: The payout is around $0.00133 per stream.
· Tidal: Known for its higher payout rates, Tidal pays approximately $0.0125 per stream.
With the knowledge of these rates, an aspiring music producer can quickly calculate how many streams his or her music will need to generate so that he or she can earn the income they need to survive.
Intuition tells indie musicians that there is no alternative way to find their first listeners other than posting music on one social media network or another. And the fact that the music economy has largely become a "playlist economy" does not negate the importance of social networks.
However, the belief that free music promotion on social networks can just get you an acceptable result is naive.
Credits: PNW Production, Pexels CC
The algorithms used by social media networks are opaque. In fact, no one except for a small circle of the company’s employees, shackled hand and foot by ironclad NDAs, knows exactly how user content is distributed on social platforms.Twitter was the only major social network that for a relatively long time provided individual scientists and research teams with limited access to some of the internal functions of the platform.
Since Twitter became X and one eccentric person became its key owner, scientists have been denied access to the APIs they used before.
The research that was carried out up to that time has been published and only these scientific works are really able to shed some light on the inner kitchen of social networks.
Entrepreneurs, including music entrepreneurs, among whom we include indie musicians, are forced to rely on the opinions of marketers. But marketing agencies have only limited empirical experience working on social media for their clients. And whatever experience they do have is at the risk of becoming outdated at a staggering rate. The same applies to scientific research, but hey, at least it’s scientific!
So, what did the scientists who happened to work with Twitter find? They confirmed that the Matthew Effect works on social media. To put it simply: "The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer" or "Whoever has a lot will get even more."
To quote one of the studies:
And, by the way, most of the messages are usually created by a small circle of people. 25% of the most active users create 97% of all posts. Moreover, these are mostly not original posts: 49% of them are reposts and 33% are responses to other people's posts.
Anyone with even limited experience engaging in free social media marketing on their own might be able to tell you that the Matthew Effect doesn’t apply just to X, but also to every other social media network.
An account owner with a small number of followers has to bust their chops so that their posts get some notice (number of impressions). And the experience of marketers and indie musicians tells us with some degree of confidence:
This statement fully applies to the music business, and especially to indie musicians who do not have the benefits associated with the Matthew Effect.
The new religion of the music market is the creation of videos with an aspect ratio of 9:16 and a length of 15-30 seconds.
By 2024, young producers and marketing agencies had figured out there were some actions that could be done in a music video that could boost it in the algorithm.
This sad list can go on for quite a long time, but the essence of this phenomenon is clear. In fact, just a very small number of musicians who are specialists in music (and not in video production) are able to independently produce a sincere video (without flirting with the audience) that breaks through the noise.But, the sad truth is, there’s no way out – we must either play the game and produce the vertical videos the social media networks crave or accept that we will forever remain no-name artists.Some lucky people manage to maintain a balance between commitment to their honest message as a musician and the need to make dozens of videos a week for social networks (and dozens of them NEED to be made).
Unfortunately, there is no true recipe for a successful 15-second music video that promotes a song. One thing is for sure: teasers for a song are suitable only really for those artists who already have a large audience. For indie artists looking to promote themselves in short videos, it’s better to use tracks that have already been published and uploaded to streaming platforms.
Usually, if the TikTok or YouTube or Instagram audience like just a fragment of a song, they will Shazam it. And they really don't like it if they can't find the song on streaming platforms…
Promoting music for free with short vertical videos can be exhausting and frustrating for indie musicians, especially if they are introverted and aren’t comfortable promoting themselves on camera. The effectiveness of most of the created and published videos on any platform will be zero or almost zero. It’s just part of the numbers game. It is impossible to predict what exactly will become big.
These are the starting conditions for aspiring music producers. It’s the media landscape we found ourselves in and we have to accept that and move forward.
The question is: what services and technologies can help us make short videos without embarrassing ourselves or compromising our art? We’ll cover that next time.
We spoke with an independent artist from Los Angeles, Carley Davis, about her experience in promoting tracks without investing in advertising. We wanted to know how effective she felt free social media promos were as an independent artist and if vertical smartphone-style videos really did help to increase an artist’s audience. Here’s what she had to say:
“Free social media promos, for me personally, as an independent artist, have been incredibly effective. It has been the biggest blessing to me in my journey in this, in pursuing and building this career and building my audience. I think it is one of the best tools that we have access to as artists. And the reason for that is there are no bounds with social media.
“The people and the opportunity to reach people is infinite. And I find that when I am being authentic, being myself, showing up as me, you know, whether that's personality or funny stuff or music or whatever, it casts a big net out to an audience.
“You can reach anybody in the world. And from those people, you kind of start to develop and see your core audience and your core fan base. And so, for me, social media has allowed me to not only reach way more people than I feel like you could without social media, but also they gave me a platform and a place to nurture and feed and pour into the audience.
“And I think that that is priceless when it comes to being an artist. And I don't think it can be just self-serving. I think there is purpose behind what we're called to do, what we're doing. And finding the people is the first step. So social media helps you do that. But then the platforms that you build your social media presence on, that's your audience.
“That's the people that you can pour into and nurture and feed, you know, for lack of better words, these songs and these messages. And I think it helps increase an artist's audience a hundredfold. I mean, it is one of those tools that we have in our modern kind of music industry world era that is – I think the best tool and the best thing an artist can do.”
