Spotify is endlessly fascinating to me because it has so many layers. There’s a whole lot to this service that I don’t think that people fully realize. Not only is Spotify a great and surprisingly convenient place to market your band and sell your merchandise, it also is perhaps the single most effective service to get your music out to music lovers. This is not a guide as to how to do those things, that particular side of the equation can be found on Spotify’s extremely helpful FAQ. This article is more about what this can mean for you band and ideas for implementing these to the best of your ability.
What’s important to remember is that though Soundcloud technically has a larger user base it’s a lot more diversified, with speeches and podcasts providing a large chunk of the sites content. Furthermore, Soundcloud has an estimated thirteen million or so paid users out of a userbase of two hundred fifty million people. Meanwhile, Spotify has about twenty million paid users and seventy five million total users. I think this says a lot about the power of Spotify as a platform. It shows us that the Spotify userbase is a lot more dedicated and passionate about the music and apparently they are more willing to invest money in it. (Although I would be really interested to see the crossover between the two platforms) Beyond that – it’s a whole lot prettier and provides a range of functionalities that no other single music streaming platform can fully match.
Beyond that though, Spotify makes it relatively easy to put your content on an easily accessible platform and one that caters explicitly to music lovers. If you want to get the most out of the Spotify experience I strongly recommend doing two things. First, go to the Spotify FAQ for artists and take full advantage of every service they provide. Not all of it is convenient or easy to immediately execute (In fact, a lot of it is pretty confusing) but it is very important and will help to construct something greater further down the line. Furthermore, as you design your Spotify page be sure to check out the Spotify pages of major pop artists, the type of people most likely to be taking full advantage of Spotify. Regular readers recommend that I normally suggest checking out respected DIY bands for this, but I was very disappointed to see that a lot of the bands that I really admire for their resourcefulness and marketing savvy where not taking full advantage of all that Spotify offered.
Here’s the thing – a lot of this stuff is time consuming to set up – but as far as I can tell pretty much all of it is free to initially establish. No other platforms have this level of versatility and class. Spotify is rapidly becoming the most viable entertainment company in the world for a reason – and I can guarantee that your band is not capitalizing on this as much as they could be. Why, Spotify even has some really awesome advertising deals that I can guarantee are a lot better than Facebooks. Think about it, with a single click brings potential fans right to the music rather than pussyfooting around some fan page.
Now, while many of these things don’t require start up cash what some of them do need is two hundred and fifty Spotify followers, which certainly might seem like a hard task. But then think about it – how long did it take you to just get two fifty Facebook fans? Probably not too long. Be that guy. Harass your friends, it will only take them a second and have practically no impact on their Spotify experience but it will make yours a whole lot easier. If that’s not working out for you remember that Spotify has a whole page talking about how bands grew their followers. While I’m not totally convinced on all of their methods I definitely think what they say is valid. Simply put – though ads on Spotify are effective a twenty dollar Facebook ad should also be able to help draw enough followers to start unlock some of the cooler aspects of the Spotify experience.
Is Spotify the panacea to your cares though? No, it is only one tool in a long path on the way to triumph in the industry. You shouldn’t put all your money into it, but it’s certainly a platform that could be making you a lot more money than I think any of us realize. Sure, the streams don’t pay very well at all, but guess what, the merchandise sales that you can generate totally will. Spotify can be clunku and doesn’t integrate as well into websites yet either, but the key word there is yet. The service has drawn the attention of some serious big league investors in recent years and if you think that their in browser plug ins are going to remain clunky then you are very misguided my friend. There’s a lot of inefficiencies right now, but Spotify is growing fast, and if other streaming services are any indication this means that soon they are going to be clamping down on artists and starting to really hurt them. Yet a lot of these services won’t impact you as much if you’re grandfathered in – so hop on board as soon as possible and take advantage of all that this great service has to offer. If the brands unique success is any indication soon you won’t have a choice.
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