How to connect with a digital audience

The text below is a short extract from the first chapter, How to… Connect with a digital audience. In it, Chris Cooke from CMU tackles the world of streaming, with a guide to music rights, the online sites and services that’ll get your music heard and how to find an audience once your music is online. Wicksteed Works, music marketing specialists, have written a practical counterpart to the text – a step-by-step DIY release marketing plan to help you structure your campaign.

Getting your music and finding an audience online

The single biggest revolution in music caused by the shift to digital is that artists can now get their recordings to a global audience and communicate with a global fanbase by themselves. Doing so does require signing up to some platforms, buying some distribution services and joining a collecting society, but all of this can be done with minimal cost and minimal expertise.

Which means that early-career artists can release music and start building a fanbase without having any traditional music industry business partners - like management, a label or a publisher – in place. As the artist’s career progresses and their own artist business starts to grow they will probably want a manager, a label and a publisher on their team. But none of those partners are needed to get started. And, indeed, these days most managers, labels and publishers will expect an artist to have set things in motion before they come on board.

This chapter explains how you can get your music online, how you can earn money when your music is downloaded or streamed, how you can try to drive more listening, and how you can use your various digital channels to grow and engage a fanbase.

Some top tips on digital streaming:

• Spotify and Apple Music are the biggest global premium streaming services, but you want you music on all the platforms all over the world, including the ones you’ve never heard of!
• A distributor can help you get your music on and earn money from most of the streaming platforms. But if you wrote the song, you are also due extra royalties which will likely come from PRS and MCPS.
• Everyone talks about per-stream rates, but the way streaming services pay-out is more complicated than that. However, one simple fact is that when a premium subscriber streams your music you earn lots more than when your track is played on a free service.
• Streaming only works if people listen to your music again and again and again. What can you do to persuade people to keep coming back to your tracks on Spotify or Apple Music?
• Most fans will want to stream your music on their streaming service of choice. But some fans will want a more direct relationship. That direct relationship is really valuable. So make it easy for those fans to connect and spend money.

You can read top tips from each resource for free on the ISM website or join the ISM as a member to download the guides in full. www.ism.org/advice-centre.