Beginning today, we’ll be posting one “mandatory strategy” every week or two, where our objective is to give you a quick strategy recommendation that we believe to be a “must” if you want to be successful in today’s wild, often unknown, and digitally driven landscape of the music business. This week’s “mandatory strategy” recommendation is to ALWAYS BE ACQUIRING new fans.

The Art of Frequency

Anyone who knows me (Ryan Wines) and my philosophies will know that I regularly preach that artists today need to develop the “art of frequency”, where they are regularly creating and evangelizing new music to their fans and to the masses. It is my belief that independent artists who take more than a year to release a record these days, without releasing any other public material (EPs, singles, demos, live tracks, videos, etc), will be largely be abandoned by their fans and will be considered irrelevant by others. This is do to a large variety of factors, one of them being the vast competition from other artists who produce material more regularly and a general inundation of music from so many sources. If you want to separate yourself from the static that surrounds us, you must produce material with a high degree of frequency and your work must simply be better than most of the rest (be BRILLIANT!). Note: More on “The Art of Frequency” can be found in a previous essay here: http://petmarmoset.com/about/pet-marmoset-strategy-posts/

Fan Acquisition

As such, if you are regularly putting out new material, you ABSOLUTELY MUST be working equally hard (if not harder) at building and developing your fan base. Simply put, there’s no point in putting out a lot of material if you don’t have an audience already interested, developed, and ready to go nuts when they get it. As many of you know, at Pet Marmoset PR + Digital Strategy, we work closely with Topspin Media in developing and executing our direct-to-fan strategies. At Topspin, they focus on three core stages of development:

1. Creating awareness (aka Fan Acquisition)
2. Making connections (I prefer to call this “Engage and Interact”)
3. Monetizing

Too often, artists complain that they aren’t selling enough merchandise to justify an investment of time and resources in strategy, publicity, an effective website and other tools. Many artists take the standpoint that they don’t make enough money to invest any more than they’re already spending on recording, mixing, mastering, duplication and other more traditional costs associated with releasing music. As such, most artists will skip steps #1 and #2 and will get frustrated that #3 isn’t happening. Read more »