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What’s up everyone. We’re back with a new episode of electronic dance money at the beginning of the year 2022 We finally made it through 2021 Cute fireworks in the cheery did it. I hope you guys are having a great New Year and a great Christmas to good holiday. I know I did for sure. I’m newly engaged, which is super exciting. It’s like a new step in my life which is which is awesome. I’m actually I’m I’m really excited. Most people think most people say they don’t really like nothing feels different. When they can move through those different stages of life. They like, get a girlfriend, get engaged, get married, but it definitely feels different for being a good way. Yeah, it’s great. But Christmas was amazing. New Year’s was great. I’m excited because I haven’t nothing to do for the next five to six months in terms of traveling ever since like September it’s been go go go every single week, I’m doing something every weekend someone’s visiting, we’re going somewhere, we’re doing something. And I pretty much have nothing planned over the next six months, which is just, I’m excited. I guess I don’t have to go and do things on the weekend anymore. Which is awesome. For me. It’s like a breath of breath of fresh air and relaxation, by wanting to take today’s episode and kind of do like a urine review a 2021 Wrap up, if you will, and discuss some of the things that I felt were one some of the most important things that we learned throughout the year in 2021, specifically for this podcast, and things to look forward to and work on throughout the year. And so I picked four main topics that I was going through each episode and I was kind of thinking, you know, what, what are the key episodes were one I noticed a lot of people got a lot of value from and two episodes that I felt like people may have listened to but didn’t put much thought into it or might have like, I thought there was a ton of value. And things that should be almost emphasized that you should be focusing on that some people may not have cared too much about or hadn’t taken the time to really do anything about. So these are some of the things I think to get the year started off, right, they should be added to your to do list or your calendar and start implementing and working on because it’s going to be somewhat transformative for releasing music, marketing your music, or whatever it is that you’re trying to do with your music. Regardless, these things are going to help when implemented correctly, so that you can hit the goals that you really want to hit towards the end of the year. And so what we’re going to be focusing on are some of the subjects of kind of releasing music and getting more eyes on your music and getting more streams right cuz that’s, that’s what we all want, especially from the last episode with Matthew. fucking fantastic episode, by the way. I mean, Matthew was so knowledgeable in the world of Spotify, marketing, your music releasing itself releasing specifically which is kind of one of the topics that that is included in this episode. So we’re gonna go through the four, the four top learning subjects, or I should say the four the top four subjects that we learned throughout 2021 on electronic dance money, that you should continue to focus your power and your energy towards. Alright, so Topic number one is kind of an extension from 2020. It’s from an episode in December of 2020, as well as an episode in August, and that was sales funnels and marketing. The two episodes with white Christiansen we had him on first in December for Episode Episode 42 The world of sales funnels, lead magnets and selling your music. And then obviously we just had him on with episode

59 Why marketing matters with white Christiansen and I really wanted to emphasize the importance of sales funnels to really convert your audience because we especially coming off the last Episode with Matthew when we were talking about, you know, marketing your music, creating ads, and trying to convert that audience into streams and getting them on to your Spotify. That way you can get your artist profile can get involved in the algorithm and get added to those editorial playlists. But yet, we have to take a step back from, from the actual getting on an editorial playlist to begin with, right? What, what’s, what’s the first step, before we get people onto Spotify, it’s going to be the marketing part where we really need to emphasize sales funnels. And the sales funnel is it’s all about first initially telling your audience who you are, and why they should listen to you. And eventually, it’s going to move people down through that sales funnel to eventually end up wherever it is that you want them to end up. Now, for most of you, that’s going to be Spotify, you want them to end up on Spotify. I’d imagine even more so from the recent episode with Matthew, because that’s that’s how he’s gone about his entire music career of the last couple of years, as he’s been focusing on, using creating sales funnels, using them to convert his audience to go to Spotify in a number of different ways. So it’s not just getting users on to your artist profile, or to stream your track or share it, but it’s also getting them on to his own personal playlist, and getting more followers on his playlist. Because remember, Spotify is watching that sort of stuff. They’re looking at what you’re doing on or where you’re sending users on their platform. They want more users on their platform to listen to music, too, so that they can sell more ad space, they can make more of a profit. And so they want to see how you’re involved in getting people on their platform and staying on their platform. And the number one thing that you’re going to have to start with is those sales funnels. So the messaging behind what Y is saying in specifically the most recent episode, why marketing are the most recent episode with Wyatt? Why marketing matters? You know, we really dove into the topic of what is it? What is it that makes sales funnels so important? And how can they be utilized for music and even talked about how, and I suspect him and Matthew have probably use some of the similar strategies, but why it has been