You probably got here by clicking on something regarding building your image or music marketing. The truth behind your intention for doing so was probably that you want to build your audience, which is important to keep in mind during your music education. Having a clear image of what your marketing strategy will be is very important, and it should fit into a really clear goal that you hopefully have: finding your fans, identifying them, going out to where they are, and giving what you’ve made to them.
This goes along with any other aspirations you might have about getting a record deal or getting management. All those people in the music industry are just chasing audiences. They’re not chasing you. They’re not chasing the talent. They’re chasing audiences.
That means, your focus should be finding out who your audience is. The really good news is, unless you’re making a really bad product, assuming you have pretty good songs, there is an audience for you out there. There’s an audience for everybody.
One of the first important changes that we all need to go through when we start communicating about the things that we’ve made (and that’s what music marketing is, right?) is to grab your audience’s attention. We’re just trying to communicate and say, “I want to win your trust to take the 15 seconds to listen to my song.” To do that, I need to say something, or you need to read something.
The first big change we need to look at is to refraining from simply just focusing on describing what we’re doing, which a lot of us start out doing in the beginning. We say, “Hey, I’m Mark, and I play guitar.” But that’s sort of a commodity and it doesn’t really resonate on an emotional level with anyone.
A really important hack you might learn in online music education is to actually just change the sequencing of saying what you do and focusing on saying why you do what you do first. Then you just illustrate that what you’re working on, be it your band, your album, whatever project it happens to be, is proof of what you believe in, what your “why” is.
So on one hand, I could say, “I play guitar. I’ve been playing for a long time. I have an album coming out. Please listen.” That doesn’t resonate very hard, does it?
Or I could go a different route and say, “When I was growing up, I didn’t see my brothers or sisters very often. But one day, my brother came around and gave me his guitar, and then everything changed. I ended up writing songs. I have an album coming out with those very songs. Would you like to listen?”
Now, it doesn’t really matter if my style of music isn’t your cup of tea, as long as — on a belief level — if my “why” has resonated with you. If it has, then chances are you’re going to take a moment and check it out, which is all we’re ever trying to do. So this pivot to starting with “why” is really important.
It’s not just rooted in psychology. There’s also a biological component to it. I promise we won’t go too scientific in this course, but the reason we all focus on “what” is because the outer layer of our brains, the first thing that the information I’m saying is reaching, just focuses on language.
So if I know that the first thing you’re going to process when my words hit your brain is “what” I’m saying, I’m going to emphasize “what.” But where we make decisions, where our beliefs and our values live, is actually deeper in the center part of the brain. That’s why “why” is more important than “what.”
What we’re essentially doing, if you can visualize it, is that by starting with “why,” we’re jumping right to the decision-making point and we’re not making all these words go through the processing part of the brain. That’s all happening as well, but we’re sort of taking a shortcut. So it’s literally in our biology that when we lead with “why” in our beliefs, things resonate faster.
