This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Do you listen to music on Spotify or SoundCloud or perhaps some other platform? Well, millions of people do, millions and millions of people and most of us probably we can say we stream our music now as opposed to purchasing it and downloading it and having it available offline. Well, even if you have it offline, you could still be listening to Spotify. These platforms also make it easy for independent artists to upload their songs, or I should say drop their songs, their tracks, their albums in many cases allowing them to go directly to listeners and cutting out the need for record companies. Now that's great, but how does an independent musician use these platforms to connect with fans who discover them there?
Unfortunately, there's not an easy way to do that. The best answer is to focus your efforts elsewhere while still uploading to Spotify and SoundCloud of course. But let's not get too far ahead of the question from this listener. It's basically what they're wondering, how can I use SoundCloud or Spotify as a lead generation source? Let's talk about it and perhaps consider some alternatives.
Got a message from our sponsor, shout out to them. Thank you so much for allowing the show to be free to our listeners. Then we will jump into this topic in some detail. >> Hi, Chris. This is Arabelle from San Francisco, and I've been following your projects since the $100 startup.
Thanks for all the help. I'm an independent musician and have been streaming my tracks on SoundCloud. They're getting a lot of streams and my next step is to move to Spotify. However, I have absolutely no idea who's listening and how I can communicate with them. I can't encourage them to follow me or subscribe.
I can't email them since I don't have their info. If I want to promote something, I really have no way to reach them at all. How can I use these streaming platforms to more closely connect me with fans and listeners? >> Thanks, Chris. >> Arabelle, thank you so much for the question.
Thank you for listening as well and following for all these years. Now, this is a great question because I bet we have some other independent musicians out there. We've had a few stories over the years about independent music and how to get that out and such. I think we've had probably a lot more stories about visual artists and people who are making handcrafted items per se. Let us talk a bit more about music and Spotify in particular.
Now, by the way, listeners, before you tune out, in case you're like, I don't care about that. Well, everything about this answer applies to podcasters as well. If you're interested in having a podcast, if you have a podcast, it can and should be available in Spotify. Spotify was behind the podcast game for a long time. I always found it strange.
Lots of other people did too because they were doing so well with everything else. But the service decided to wake up this year and invest tens of millions of dollars into the world of podcasting, including creating a much better interface for listeners, including a pretty robust back-end platform for podcasters who want to submit their podcast. Also, they're acquiring and hosting their own shows. They've really gone all in with it. There are also other services.
Arabelle mentioned SoundCloud, I believe. But I want to focus this answer mostly on Spotify. As for the direct question, what she's saying is people are listening to my music, it's pretty cool, but I have no way to contact them. How do I market to them? Well, unfortunately, the short answer to that, to the direct question, is you can't.
Sadly, there's no way to know who those people are, how to reach them. It's no way to know who's listening to a streaming service aside from whatever analytics you get from those platforms. So they might show you some basic demographics, where people are listening from, et cetera, probably some other data. But it's not like having an email list, right? And the same is true for podcasts, by the way, right?
And not just on Spotify, but also on Apple Podcasts and everywhere else. There are a lot of people subscribed to Side Hustle School. And in some ways, I have no idea who they are. I can see the download numbers, I can see, okay, well, this number of people from this area downloaded today, and here's how it looks over time. I have a lot of detailed analytics, but aside from publishing another episode in the feed, no podcaster has a way to really communicate directly to their listeners through the podcast interface.
So what can you do instead? You're like, well, this is great that I have a podcast or I've got my music up and people are listening to it, but I can't reach them aside from that. The good news is, 'cause that's kind of bad, right? But the good news is, if a lot of people really are discovering your work, your music on Spotify or another streaming service, some of them will find you. I mean, that's ultimately the goal, right?
Is to be able to produce your music and people are coming to find you elsewhere, right? They're looking for your social channels, they're searching for your website, et cetera. But otherwise, like what can you do to be more active? Well, you can focus your independent music efforts on other promotion, which is like posting daily videos, sharing parts of your life on social media, live streaming a concert or jam session, creating a Patreon, perhaps, or any other number of things, like whatever else you would do to promote your music and just kind of look at those streams on Spotify as the reward or the outcome. Like you're doing all this work, you're trying to produce great music, you're trying to connect with folks, and then if it's working, hopefully people are finding and listening, but you can't actually contact them directly, they have to choose to interact with you and just stream your music.
All right, it really is a whole new world, with so many things, with music, with this podcasting medium, with lots of other stuff too, right? Like the chance to be able to connect with people based on shared values, I mean, more than other effects of globalization, to me, that is what enables so many different little micro businesses and people to explore the arts in different ways. So I'm sure we could say more about it, but let's wrap up for today. If you have a question, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We will continue to feature them throughout the rest of the year.
And thank you so much, by the way. I really enjoy making this show for you. Much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
