Why A Bigger Audience Doesn't Mean Better Music Sales

Music Business Myth Busters - Episode 6: Your Music Is For Everyone/A Bigger Audience Is Better

Do you tell everyone you know about your music?

Do you have die-hard fans who are evangelists for you and rave about how much they love your music?

Or are people just polite or kind of “meh” about your music?

Are you struggling to pay your bills and make a full-time living from your music because you're not consistently making enough music sales?

And are you spending money on marketing but not getting any more people to your gigs, any more social media followers, or selling any more CDs, digital downloads or merch?

If any of these situations are happening to you, you're probably unconsciously sabotaging your music career because you believe this myth: Your music is for everyone/A bigger audience is better.

This myth is sort of a symptom of the myth that success in the music business equals fame and fortune. We've had this model of success shoved down our throats by the media for decades, and so we've been brainwashed into thinking that a successful music career looks like what the megastar mainstream artists are doing. We see that they have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans, they sell millions of albums, and get millions of streams of their songs, and we think that we need to copy that, that's what the goal post is; we need a huge audience and that everyone should love our music. This is an obsolete model of success. It's a result of the way record labels promoted artists.

If you ask artists who their music is for, the response you usually get is that their music is for everyone. If you think your music is for everyone, then no one is going to like your music because you can't please everyone. You'd have to compromise your music for the masses and water it down. You turn into Nickelback. If you try to please everyone, you will please no one, so stop trying. Instead of trying to please a million people, figure out how to delight a thousand. I've talked about Kevin Kelly's concept of 1000 true fans before.

The other problem with thinking that your music is for everybody is that it's impossible to market to everybody. It's too vague and it's too expensive from a cost-per-acquisition standpoint. That's what the record labels do. Labels have budgets of millions of dollars to blast music at the masses. As independent artists, we don't. Labels are like a shotgun, scattering music everywhere. We have to be like a scalpel, more surgical and precise with targeting our fans. The internet has given us powerful tools to find and build a dedicated, passionate fanbase so that we don't need millions of dollars.

In the entrepreneurial world, there's a term called “Product/Market Fit,” which means that you find an overlap between your product and part of the market so that customers actually resonate with your product and want to buy it so that you can make sales. Businesses don't achieve product/market fit by trying to sell their product to everyone. They'll have very specific criteria to define who their most likely customers are.

In this sense, selling your music is no different from selling any other product. You're looking for a smaller part of the market that resonates with your music, not everyone who can hear. That's been obscured by the old music business model that the record labels use. When you don't have product/market fit, customers aren’t getting value out of your product, word of mouth doesn’t spread, reviews are kind of “meh,” and sales don't grow or happen at all. So if you want to make a sustainable income from your music and scale your music business, you need to achieve product/market fit. Without it, your music sales are going to be totally hit-and-miss and you won't be able to grow your fanbase.

To achieve product/market fit, the first thing is to get the product right; that's your music. Make sure that you've got the right music for the audience that you want to build. The next step is to know who your audience is and go out and feed that audience. Rick Barker, Taylor Swift's first manager, says “Find a hungry audience and feed them.”

I've talked before about the concept of Minimum Viable Product, where instead of working for ages to make your product perfect, you just produce the minimum viable version of it so that you can get that out to people and get their feedback before you invest massive amounts of time, effort, and money to make a product that people might not actually want. Then you get their feedback, you take that on board, and you go and tweak and reiterate your product and then you put the next version out and get the feedback on that. This is one tool for getting your product right so you can achieve product/market fit.

The other side of getting product/market fit is the market, who you target. This is the really critical thing I want you to get, so pay attention. The smaller you go in your targeting, the bigger the audience you'll have. A handful of passionate fans is more impactful (and profitable) than lots of lukewarm fans. This is totally counter-intuitive and most musicians don't understand this, so let me explain.

Most musicians think that if they distribute their music on CD Baby or Tunecore or Soundcloud or just put it out there that people will magically find them. That will not happen. Most of us will not go viral. The internet is a gigantic ocean. Most musicians will drown and never be discovered. There are a lot of musicians competing for the same ears and fans you are. The way to stand out is to get into a very specific niche that makes your market a lot smaller. It's easier to be a big fish in a small pond than to be another small fish in a gigantic ocean of millions of other fish. Let that sink in.

A niche is a way of categorising what you do, defining that more specifically. It's a little corner of the market that you can carve off for yourself where you specialise in one particular type of product or service. With a micro-niche, you're narrowing that down even further. You might think that you're cutting out potential fans and part of the market that way, and you are. But you're cutting out the people who don't matter, the people who wouldn't have been very engaged with your music anyway. If you want people to discover you and buy from you, you need to come to the attention of collectors and people who are fanatical about that specific thing you do. It's better to have a smaller number of higher-quality fans who are engaged than millions of casual fans who never buy your music. So what you want to do is to define your micro-niche. Here's how you can do that.

Think about a series of concentric circles, like a target. The outermost circle is your main genre; Rock, Country, Metal, Blues, R&B, Hip-Hop, EDM. This is way too broad, too vague, too generic. This is the huge ocean where there are a million other fish you have to compete with. You want to narrow it down further.

That's where you move into the next circle. That's your sub-genre; Rockabilly, Traditional Country, Folk Metal, House. This is getting a bit more specific and helps you to stand out a little. Now instead of being in an ocean, it's like being in a lake; there's less competition. This is a starting point, but ideally, you would go much deeper and continue to narrow down.

The next circle would be your niche; Punkabilly, Ameripolitan, Acid House. Now you're starting to get into more fertile ground. This would be like being in a lagoon, much smaller than an ocean or a lake. You're starting to get very clear and very specific about the kind of music you make.

If this was as far as you narrowed down, you would be ahead of at least 80% of other musicians. But there's one level deeper you can narrow down. That's your micro-niche; things like Psychobilly, Western Swing, Pirate Metal. This is the innermost circle of the target; the bullseye. This is like being in a pond compared to a lagoon, a lake, or an ocean. You've eliminated probably 95% of your competition.

There's a correlation between how much you target your niche and the level of fan engagement and financial investment/support. The more you narrow your niche, the more passionate and dedicated your fans are, the more engaged they are with your music, and the more money you make from your music.

If you only define yourself by your main genre, if you're just living in the outermost circle of the target, you're only going to find people who are casually interested in your music, and so they won't feel compelled to buy your music or support you financially. It's not as common for people to be as fanatical about huge mainstream artists. If you're a pop artist and you've got nothing that sets you aside from all the other pop artists, it's going to be very difficult for people to find you for a start, but also they won't get excited about your music.

If you can narrow down to your micro-niche, this is where you find those die-hard superfans who are fanatical and collectors who'll spend money on your albums, your merch, your concert tickets, support your crowdfunding campaigns, and even become your patrons and give you money every month.

The great thing about narrowing your niche is that it gives you a lot of clarity and insight into who your audience is. Do you even know who your core audience is? Artists usually overlook this because they're on the creative treadmill of just making and releasing music. You have to figure out who your music appeals to. You want to figure out who cares and then go after more of those people and focus less on the people who don't care. That's going to give you much more bang for your marketing buck.