[MUSIC PLAYING]
You want to be heard.
That's why you write songs.
And building your audience one member at a time
is a pretty rewarding experience.
After each show, when somebody comes up and says,
oh my god, I've never heard you before and I love you.
Can I get all your CDs?
Can I be added to your mailing list?
Or when you find a connection with somebody on a social media site,
and they start sharing all of your new releases to their friends
and talking about how great you are.
But sometimes we are looking for a bigger boost
than just a one-on-one relationship.
And that's when you need to start thinking about how
to find your professional audience.
When you're looking at expanding your professional audience,
you're looking to find something called influencers,
people who have a lot of power and who, when they speak, a lot of people
listen.
This can be in the form of bloggers who've got an audience of thousands,
or it can be in the form of music supervisors, who
don't have a personal audience, but when they put a song in a show,
you can be sure a lot of people are going to hear that song.
So how do you reach out and connect to these people?
Let's take blogs, for example.
Trying to get a coverage on a blog can seem like a daunting task.
After all, you're just a single artist.
And you're up against countless numbers of PR
people, lawyers, managers, and other artists who are all
fighting for the same attention.
So how do you connect with those bloggers?
You don't need to email every single blog in the blogosphere.
You don't need to email every address in the music industry.
And you don't need to DM every inbox on every social media
site you can think of.
After all, if you did that, you'd barely have the time to make any music.
So what do you do?
Breathe and take it one step at a time.
The first step is to find your audience.
Let's look at blogs, for example.
There's dozens, hundreds, thousands of them.
So how do you know which ones to pick?
Well you find the ones that are relevant to you.
Start with the ones you already subscribe to.
You can tell you trust their taste in music.
Once you've found the blogs that you like
or that have music that sounds like what you do, start checking their links
and see if they ever communicate with or talk about other blogs that share
similar music.
That's a great way to find new blogs.
Also a Google search for blog plus your genre of music
will be a great place to start.
You can even dig down and search for specific artists that you like
and find out which blogs have covered them.
Then go to their site, look for an email address,
or see what method of contact they have listed.
So now you've narrowed down the blogs from a list of a couple thousand,
to a couple of dozen, or maybe a couple hundred
if you've got a particularly popular style of music.
So from there, you need to start making a list
or build a spreadsheet of all the different blogs and how
they like to be contacted, what style of music
they do, how often they do releases, whether they want you to upload an MP3
or they prefer a SoundCloud link, and any other relevant information
about how to contact those blogs.
And then you simply start reaching out to them, one-by-one.
Don't get overwhelmed.
Just pick one at a time, send out, and make a note of what you sent
and when so you know to follow up or not, depending on the blogs policy.
And eventually you'll make it all the way through the list.
Hopefully you'll hear back from a few of them.
Some blogs may reply and say, we'll pass on it for now, but thanks for sending.
Don't worry, that's not the worst thing in the world.
At least they acknowledged your presence.
And that gives you an opening in a couple months,
when you've got a new song to send it along to them.
Because maybe this time, they will want to put it out.
So what steps can you take to get started finding
your professional audience today?
[MUSIC PLAYING]