able to use sales funnels with other friends to market their music to get millions of streams. So not only is it possible to self release your music, get on editorial playlists, get the millions of streams, but it’s also possible to just use sales funnels in marketing to be able to get millions of streams without being added to those playlists, right? It’s possible but it all starts with those sales funnels, and making sure that you can construct it properly. Follow through with editing your sales funnels, right testing different things continuing with that process of tweaking the sales funnel, seeing what converts more and creating just a a suit of armor in terms of how that sales funnel works and converts. You can create your sales funnel and to the strongest suit of armor where it’s unbreakable. And it just keeps converting as that cascades and your audience grows. And you come up with different ideas of implementing that sales funnels, that sales funnel in different processes. Or I should say processes like let’s say you’re playing a show you need to sell tickets you have this suit of armor of a sales funnel well you can start to implement that sales funnel in promoting shows right get let’s get people to the show. We know we can convert people from Spotify, we know we can convert them to our pages they’re following us now let’s convert those people in specific cities to go to the show that we’re playing at and then I’m sure you can see how this this snowball effect happens. You grow your audience the promoters like you more they book you more you can get people to shows you actually have listeners so maybe you people want to collaborate more with you record labels if you want to sign with them start looking at you because you have legit streams now bot streams remember we talked about the bot streams we will we want to avoid that stuff but moving people from point A to point B is probably the most difficult part right moving them from Facebook or Instagram over to listening to your music is difficult. What is going to be your your key ingredient there is systematically developing a sales funnel that is effective and it converts that’s going to be step one. So I really felt like that sales funnel discussion, it might have gone over some people’s heads. But it’s probably one of the missing pieces to your promo plan and your marketing plan that you’re not implementing that is holding you back from hitting the goals that you want to hit with getting streams.

So those of you that listen to this advice, or listen to those episodes, and didn’t implement anything, and you’re still wondering what the issue is, and you’re still wondering why things aren’t working, I urge you to start looking into sales funnels, start implementing sales funnels, and researching them and figure out how you can develop your own sales funnel that’s effective for you and your brand, and who you are as an artist, and stop complaining about why things aren’t working, because you need to take steps, effective steps in the right direction to market your music or market the products you’re giving or services you’re providing. So that you can convert you can you can get the people listening to you are purchasing your products or purchasing your services to start with their sales funnel. Step one. And the second thing is literally the last episode we just had with Matthew, I keep talking about because it was such a good episode, there was so much great information in there. And it it really pushes back on this idea that’s been heavily ingrained in music for decades. And still is really, I mean, even more so with EDM producers have this idea that you have to go with a record label. And I mean, Matthew is the one case that shows that you don’t self releasing your music is a viable option. I think self releasing is something we learned through 2021. That, you know, it’s something we’ve talked about in past we’ve talked about how to get signed to record labels, we’ve talked about what the differences between self releasing and a record label and and Matthew nailed it, when we talked about it on on the last podcast and record labels have just turned it, they are just distributors with extra steps. That’s all they are. For the most part, there are some good record labels out there. But a majority of the record labels that you’re probably signing to aren’t really worthwhile. They’re taking such a large percentage and doing nothing to market your music at all. They don’t have big playlists that they can get you playlisted on, they don’t really affect your streams all that much. They don’t get you many views on YouTube, they don’t have any affiliates. So they can, you know, send a track to a big YouTube channel to get you added and uploaded and get a lot of views and grow or grow your audience that that’s not their record labels are just they’re distributing your music for you for and taking a percentage for no reason. So self releasing, it’s starting to look like it’s a much more viable option. But you have to spend more time working on self releasing your music, you have to develop a sales funnel, right? So step one is gonna be the sales funnel, you have to develop a sales funnel, you have to have somewhat of a marketing budget, it doesn’t have to be extreme as what Matthew was talking about, he’s been able to get millions of streams, just doing one to $200 ad campaigns. And so really, when you’re talking about self releasing, you’re talking about sales funnels and marketing. paid marketing is probably going to be the the space you need to play in, right running social media ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe even tick tock ads. The ad space is probably where you need to go. And you have to look at when you’re when you’re talking about running ads, you have to talk about what how, how important is your music to you? And what’s it worth? What’s your value? What are you willing to invest for yourself? Right what’s the dollar amount that you would like to invest into your music to help it grow? Because most record labels aren’t going to invest a single dime into your music other than paying for distro kid $75 a year that’s what they’re willing to invest in your music is $75 a year.

