Building an audience for your creative projects.

I want to build an audience for the music I create. 

But there are a couple of factors that go into building an audience for your music. 

First and foremost, You have to have great music. 

But then you also have to have a strategy for attracting people to your music.

I’ve done alright up to this point at getting some reps under my belt with songwriting and music production. But I’ve mostly done this quietly. I haven’t let a lot of people know about it. 

These were my personal efforts at getting better at my craft. So there really aren’t many people that know about the music that I’ve made.

I’ve struggled a lot as a creative person with the idea of marketing my music. 

It feels weird to me in some senses to try to attract attention to something that you’ve made. I feel a sense of being prideful or arrogant in trying to get people to notice what I’ve made, but I don’t think that’s the right mentality. And I also struggle with the idea of being scared of how people will judge me or the music that I make (fear and rejection).

I think I’ve held onto this false idea that if you make great music it will just find its way into the right hands and you will magically build an audience. 

But that idea is garbage. 

You have to actively participate in putting your music into the market so that people can discover it and decide for themselves if they like it. 

And you have to be willing to put yourself out there and see how the market responds.

So my goal now is to get better at both – the craft of music and marketing the music. 

MAKING AND MARKETING THE MUSIC

So how do you get better at something?

You do it a bunch of times. 

You put in the reps. 

For me that means creating a bunch of songs from start to finish. 

It also means creating a bunch of content around each song in order to help get attention for the music. 

I came up with an idea for how I could do this to make it a little more interesting, and to help me level up my skills in different areas through the process. 

So I have created a 100 song challenge for myself. 

This isn’t going to be making 100 songs in 100 weeks or something crazy like that. 

No, I’m going to approach this a little differently. 

There’s two parts to this. 

There is the songwriting and music production part. 

And there is the music marketing part.

THE MUSIC PART

I’m going to break this down into 4 sessions (25 songs each)

Session 1 – For the first 25 songs – writing and producing songs – solo – just by myself, to get in the mode of creating.

Session 2 – For the second block of 25 songs – bring in co-writers for the songwriting process. This expands my network, helping me learn some critical skills through collaborating.

Session 3 – For the third block of 25 songs – bring in collaborators – session musicians, or other producers, etc. to practice the idea of doing collabs with other musicians – this really focuses on the production part – me not doing every part of that. 

Session 4 – for the last block of 25 songs – going after collaborations with artists that I respect and admire. Doing collaborations with them. Building relationships in the genre and with other artists that I would love to work with.

THE MUSIC MARKETING PART

I also need to create things that help get attention for the music.

I am planning to do that through creating content. 

This content, I hope, will give me the chance to grab people’s attention and have them want to hear more. That would then drive them to listen on spotify or other streaming platforms and start to build a fanbase. 

So the plan is to try to create at least 4-6 pieces of content for each song. 

The goal is to have material that will help get attention for the music. 

I don’t want to put pressure on doing this right out of the gate. 

I need to find a rhythm that lets me go through this cycle of building a song and the content that surrounds the song. 

I will go through a few reps of making a song and experimenting with creating content around that song to help me get a feel for what works for me. 

I have a couple of ideas that I want to try out. 

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Like I said, I am not going to put a timeline on the completion of each thing at first.

I want to go through the cycle a few times to get my feet. 

• Songwriting 
• Music production
• Creating content
• Sharing that on platforms
• Getting feedback 

But I am hoping that as I get my feet under me, I can get to a place of being able to put out a song every two weeks. 

I’m hoping to get to that framework towards the end of the first block of songs. 

This is all an experiment. 

I just want to try to build an audience for the music through content. 

• Songs 
• Content 

The ethos that I will be using is the idea of: 

CREATE and SHARE. 

Create songs, create content. 

Share songs, share content.

Hopefully build an audience over time. 

That’s all I got for now. 

Talk to you soon, 

Jeremy