If you are looking to boost your engagement with a target audience, your digital goals are to find platforms that have the easiest conversions per touch point. This means that you can easily: 1) Find an audience; 2) Connect to that audience; and 3) Convert that audience to a fan base.
Constantly searching for the best platform can be time consuming and wasteful. There just aren’t that many platforms in the digital space for new growth. When a platform is too highly competitive, it is known as being saturated. Saturation means that your conversion, or getting a new follower, takes more effort than it is worth.
However, since there are fewer and fewer platforms to expand into, as a music marketer, you need to rethink this classic approach. Instead of finding new platforms, you need to rethink what “saturated” actually means. Take a new perspective on the way you market and make the best of a bad situation. Spotify is the perfect example of this issue.
Too Many Artists?
There are literally thousands of artists currently on Spotify application with profiles and audiences that will constantly follow and listen to their new music. This may seem like a bad situation because how are you going to gain traction with all of that competition. Instead of trying to make a name on Spotify, you could go somewhere else that is less saturated with people and artists.
This is the easy answer and the inappropriate way to go. Don’t let yourself get stuck in this cycle. Instead, you need to think of better ways to capture your target demographic on Spotify. Spotify will make you famous and make you money. Giving up on it will be like admitting you lost and will never make it. Don’t let this mind set keep you from going after your goals. You just need to think outside the screen.
Why Fight the System?
Spotify and other social media platforms put in place a set of rules and regulations to try to even the playing field such that everyone can have the same access to the audience they want. However, this isn’t what happens in real life.
Rules are meant to be broken and Spotify only cares about it if you are blatantly abusive or discriminatory. Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Reddit, etc. are all filled with people that take advantage of the rules. These aren’t people practicing black hat SEO. These are big budget, San Francisco marketing firms, that handle name brand companies.
You are probably wearing or eating or using a product that uses tactics that you would think are wrong but are just not initially thought of being commonplace. So, really, you aren’t fighting the system. You are fighting your competitors. They use techniques that are alternative to general thought processes. If you want to be relevant you should too.
Work the System Instead
So, this means you need to think outside the screen. Before we dive into the number one way to boost Spotify growth, let’s chat about the standard, non-marketing method of profile development on Spotify.
If you started a profile for uploading your music, most likely, you upload your music and let is sit. You may reach out to your followers on Twitter or Facebook for shares and listens, but there really isn’t much else to do. At the end of the day all you can do is hope for the best and wait for the magic to happen. That is the problem. The magic won’t ever happen because Spotify doesn’t care about your impact on other platforms. All it cares about are the plays and streams on its site.
Buying Plays Isn’t Uncommon
Use this knowledge to your advantage. You can get large amounts of organic growth if the Spotify algorithm picks up your tracks. The algorithm will then share the music with others that listen to that genre. This is how you can make sure your music spreads. It won’t happen any other way. So, make sure that your plays increase over weeks to show that you have a sustaining power that can outperform your competitors.
The only way to do this is to buy Spotify streams such that the algorithm notices that your popularity is growing. Once you’ve gained enough organic growth you can back off the purchases and run with the natural sharing. This is a normal practice by most digital marketing firms and isn’t uncommon. What are a few dollars if it means you could gain a few hundred followers on Spotify and start making real money with royalties?