So that probably isn’t valuable to you, right? He probably I’m sure you’d look at that and you go well that’s that’s not really worth it to me. I my value is is much higher. So if you think your value is much higher, and instead of purchasing the next new plugin that you think is the secret to making your music better, maybe your music is already decent and good enough, but what you need to do is shift your focus from purchasing new gear and trying to make your music better. And you need to shift your focus into investing into marketing your music and how you can start marketing it and converting people, converting your audience and building an audience. And I think the one of the other big takeaways, I’d say that we got, from the last episode with Matthew was not just pushing your audience to stream your newly released track, but also constructing and building yourself as a creator, or an artist on Spotify, through building your own playlists, pushing your audience to that playlist, getting people to share your music. And when we’re talking about getting people to share your music, you have to give them some sort of incentive. So one way you could do this is, is having some sort of contest of some sort. There’s specific websites, you could create contests, where people can enter in a certain amount of ways to enter in a ticket to to then win something, whether that’s like a merch package, or maybe it is that you’re playing at a festival somewhere and you have you have guest passes to give away, right, that’s something you could offer in a contest that you’re going to give to your fans. And included in that contest could be something like sharing your artist profile from Spotify or, or sharing a specific track. There, the different websites that you can do this with or stuff like gleam, I think is one of them that I’ve seen some other YouTube people use with some of the YouTubers I follow, and which pond as well as another big one. But that’s a way of, you know, you running ads, sending people somewhere to enter in into a contest. And you can you can get people to essentially share your music to help get you involved in that algorithm. There’s different ways that you can come up with getting people to share your Spotify playlist, share your music, share your artist profile that can get you involved in that Spotify algorithm. And that’s actually a really good idea, I think for another episode topic to bring Matthew on is how do we get people to give a shit about our music and share it. I think that’s a really fantastic episode topic. That would help out a lot. But the whole point behind this is that I think artists need to start looking at the time that they’re investing in themselves. And the percentage of royalties that they’re giving away to record labels that are not doing anything for them, and probably will continue to not do anything for them. Because I doubt most of you artists, I will guarantee that you guys don’t look into you don’t invest your time into looking into the record label you want to sign with and see what their marketing plan looks like. You probably don’t look at the places that they playlists, you probably don’t look at the artists that have released and what promotion and marketing they got on top of the what streams they weren’t given or where they charted with their music, you probably don’t look into that sort of stuff, you’re just, you have the blinders on. And you’re so excited because you think that signing with a record label is going to get to do something for you, when the record label doesn’t do anything for you. shifting your focus to this more self released, self starter mode is probably a better is probably something to really look forward to and think about in 2022. And seeing how that goes for the next year. If you decide to self release, consistently self releasing consistently working on a new marketing plan and adjusting your sales funnel and developing something that works for you and converts. The third thing that really pulls in the sales funnels with self releasing, I think that almost all of you guys probably overlook, listen to this episode, didn’t think much of it and didn’t do anything about it. I can call out all of my most of if not every single one of my clients because I know you guys listen to this podcast. I know you guys have probably listened to a majority of the episodes. And you probably listened to the episode with with Brian hood where we talked about creating your own website. And that was back in April, Episode 51. Building a high converting and well designed website with Brian hood. I think most most of you producers probably just completely disregarded it because he thought well I have no use for it. But if we’re talking about self releasing and this is something you’re thinking about and you’re talking and we’re also talking about sales funnels developing one, it’s way more difficult to to successfully accomplish that and do that the right way, without having an established website that’s built that you can start converting on and start testing and seeing how how people interact with your website. And probably the most important thing that we need to think about here is, is the fact that you need to own your audience, you need to have a place for that your audience can go to that they can, they can, you know, you can guarantee that they can go to there have updated information, they’re gonna see your active there. And they know that if they need information on you, there’s a place for that because not all of your social media will probably up be updated. Social media sites die, we’ve talked about this in the past, new ones pop up. So if it’s best to push people to one source, own that audience own that place where people can visit and check you out, and then you can push them to other places, your website can be a place for you to track conversions and have your Facebook pixel set up so you can create custom audiences. We go further and further into this rabbit hole of websites. But I strongly urge you to go back to that episode, Episode 51, re listen to it, and design a website. I know my clients aren’t doing this. I know they don’t have websites, I follow all of them on social media. And I think all of them just push people to a link tree. And that’s great and all but you don’t get the best data that you would you could get with a website on something like a link tree, you don’t get the customization that you get with a link tree that you do with a website. You can’t set up a Facebook pixel on your link tree the way you can with a website. There’s, there’s so many things you can’t do with Link tree that you could do with a website, you can set up a link tree on your website like you could do that you could just develop you could create one, too, it will take you all of 10 minutes to do. It’s very simple. With really easy website builders easy funnel.io I strongly suggest that’s Brian Hood’s super easy to create lots of wonderful features beat and create your own link tree on there, that’s yours, you own it, Link tree doesn’t you get all the data, you can turn those people who visit your link tree into a custom audience and create a look alike audience for those people on Facebook. That probably that might be going over your head. But the things you can do with a website are far far outweigh what you could do with just a simple link tree. So if you want to start running ads, if you want to start developing sales funnels, you want to start self releasing, because these record labels are just distributors with extra steps for you and they’re taking your money, then you have to develop a website, you need to get something set up, you need to push people to a specific place that you control, no one else does. And no one can take you off their platform, or, or the website, the social media platform dies and you don’t have anyone anywhere else for anyone to go.

