Data is Power for Indie Musicians

Many musicians create music and then release it to the public hoping their sales will be fantastic.

If you’re going to spend countless hours, writing, rehearsing, recording, mixing, and mastering your songs, you don’t want to just hope you can sell your music, you want to make sure you’ll actually have a targeted audience ready to buy your music.

The internet pretty much gives you a direct connection to your fans and access to a huge community of music listeners. Nowadays, you can get feedback almost instantaneously online.

Here are some strategies to help you target your music people who are interested in buying your music.

1) Survey your fans

If you have an email list, website, or blog, you can ask your visitors and subscribers to complete a short survey to get a much better idea of what music they want to hear.  You can ask them questions like e.g. what is your favorite music genre, what kind of emails do you like getting from musicians, what types of concerts do they like to go to, which ones of our songs do you like the best and why (you can have them vote on your songs), how often do you go to concerts?

The feedback you can get from surveying existing and prospective fans and customers is invaluable.   For example, if a lot of your fans like going to shows once a week, that gives you a good indication that you should consider gigging more to appeal to what your fans are looking for.

Also, if you really want to get make sure you get plenty of feedback from your survey, you can always make a contest out of it and provide some of your band merchandise, unlisted videos etc. in exchange for their feedback.

2) A/B Test

Basically you’re just going to create 2 different versions of something, release them both to your fans, and see which performs better.  For example, you can release 2 versions of one of your songs to see which one your fans like more and buy.

You can apply the same principle to making changes to your band website, or sending out emails.  Just make sure you only change one thing at a time and get data on that before you do a major overhaul.  Otherwise you won’t be able to tell which changes directly improved your results.

3) Audiokite

Audiokite reports can help you learn whether your song appeals more towards men or women, how new listeneres react to it, and a lot more.

Click here to learn more.