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The Impact of Your Product-Market Fit in the Music Industry

There’s a concept called product-market fit, and it’s one of the most important elements in finding your audience, finding customers, in anything you ever want to do. It may sound self-explanatory, but it’s actually pretty complicated when you learn about it in online music education. A really helpful way to think about product-market fit is to think about it as a moment in time.

If you think about the moment when someone is saying the words coming out of their mouth, or when they play you a song, at first it all sort of has infinite potential. One could play a song right now and, in theory, 7 billion people on the planet could love it. But that doesn’t actually happen in the music industry, does it? But as soon as that product interacts with any sort of market, the potential for it starts to fall. This happens even with the greatest things of all time.

But at a certain point, hopefully what happens is it stops somewhere. So that song has infinite potential at first, then it starts falling down, and suddenly there’s some consistency to the group of people that like it. This actually happens with most things that come out. What a lot of entrepreneurs and artists miss, though, is actually doing the analysis to figure out what the commonalities are about where it stopped.

So the story goes that an artist has been playing concerts, and it seems like these five specific people keep going to every show, even though they’re not friends. Is there anything they have in common? You’ll find that it’s usually not random. They actually all like the same five artists. They all listen to music on Spotify but not TIDAL. They all use Android but not iPhone. It can seem very random at first.

But as soon as you notice these patterns, you’re starting to find your product-market fit. You’re starting to be able to define exactly who your target audience is. It’s always recommended, to make a John or Jane Doe profile of who your person is, so you can put a name to your fan. So saying, “My fan is someone who shops at H&M, lives in Canada, is in this age range, and likes these kinds of artists,” is great information to have.

This is really important to do because artists are people who make their own things out of nothing. They are usually not the best at actually predicting who their audience is. It’s been seen time and time again. Usually, what we want to do is make our target audience a mirror of ourselves. So it could be tempting for me right now to say, “My target audience is 32-year-old men who live in New York and who have beards, right?”

But if I actually look at my SoundCloud data, it would reveal that a lot of my fans are 45-year-old women who live in Europe. Which is great, but it’s not exactly me. And it’s actually taking the time to look at where and who my music is resonating with, and finding out what’s common among them. That’s your target audience.

So finding product-market fit is something that will take you a very long time to master as you study music education, but you need to constantly be thinking that it’s kind of a waste of time for you to do a lot of marketing, advertising, and trying to get the word out until you find your product-market fit.

Not finding your product-market fit is how labels and artists waste upwards of millions of dollars by these very expensive experiments of doing Facebook ads to anybody, rather than knowing who they’re selling to. We know that the product-market fit is comprised of people that love these three artists. We’re only going to go there. So it’ll save you a lot of time, money, and emotional heartache by waiting to actually market and do these creative ideas you hopefully have to get the word out until you have found your product-market fit.

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