You need to have a home base. Now finally, I think the last thing number four, one of the most important things that we learned through 2021 on electronic dance money was was the power of submit hub. And what you can do on Submit hub with the right tools, with the with the right ideas in the right, essentially marketing plan. When you’re releasing your your music, how you can make it more successful included with the Spotify algorithm and the way it works is you getting playlisted and there’s probably no better place than submit hub to try and get playlisted. And one of the biggest benefits I think was summit hub, is the fact that there are creators and curators out there that not only want you but need you. You are the person that keeps people active on their playlists, their record label their selling. So whatever it is that they’re trying it whether it’s an influencer, a playlist or a record label, it doesn’t matter what it is, they need you to be able to keep creating content, keep their audience engaged and keep people involved them. So using submit hub to to utilize your abilities to get play listed is going to not only help you with getting more streams on your track, but getting you involved more with the Spotify algorithm, especially if you’re implementing your onsubmit hub getting playlisted by curators from summit hub. You’re pushing people to stream your track from ads and marketing. You’re also pushing people to share your music and Then you’re also pushing people to to your own Spotify playlist, you kind of have like the trifecta there of everything working for you to get you involved in the Spotify algorithm get you involved in different radio stations within Spotify on their kind of shuffle, randomization algorithm, but then also getting you added to editorial playlists. And this can all all of these four things, when combined, and done successfully, kind of emulate and is like the blueprint of becoming a successful self releasing artist. You have your website, where you host your sales funnels, and you run ads to yourself released music, and then you’re implementing submit hub to get playlisted. So that everything is working under your control, to push people to where you want them to go. To grow your audience, listen to your music, get you involved in the Spotify algorithm get you add to editorial playlists, and you can get millions of streams and collect 100% of those royalties, and actually make a living off of releasing your music alone. Then the next step after that is how you can implement all the things you learn through that process. To now get shows and get people to those shows, I think these are the four most important things we could probably learn from 2021. That can when done strategically, and really thought out and developed and taking time over the year, let’s be let’s be clear, here, it’s not you do this for a month, it doesn’t work. So you quit this is you do it for 2020. To test it, learn, figure out what works, what doesn’t work. Again, this is part of this, too, is a learning process, you’re learning how this stuff works. And out of that you are going to find things that work and things that don’t work, and you’re going to adjust your plan accordingly. And that’s okay. But you have to take the time to develop the skills to see what works and what doesn’t work. But these four things, sales funnels self releasing your music, you’re creating your own website, your own hub, and then utilizing submit hub for your releases. These are all things that when done strategically, accurately, and effectively, can completely alter your place in the world of music

entirely. One of the things we didn’t talk about with submit hub, just earlier in the episode, is the fact that also blogs are on there. So when you have a website, you really need to work on your SEO. And one of the best things with SEO is having people linking to your website having high profile people that rank high with Google’s algorithm for SEO. So if you’re being linked from these third party blogs that are writing about your new music being released, that’s going to help you out even more when people Google your name, search your website, you’re going to rank much higher, you’re going to look better. I’m curious if that affects the Spotify algorithm I’d be interested I would suspect it does for your artist profile, which could definitely help you out when someone searches like specific genres that could help you out with ranking higher with just your Spotify, artist profile in Google. But regardless, these are, these are all tools that I think artists are, they’re listening, but they’re not. They’re not effectively doing that can just they can really change things for you and others and eventually, who knows, you might realize that you develop a really good skill that you can create a second business with. And we’ve talked about this continuously over the years, you can create another business with to help out other artists, or you’re a specialist in a specific field that you can then promote services to and help out other artists. That’s it for today. Guys, think about each one of these topics. Go re listen to the episodes each specific episode with Wyatt with Brian hood with Matthew with James Krause. If you don’t remember we just did that episode was submit hub how to submit hub tech 10x the reach of your music with James cross that was episode number 62. realist know that those episodes really listened to what we’re talking about and see how you can start implementing them because I think it would help you out with time. Check out the show notes at envious audio.com/episode 70. And I’ll see you guys in a couple weeks. Take care