Musicians and Artists: Build Your Fanbase!

If you want to make your bread and butter as a musician, besides investing in your skills, it’s also essential to invest in building your fanbase. If you don’t have people listening to what you’re making or coming to your gigs, it’s going to be pretty hard to make a living from your music. With that in mind, the question is: how do you gain new fans? Guestblogger Maaike van Steenis offers up her top tips!

It Won’t Happen On its Own

For more than 8 years, I’ve been training and coaching musicians and creatives in the art of making money from… their art. I get requests from all corners of the creative industry, mainly because someone has just come across my name or a friend or colleague has kindly recommended me. Sometimes, I hear people saying that they feel like they see me everywhere, maybe because they’ve stumbled across one of my blog posts, read an article I wrote in a music magazine or seen my name on the line-up of a show. That people are able to find out who I am and what I’m about this way didn’t happen on its own. It’s something I work at every day to make sure that I’m always somewhere in the picture. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t something I do because I enjoy it, but because I understand that it’s an essential part of my marketing and therefore an essential part of my business. So, if they want to make music their business, any musician or artist needs to be spending a good portion of their time working on promotion and, when it comes to promotion, there are plenty of routes to the same goal.

Maintain a Good Online Presence

You don’t have to be sharing every little thing you do online and there’s no need to be active on every single channel but, for your existing fans and your potential fans, you do want to be easy to find and easy to communicate with. These days, communication is no longer just a one-way thing, where you’re forever sending out updates. Your fans want to be able to respond to you and want to feel heard. Naturally, social media is pretty much made for this but, to play the social media game well, try to avoid just posting when you have a gig or you’ve just brought out a new track. Why not ask your fans some questions and involve them in your work? Do things like actively ask fans to share your messages or even set up a contest so they can win some goodies and they’ll only love you more for it.

Musicians and Artists: Build Your Fanbase!

Work With Others

Working together with other artists and creatives can be a much more fun way of growing your fanbase. You can connect your following with that of one of your creative peers and they can do the same so that you both benefit. There are plenty of ways to go about this, whether it’s a collaborative project, playing a gig together, exchanging blogs, or simply sharing each others’ posts on social media. These are just a few examples of what you can do. The most fruitful collaborations will usually happen when you’re working with another musician or band that you feel a real click with, who are at a similar level as you, and whose sound is a match for your own, so their fans will probably like your work as well.

Bombard the Media

A good review in an online or print music magazine, a podcast interview or an article on a website or blog can have an enormous impact on your brand awareness. In turn, this kind of media couldn’t exist without some good-looking, interesting content. As such, most outlets will be open to suggestions. To get your name in there, you need to make it clear why you’re approaching them and why you think your act will be a good fit for their audience. The idea that you already need to be famous to gain any kind of media attention is an absolute myth. For a reviewer or journalist it can be a real kick to feel like they’ve discovered something new.

Take Part

There are countless contests you can take part in, whether it’s a ‘battle of the bands’ event or a songwriting competition. If you win or finish in the top, the media attention that always surrounds the winners and runners-up will give your name an enormous boost. These kinds of contests can also help you gather some really good contacts and sometimes, you can win a really good prize. On top of that, it’ll give you plenty to post about on social media and give you plenty of fodder for your press releases.

What are your top tips for growing your fanbase? Let us know in the comments!