Thinking orthogonally again, a really great trend that comes more from the technology world but is a great one to also bring into the music world is this concept called growth hacking. The overlying idea behind growth hacking is this sense of taking areas of marketing and creating things that we’ve always described as completely disparate things. For example, being in the studio, getting my message out, advertising, doing data analyses, looking at who is resonating with my stuff — we’ve traditionally thought of these as separate phases and that they each happen only once.

Growth Hacking in Music Education

Growth hacking says, “Not so fast.” That process can be cyclical and going on all the time. If I have enough songs and am putting out a song today, I can look at how people resonate with it and who’s resonating with it, and that can influence the song that I’m putting out next month.

And we just keep going around. It doesn’t have to be so isolated. A really great example of who’s done growth hacking well is anyone who makes a change to their product that sort of does the marketing for them. Remember this as you continue your online music education.

Before releasing work in the music industry, something really important I recommend doing is called “quant-based marketing.” It’s basically this idea of literally plotting out how you’re going to get the amount of traffic that you would like to get before ever releasing music. What we really want to avoid is putting out a song, and then first starting to market it, and getting a certain amount of traffic. A music journalist or an influencer wants to feel like they’re getting to cover something new.

The first thing to do is to establish a goal. Let’s say you want to put out a song soon. Say you would like in the first four weeks to get, say, 50,000 streams. That’s totally cool. We just need to reverse engineer how you’re going to get that. So what I’m going to do is pick a few outlets, influencers, things I either have relationships to or people that I’m starting to build relationships with, and I’m going to look at their audience size. If you’re a student at a university, a great place to start is to see if there’s a school paper or a school blog at your university, even if you’re in online music education. Would it be relatively easy to look up the editor’s email address and send them a message, asking to be covered in it?

Next, I would look up the traffic amount; what is the audience size of that school paper? In music education, you’ll find there’s a great website called SimilarWeb. Amazon has a tool called Alexa, where you can check the traffic counts of different websites. So, let’s say your school is getting 100,000 unique visitors a month. Basically, you can think of it like this: if the school paper writes an article about me, in theory, 100,000 people could be seeing that article about you and your song.

The next part of it is sort of trying to guess how many people would actually convert from that. So even though 100,000 people might see that article, maybe only 10% will click on it. So that gets us down to 10,000 people actually seeing your article. Now, they’re reading your article. The question is how many of those people are actually going to click on the song? That was your goal all along. Maybe 10% of that 10,000, so let’s say a thousand people end up being converted to your song if you’re featured in your school paper. That’s amazing.

We know that beforehand, even if our goal is 50,000 hits and we just got a thousand, we’re on our way. Now, we just need to do that five, six, ten, fifteen more times with different kinds of outlets. Doing all that before deciding what the release date is is huge, because then the release date comes, and you know what? You can sleep really soundly knowing you’re not guessing. You’ve pretty much guaranteed the amount of traffic you’re going to get. This is going to be a very big difference between artists that are really disheartened by the response they get versus ones who know that it’s starting at a certain point and hopefully grows from there.

When you’re booking a show, there are a whole lot of actions you need to take before you actually get into the venue on the day of the show, and one of those actions is called advancing. To do this, you write an email to the venue in preparation for your show with your tech rider, your hospitality rider, your questions about the run of the show, and any other information you may have, including your stage plot as well as your input list.

The hospitality rider is often what the band sends to the venue to make sure that they’re hydrated, and that they have everything they need in terms of a backstage setup. That includes water, drink tickets, towels, a mirror, chairs, and other things you might need to make sure that you take care of yourself in order to put on the best performance that you can.

In some cases, hospitality riders can actually be pretty funny. Some people will put that they only want green M&Ms. Some people will put that on Monday, they would like Doritos, and on Tuesday, they would like Ruffles. Some people have puzzles on their riders. They like to keep things fresh backstage and have something to do. A lot of people have newspapers from the area on their riders. Some people have even put kittens and puppies on their riders and actually received them.

One of the most important things to remember when you walk into a venue is that you are in control of your show. I don’t mean that you need to be overconfident about the way that you take up space in the room. What I do mean is that your kindness to your bandmates, your kindness to the employees of the venue, the front-of-house engineer, and everyone else who’s working is really paramount to everything else. You are in control by the way that you treat everybody and the way that your generosity comes through while playing the show.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how artists interact with venues, in addition to many concepts and lessons about working and succeeding in the music industry, think about giving online music education a try. This is the only form of music education that requires nothing more than an internet connection, and ideally a passion for the subject.