Last April, I detailed three strategies to get YouTube subscribers with ads. Since then I’ve added 11K subscribers, bringing me to 29K. In the meantime, Google deprecated the campaign type I was using and disabled my retargeting audience. When I saw John Gold of Hypeddit’s video, How I Got 22,000 YouTube Views for $18 (NEW…
Meta has the best advertising platform in the world, and has for some time. The most reliable way to grow your audience on Spotify and other streaming platforms is with Facebook and Instagram ads. If your audience is under 30, you’ll do perfectly fine with just Instagram. Advertisers have been complaining about the gradual loss…
Over the course of my career as a recording artist, I’ve released 13 albums on CD. Two of those got second pressings. Five years ago, there were 5000 CDs in my garage. Now I’m down to a few hundred copies of my third CD, which I’ll likely take to the grave. How did I do…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for equality! And yet when I target tier 1 and 2 countries, the vast majority of my advertising budget goes to Brazil and Mexico. That’s not equality, it’s a bramexitocracy! (it’s a word, look it up) Historically my solution was to devote a separate ad group to Brazil and…
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but is it worth 15 seconds of audio? Meta Ads Manager seemed to think so: And so I tried it with a conversions campaign directing to a smart link for my latest single, “Undone.” Color Theory · Undone I let the campaign run for a week…
A reader of my How I’m Promoting My Music This Month monthly email recently told me: You always begin your letter by saying that your promotion is on autopilot but you never say what it is you do. And so, for the next installment, I wrote a quick and dirty summary of my ongoing promotional…
I’d been kicking the idea of a co-op playlist around in my head for a long time. Around the beginning of the year, a friend prodded me to finally give it a go. Here’s what I proposed: Unfortunately the meritocratic approach didn’t pan out. The ad campaign produced no clear winning song, or more precisely,…
I just… can’t. I’m not saying you shouldn’t! You really should. I mean, it would probably be better if you did. After all, social media is where the majority of music discovery occurs. My advice is to record yourself lipsyncing your track the whole way through in 4-6 different locales, chop those into 60-ish 15-30…
YouTube has been pretty good to me. Since 2012 I’ve racked up 18K subscribers, 9.2M views, and 263K watch hours despite not having any “real” music videos. Granted, more than half of those views were for a song I was hired to cover for a Just Dance game. Embarrassingly, I filled in for Will.i.am on…
Last month I wrote about how Spotify effectively removed audience targeting from Marquee. Worse, my campaign “targeting” all 55.2 million Spotify users in the US only managed to spend 10% of my $500 budget. I concluded that Marquee is now mostly indistinguishable from Showcase, except the latter will quickly blow through any budget you set….
Before you ask, yes, that’s Christopher Columbus, who set sail across the Atlantic on a voyage to discover some fresh jams. I previously wrote that using Spotify Discovery Mode was a no-brainer. I’ve heard it compared to standing up at the theater. Sure, the first person to stand gets a better view, but before you…
Over the years I’ve managed to rack up over 17K subscribers to my YouTube channel despite only having a couple of “real” videos. Sure, I could take my phone to the beach and lipsync. But I won’t. I’ve spent my entire adult life learning how to play the piano, sing, write songs, arrange, mix and…
Unless you’ve been avoiding social media (good for you), you’ve likely heard of ChatGPT, a conversational AI that’s currently free to test. It does a lot of things really well, and some things quite poorly. It’s a consummate bullshitter who will readily and unapologetically admit to being wrong. Can it write lyrics? You betcha. For…
Last weekend, I had some time on my hands. My wife was in Vegas for a soccer tournament, my daughter was at UCLA for a Model United Nations conference, and my son was at UCI where he always is. So I went out drinking. Haha, no I didn’t. I stayed home and worked on expanding…
No doubt you seen AI-produced images popping up all over social media. One such AI is DALL-E, credited with creating the world’s first AI magazine cover. The one I’ve heard the most about is Midjourney, and the beta is now open to all! Over the past couple of days, I’ve had a ton of fun…
I recently explained my strategy for choosing the 22 Spotify countries I typically promote to Now minus one evil empire, it’s 21. Those countries were chosen with the express goal of growing my audience on Spotify. If I were planning a tour (I don’t perform, but hypothetically) I’d make different selections. Similarly, if I wanted…
In our last installment, I detailed a process to evenly distribute your Facebook and Instagram advertising budget across Spotify countries by splitting them into tiers. But what if you’d rather focus on only the countries most receptive to your music? I had an idea to do just that, and so far it’s worked out pretty…
You’ve got a new song and you want people to hear it. Despite all the iOS tracking changes, I still think Facebook and Instagram ads to Spotify are your best bet. For an overview, check out my post on Facebook Ads for Spotify Best Practices. I’m going to tackle a very specific problem here. Are…
A little over a year ago, I released an updated version of my Depeche Mode tribute album with three new tracks. I detailed my attempts to sell the CD to strangers on Facebook here. When the dust settled, I still had over 700 of them in my garage. The tribute has always been the best…
I’ve been releasing a new track every 4-6 weeks for some time now, and I daresay I’ve got it down to a science. I upload the track to DistroKid a month or so before release, then work my way through the checklist below. Many of the items won’t apply to you, but they’re sure to…
I’m exhausted. My 12th full-length album Mages was released on December 3, and I’ve been going nonstop since October. The album promotion was a series of five distinct campaigns, not counting two singles releases over the same time period. I’m going to break it down into bite-sized chunks and perhaps draw a conclusion or two….
I’ve got an album launch coming up, and I’m determined to make it my best yet. That means putting together bundles of merch that my fans will actually want, and not just what I think is cool. I would’ve been happy taking a chance on cassette or MiniDisc, but vinyl is too big a proposition…
Matt Mancid and I just released an album of 80s covers that we’ve worked on since 2013. As much as we would’ve loved pressing CDs or even vinyl, paying the rights for 1000 CDs doubles the cost. We would’ve absolutely, positively lost money. So we released it digitally in two flavors: a 12-track standard edition…
It’s been four months since my last post. Sorry about that! My new album of 80s covers with Matt Mancid has been keeping me busy, among other things. On the promotional front, I’ve got plenty of irons on the fire, including three big reviews in progress. I share all the details in my How I’m…
That's all, folks!
That's all, folks!