Are You Paying Close Attention To Your Listeners?
10/26/2020
Written By: Jade Zalevsky
Fans. They're hard to get, and, with the plethora of musicians out there in the very same genre as each other, those fans can sometimes be hard to keep. They determine whether an artist will be successful in their music career or not. The big question is: how important is it to keep fans and listeners satisfied in this streaming dominated industry? And if it is as important as everyone says, how do you keep them?
Every artist starts out with only a couple of listeners (most of the time it's just their parents or friends). And there is nothing wrong with that, of course. Everyone has to start somewhere, and they'll be very loyal listeners. However, if you're talented enough, and you understand the importance of social media in this age of the music industry, with a bit of luck, you'll gain more listeners. Only with consistent effort and valuable content will you eventually gain so many listeners, that there is bound to be a couple of fans in the mix. To me, there is a big difference between fans and listeners. Listeners might see your Instagram post about your new song dropping on Friday at 12am, and will get around to streaming it whenever they remember, usually within the next couple days or maybe a couple of weeks. Fans, however, not only saw your Instagram post, but saw your post from Twitter, retweeted and reposted on both of their social media accounts, and were waiting patiently for the clock to strike 12am on that Friday night to be one of the first to hear it. Listeners are great; they sometimes turn into the fans, and they'll get you the extra streams. But fans are unbeatable in their loyalty when it comes to giving you free promotion on social media, and streams and downloads on streaming platforms.
To be able to understand the importance of listeners and fans, we have to first understand the impact of a song stream vs a song download. Streams and downloads happen on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. As of this moment, approximately 150 streams of a song equals one sale of that song. Considering that there are usually 10 tracks per album, that is about 1500 streams that equate to the sale of an album. 10 single-song downloads are also equivalent to the sale of one album. With those numbers in mind, does it make more sense from the business perspective to convince someone to stream a song 150 times or download it once? Exactly.
Now, back to the fans and listeners topic. While you hope that people are listening to your songs, you more-so hope that they're listening and downloading, such as fans would do. As I said before, listeners are people who like your music, but fans love it. How do you turn these listeners into fans? How do you turn song streams into song downloads into album downloads? That is a loaded questions (there are university courses that dedicate an entire semester to that question), but I see it as putting out as much content as you possibly can, and interacting with everyone that you can. It baffles me the amount of musicians that pay little to no attention to their listeners and fans. Yes, the record label is in charge of the business side of your career, but if you think about it, your fans are in charge of the record label. If the fans' tastes change or you upset them, the label won't have anyone to market your songs to, and there goes your career. Depending on your amount of clout, a single reply to a fan could make them pay more attention to your song release dates, or, if you're really famous, make them loyal for life. Very rarely does it work out for musicians who are awful to others. I've spoken with many fans who all have many different artists that they like and each one said something along the lines of "he/she/they are so nice to people, they treat everyone with kindness, and they have a genuine connection to their fans".
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