Marketing for Musicians and the New Landscape — Personal Experience with Adam Ivy
After working as a live musician for 10+ years in Touring music and Piano bar entertainment, I was ready to get back to my roots. In 2020, as the Pandemic raged, I took advantage of the time off to write and produce my first full-length album (having written many songs since age 12). The piano bar world is a cruel master — amazingly fun, but if you’re traveling, it is an almost endless barrage of hotel stays, flights, and 11pm “dinners” at Taco Bell. After 10 years, even without something as all-encompassing and unexpected as Covid, I was definitely ready for a break.
Enter the new world we’re living in with streaming services: Even if you’re just in your 30s, you probably remember the before era — physically buying CDs, cassettes, and in general, the ‘gatekeeper’ model: Record labels stand as the almighty judges in some Kafkaesque scenario. The keepers of cool are the music press; and we’re not in the ‘NPR is God’ phase yet — Rolling Stone still matters, hell, MTV matters as important visibility. These are what stand in your way, Fool, if you would dream of making even the slightest dent in the musical landscape, regardless of genre.
Well, sort of. An important distinction: If you could afford to churn out a decent demo (or even full EP/album), you had a real leg up. These were the days in which regular folks would still shell out nearly $20 for an album, and quite frequently if they were a big music fan. The pie shifted dramatically after Napster, Limewire, and piracy destroyed the record industry. While it has recovered marvelously, it still hasn’t incentivized the true return of earning power to up-and-coming musicians. I recall an offhand remark in a Chuck Klosterman book about this; in the 90s, someone like Tori Amos could become a millionaire selling CDs out of her trunk as she did her own DIY tour. This is not to suggest that *many bands made quite that much or were that successful, but the point is, the general scarcity of music (relatively speaking) meant you could hope to monetize your recordings if you were good and count on some income.
The new era has brought new gatekeepers, and while it has a ton of wonderful advantages, it’s important to see getting your art out there in context.
Enter some of the new marketing services and promoters you’ll find across YouTube and social media; there are many. I ended up working with one -Adam Ivy — and wanted to share my experience.
Adam is a producer and former Corporate marketing strategist. I saw a variety of his YouTube videos in a stretch of watching a lot of ‘how to grow’ type videos in 2020. I enjoyed his energy and overall sense of ‘this stuff works, but be prepared to grind — it is not overnight magic’. I actually appreciated that, and it was enough to sell me on working with him and his team.
After being in the music industry now for 10+years, working as a touring musician, opening for legacy artists like KC and the Sunshine Band, being flown to Dublin to perform, working in Vegas and much more — I can smell bullshit a mile away. This isn’t that. It is not promises of going viral (you probably won’t). It is learning what processes make for the best chance of success and how to scale what you’re doing, and what you enjoy, to a point where other people can find it. And you can monetize it too, if you get good at everything.
My following isn’t enormous but I credit getting better at how to release music, build hype, and find fellow fans of my little subgenre to his concepts.
It’s actually important to stay on this point for a moment, as his program and others are sometimes unfairly discussed online, and I have a sense from the comments of why:
Musicians today easily forget our context — until or unless you get to Taylor Swift’s level, it is almost impossible to make meaningful income from the primary way people consume music today (streaming services). The other half of this context: There are so, so many amazing musicians and such an unfathomable quantity of music being uploaded every day. In the end, it’s a good problem to have: We live in a world of such creativity and dynamism. For artists though, it is both a supply and demand issue as well as, realistically, a new playing ground of competition — if you want to be heard, you have to work on who you are and why people should be interested.
The other option, obviously, is be the 1 in a million who has the combination of talent, youth, money, and connections and lives in LA or Nashville, and gets spotted and never looks back. It’s not that that doesn’t ever happen. It’s just that for most artists, it is a grind at some level. And that getting to the very top is very scarce; Kurt Cobain was still sleeping in his car the night Nevermind came out.
So the gripes about music-purity-less-social-media-branding are absurd; that died a long, long time ago, well before TikTok influencers became the new reality. And the other mistake is thinking that any marketing strategy replaces the importance of having great music and at least *good enough singing and playing ability for your genre. It doesn’t matter how you’re putting your stuff out, without basic talent or at least something very unique about what you’re doing, you weren’t going to get signed by Atlantic or something to begin with.
On this note, let me also talk about 2 things I got out of Adam’s curriculum, one personal, and one conceptual: The ‘mentorship program’ lets you work with some talented coaches, and even better, get involved with other people doing the same thing. The community aspect, even for me as a hermit-like kermudgeon, matters. The moral support when you make a post which took hours only gets 8 or 10 likes (and 2 of them were from bot accounts…) actually does help; the struggle is real. Redd and the other people Adam works with are great.
And the conceptual point? The advantage of the internet is evolutionary — everything can find its niche.
The new era is both steady-state, and dynamic. The dynamic part is the same as it’s always been; the culture of music coolness is smoke and mirrors, it’s ephemeral, it changes, it’s kept alive in cities and radiates out; it’s Pitchfork and NPR, it’s right place at the right time, right song, wearing the right sneakers and having the right haircut. That stuff hasn’t really changed. What HAS changed, perhaps debatably, is now you can make what gives you joy and still have a shot at finding it’s audience (assuming, all things being equal, you’re good at it of course).
Because if we’ve learned anything from the internet — it’s that literally everything has an audience, no matter how tiny, or how previously popular, or how intellectual, how quirky, how non-mainstream. Why is that a bad thing?
The long and short of it: Really learning how to a) create community around what you’re doing, and b) understand enough about social media to find that community and build it, is the great equalizer in the streaming age. I came to see it as complimentary, also, with getting onto a Spotify Editorial playlist (the gold standard for getting some legitimate, organic streaming visibility). I.e, finding people who dig what you specifically do does NOT replace getting your music to blogs, local press, playing shows, etc. It is part of the package; and to have a chance at leveraging what you create in the hopes that people will find it out of a functionally infinite amount of content on the internet is a game changer towards that end.
