Building Your Audience and Positive Image
It is vital for an upcoming independent artist to not only understand their audience but most importantly to connect with them. Many believe that once you release music, have a website up, etc., people will see them and love them. However, there is most certainly work behind the scenes that takes place to drive audience engagement into devoted fans. Below are a series of steps that will help build your audience. Many often have great material but lack the communication and creativity to produce personal social interactions with their audience.
Step One: Put Yourself Out There
Don’t be afraid to show your work. Post your progress on projects including behind the scenes of producing your next work. Get your audience involved with your masterpiece! Devoted fans love following your process, learning about your personality, and also seeing you rise from the ground up. You want to be that band people say they knew before popularity.
Never be afraid of rejection. You will not always get the radio play you dreamed of on your first release. Don’t be discouraged. Don’t be afraid to play around with your sound. Fall in love with your music. Your devotion to your work says it all and does show in great releases.
Always listen to feedback. Whether it is from your community, friends, or family, as an upcoming artist you will have to experiment to see what works for you and what doesn’t. This goes for how you present yourself in concert, on social media, the sound of your music, production/engineering of your project. The list goes on! All feedback, including negative feedback, is worth listening to in order to improve upon yourself as a professional in the industry.
Step Two: Be Professional
This applies to everything in your music career. Professional recording, professional communication, professional appearance. Eventually you will run into and work with other professionals in the industry such as Producers, Engineers, Public Relation Consultants, Radio Stations, Record Labels, and so on. You need a professional image even though you might want to portray a more casual image to your audience. Yes your music may be your hobby but the goal is to make a career out of it and is a professional career.
Keep it casual, but set boundaries. The process of creating music is fun, producing is a blast, and the PR that goes into a release is an adrenaline rush! Everyone works as a team when it comes to releases but scheduling will be tight. Stay on task, stay on schedule and most importantly be punctual and persistent with your project due dates. One infraction of a timeline for release can affect everything on a project from its production, to marketing, and of course the PR work that happens behind the scenes.
Don’t talk negatively about yourself! Even if you are just starting out, never depreciate your self-worth. If you think negatively about yourself, it will ripple into your audience thinking negatively about you. Whether you are talking about yourself on social media, or even talking between songs at a concert, always be positive with your audience. Your audience loves you already for your personality, your music, and the person you really are. The next time you catch yourself writing or saying something negative about yourself or your music, change those words into making it something positive about your audience who is there to support you and help you grow as a person and as a musician.
Step Three: Involve Your Audience
Word-of-Mouth has immediate credibility. Give your audience more chances to talk with you and interact. They will give insight as to what they love about you and your music. Through this valuable information you will understand how to further brand yourself as an artist and what kind of content your audience is looking forward to seeing. The more engagement and interaction with your audience, the more growth you will gain in online presence, streaming, getting radio play, etc. Always keep that open communication with your audience.
Create content worthwhile for your audience. Whether you host live streams, contests for your audience to enter, or have them create Tik-Tok dances to your music, the more content that is created and shared on audience pages the more people will organically become aware of you and begin to follow your own content.
Research your audience! This is one of the most important aspects of building your fanbase. Research what similar artists your audience loves to listen to, where they go to hear concerts, who opens up for artists they like, look at what similar interests does your audience have outside of music genre and where geographically are they located. These all give away how to effectively brand, and market to increase your natural growth as an artist. This way new audiences can find you easily through different means of online sources or within their local community.