Build Your Fanbase

The Problem(s)

Without a strategy to gather, store and keep fans, you go nowhere. Every release my introduce people to your music, however social media is far too loose and undependable as a place to store fans. Communication with followers is far too unreliable. What about music platforms like Bandcamp? They do give you a lot is great features but so far none of the key music platforms give you effective tools for the most fundamental processes:

• Adding fans
• Engaging fans

It isn’t adequate enough to give you a shopfront to sell to fans. The simple email newsletter they provide is far from adequate enough to engage fans either.

No matter if you use social media as your fan hub or your music profile newsletter as your fan hub, neither gives you the tools or process to adequately gather, store and keep fans. In fact, often the rate of gaining fans is undone by the rate of disengaging fans. This means each song release doesn’t move you forward. You remain stubbornly stuck with very low growth in fan numbers, which is misleading because it doesn’t tell you the rate of disengaging fan numbers.

Both platforms are also plagued by follow-for-follow artists. These people ARE NOT your fans. Ok, generously a few might be, but almost all ARE NOT your fans. Such fan lists may grow but most will never listen to your music. The fan numbers are more about stoking your vanity. You can easily tell if this is your list. The symptoms are:

• Your fans are completely disengaged
• When you release a song, it gets almost zero response
• Even your comments section is pretty dead

In other words, they do not behave like fans, because… THEY ARE NOT FANS.

The Concept

To build your fan base you need a few basic ingredients to create a simple concept to achieve that. You need:

1. To find more people to listen to your music (Discovery)
2. To add some of those people to your fan base (Engagement and Conversion)
3. To retain as many of your existing fan base

To turn this into a finished strategy you need to move on from a basic concept to a more detailed version that specifies how you would do it.

How do we do this?

To collect fans we need a method or process to gather them, and fundamentally we need a place to gather them. Lastly, we need a way of keeping them, and more importantly, that means keeping them engaged.

To find more people to hear your music you need to:

• Increase your reach
• Target your audience

To add people you need an effective process that takes them from strangers and turns them into fans.

To retain fans you need a process that keeps fans engaged with your music.

A big part of achieving these last two is an email list that provides a fully featured autoresponder. This is something that NONE of the band platforms provide. Your mailing list is one of your most important assets, yet what band platforms provide is way below par, way below what is required.

Beyond that, you will need a number of components from content to reach listeners and the format that content should be presented in, to the content and process of turning them into fans. You will need to learn how to use your autoresponder effectively. You will also need to know how to build buzz about your content.

Above is just the fundamentals. All should be implemented BEFORE you focus on anything else, like reviews, radio and podcast airplay etc

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