With 60,000 daily releases I can’t rely only on Spotify to take the music of Them Creepy Crawlies to the world. I learned this early in the journey so at some stage I’m really going to have to fire up our social media channels which, frankly, I’m totally nervous about.
You see, I work for a successful SME with 40,000 followers on Instagram and a burgeoning Tik Tok community. Its success is inextricably linked to the effective engagement with customers, and we have a team of 4 that spends maybe 2 hours a-day posting, sharing, replying, tagging and, ultimately, loving - one of them is fully employed as a content creator. Okay, so I have 180 followers on IG (up, effortlessly I might add, from 113 when I started this project) but I know how hard these guys work – and how talented they are.
With this in mind, I’m sure the greatest challenge to the success of taking the music of anyone to the world is time. Because of my addiction to money, I’m never going to chuck in my 9 to 5, but if I’m to take this project seriously, I have to find 2 hours a night and a few more at the weekend to do what needs doing. Which makes me think how gloriously painful it must be to be a full-time mediocre artist.
So, I’m putting off dealing with IG and FB until I’ve learned a bit more about it all. I’ll keep the Spotify Growth Engine running (see Episode 2 blog) and recently I had some excitement when our releases Insecticide and Buy Some Time attracted some ‘You might also like’ listings which I assume is a good thing. Anyway, the total number of streams has now reached 2,912 (when I started this back in November it was 403) from 688 total and 200+ monthly listeners.
But my main bit of news is that I’ve recently signed up for John Gold’s YouTube Growth Engine.
Of course, leveraging YouTube is a completely different proposition than the faceless, static Spotify. What YouTube offers is you in all your ageing, ugly magnificence. Putting your name to a song is one thing, playing it live is another, but putting your face to it in all its up-close glory seems a completely different proposition. Rock video: the ultimate test of confidence and derring-do. It’s artists as dreamers and adventurers, god-like, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go…
Or is it. Isn’t it just one of those things you have to do as part of a band’s integrated marketing plan? But does everyone who posts videos of themselves worry about being branded a bit of a prat; being found out; accused of taking yourself a bit too seriously? I suppose you just accept that some people will; fuck ‘em; get on with it.
Of course, the rock video is just one way to go but at the moment I’m loving the more intimate Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch, Robbie Williams being Robbie Williams and, closer to home, bites of Piers ‘n’ Pete. I’d like to think I’ve got the guts to star my nipples and bare my chest, sing Angel dressed in underpants and cowboy boots or simply sling my acoustic guitar. Of course, my wife would be mortified so I might need to think hard about how to be authentic, relevant, distinct and engageable.
For the meantime, however, I’ve been learning how to create videos for Them Creepy Crawlies’ tracks that you now can find on our YT channel (it's a bit bare at the moment, btw). That’s been a bit time consuming, but fun and I’ve discovered some great, easy-to-use and affordable apps out there. I’ll be using google ads and either sound-a-like targeting (phrases like 'alternative rock') to put TCC videos in front of people who listen to that sort of stuff. Amazingly, I can even target lovers of a specific band. So, if I'm targeting Bay City Rollers fans, there's an app that finds all Bay City Roller vids on YouTube and lists them for me to copy and paste into my google ads set up. So, if you fancy watching Bye Bye Baby on TOTP, look out for a Them Creepy Crawlies video topping it. It's all very clever!
Our aim on YT would be two-fold: build subscribers for the love of community and/or build views for the love of money although I read it might take 25,000 views to make $100. But Rick Barker, former manager of Taylor Swift, who earns his crust these days selling advice to needy independent bands, reckons the best way to fire-up your YT channel is not doing original stuff but covering the latest super-hits. He’s got a great point cos I for one love a cover crucified by a different genre. Case in point is The Kid LAROI’s ‘Stay’ (ft Justin Bieber). Hop onto YT and key in ‘The Kid Laroi Stay cover version’ and amaze at a rock take by Our Last Night (2.1m views), an acoustic one by Will Gittens (500k) and Vera Blue even does it on Like a Version (174k).
I mean, I’d love to hear what a bunch of 50-year-olds in a garage guitar band could do to a Billie Eilish or Sam Fender track. Honestly, we could do wonders with Heatwaves by Glass Animals (1.3 billion plays on Spotify) so, seriously, watch this space!
- We’ll have a new 7-track record ready in May, but we need to be a bit strategic about its release. No problem about putting it on Bandcamp and Soundcloud or making up CDs, but there doesn’t seem any point releasing an album on streaming services until all songs have been released as singles. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I believe you can only pitch unreleased songs to Spotify editors and have a chance of being playlisted on Discover Weekly. Also, only 1 song per band per month can make it onto Spotify’s Release Radar.
- About releasing, I’ve been learning about Spotify pre-saves which basically means people pre-ordering a song. You serve a snippet of an upcoming release organically or advertisingly to your community and they tap a few links, download an incentive and through some virtual magic the song automatically appears on their Spotify Songs or Albums list as soon as it's released. John Gold provides an entire process from 6 weeks before release, so we’ll follow his advice and see what happens
- I read an article recently about the preponderance of music plagiarism cases. I wear my influences most firmly on my sleeve and it would be a great honour to be taken to court by Jesus and Mary Chain, BRMC or whoever. Unfortunately, I guess it tends to work the other way round but as that great rock’n’roll sage Keith Richards once said, “There's only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is variation".
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Thanks-a-million!
Neil
xoxox
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