How Do I Build The Right Audience For My Music?
Finding the right audience is essential for any band or artist looking to build a lasting and impactful career. The “right audience” consists of listeners who genuinely connect with your music, appreciate your unique style, and are likely to support you by streaming your songs, attending your shows, and spreading the word about your work. Instead of focusing on sheer numbers, it’s about quality and relevance—building a fanbase that truly understands and loves what you do.
The first step in finding the right audience is understanding your own identity as an artist. What genre do you fit into? What themes do your songs explore? What makes your music unique? By clearly defining these elements, you can begin to identify the type of people who are likely to resonate with your sound. For example, if you’re a folk singer-songwriter, your audience might include people who enjoy acoustic, narrative-driven music and who appreciate authentic, heartfelt lyrics.
Table of Contents
Once you have a clear picture of your ideal audience, it’s time to reach out to them. Start by researching where your potential fans are most active—whether it’s specific social media platforms, music streaming services, or physical venues. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube can be powerful tools for sharing your music and story, especially if you use them to create content that appeals directly to your target audience.
Engage with communities that share your interests. Join online forums, Facebook groups, or Reddit threads where your potential fans might be discussing music like yours. Participate in conversations, share your music when appropriate, and build relationships within these communities.
Additionally, live performances, whether online or in-person, are a fantastic way to connect with your audience. Gigs at local venues, live streaming sessions, and even opening for similar artists can help you get your music in front of the right people.
By taking these steps, you can gradually attract an audience that not only enjoys your music but is also likely to stick with you as you grow and evolve as an artist.
Can A Music Artist Build The Wrong Audience?
It’s entirely possible for a band or artist to build the wrong audience, and this can have significant consequences for their career. When you’re just starting out, the temptation to grow your follower count quickly can lead to strategies like “follow for follow” schemes or targeting broad, general audiences rather than those who are genuinely interested in your music. While these tactics might boost numbers in the short term, they often attract followers who are not truly engaged with your work. These followers may like your social media posts but won’t necessarily stream your music, buy your merch, or attend your shows.
Building the wrong audience can also stem from a mismatch between your brand identity and the content you’re putting out. For instance, if you’re a rock band but start producing content that appeals more to pop listeners just to gain more followers, you might attract a crowd that doesn’t resonate with your core sound. Over time, this can dilute your brand and make it harder to connect with the audience that would genuinely appreciate your music.
Additionally, when your audience isn’t aligned with your artistic vision, it can limit your creative freedom. You might feel pressured to cater to the tastes of a demographic that doesn’t fully appreciate your genre or style, leading to artistic compromises that can stifle your growth as a musician.
Another issue is that social media algorithms prioritize engagement. If your followers aren’t genuinely interested in your music, your posts will likely receive less interaction, causing your content to reach fewer people—even those who might actually be fans. This not only limits your growth potential but also can be discouraging, making it seem like your music isn’t resonating when, in reality, it just isn’t reaching the right ears.
In short, building the wrong audience can hinder your career by diluting your brand, limiting creative freedom, and reducing engagement, making it crucial to target and cultivate the right fans from the start.
Stuck In The Friends And Family Rut
The Problem - The Wrong Audience
To put it simply, you’ve built the wrong audience.
Don’t despair. You might have connected to the wrong audience, but it can often be corrected. When it can’t be corrected, music industry advice is often to start again with a new band name.
Wrong Audience 1: Friends And Family
The audience you are likely to have is built from your friends and family and maybe their friends too.
Initially, that might sound like a good idea, but normally it is not. As mentioned above, when you start from friends and family, you are building your audience starting from a group of people who are highly unlikely to like your music. Again, they may like you, but liking/loving you is NOT the same as liking your music.
Many older artists never get by playing for their friends and family. They never learned how to reach beyond that group of listeners. It’s a rut that many, many artists get stuck in. Truthfully, few go far beyond. It goes like this, at some point, often when at school, an artist has a debut performance. At this point their friends and family are mobilised to help fill out the audience. Then on it goes to the next gig and the next. Skip ahead a decade or so. Many artists still need those friends and family to fill up any gigs they are still playing. The trouble is, your grandmother isn’t likely to be a death metal fan. Not meant to be literal. Friends and family are likely to be fans of you. They want to support you. That does not make them fans of your music. Even close friends with similar tastes in music like different bands. So why do we kid ourselves that all our friends like our music, or feel that they should like our music?
For many, even the friends of your friends and family might not be fans of your music. That is not a reflection on your music, just that people have different tastes. That is perfectly okay.
It probably doesn’t come as a great surprise, but even friends and family of your friends and family are unlikely to like your music.
To reach our actual audience, we need to reach beyond friends and family. By all means, use them as part of your plan, but you need to have a plan to find your audience on your own. You need to work out who they are and how you are going to reach them.
Wrong Audience 2: Other Artists
If your audience is largely built from other artists and musicians, the chances are that intentionally or unintentionally, you have taken part in a very common tactic for growing your following: you took part in a follow-for-follow (F4F) exchange.
This means you prioritized the number of followers and the size of your list following over your priority of the quality of your list. At some point along the way, you forgot that you were meant to be building a following of listeners who actually like your music. More than that, you are meant to be building a list of people passionate about your music.
Other artists taking a part in a follow-for-follow often never even listen to your music. Their reason for being on your list is not to get notified about your latest release, or how well you are progressing with your album, or where you are playing your next gig. Generally, they have zero interest in your music. They are there purely to secure you following their account.
This is a sure-fire way to shadow-ban yourself.
Wrong Audience 3: You Don't Have Dedicated Artist Accounts
This is a very common setup when you have built from a “friend and family” perspective, but both can happen without the other scenario. The problem is fans of you on a personal level is NOT the same as fans of your music. This is all the more true when you remove particularly supportive friends who do what they do because you are friends, NOT because they like your music.
These are personal accounts that you are using for your music. A common reason for this is that you don’t want to start your musical following from zero. You might have a personal following of up to 3000, and it is tempting to co-opt those connections into following your music “the easy way”. It’s a completely false economy and potentially very harmful to you.
It doesn’t take Einstein to predict the solution…
The Symptoms
The most obvious is that despite having a sizeable following on a social platform, you are experiencing terrible engagement. More to the point, you are experiencing awful engagement, when it comes to your music. You might have poor engagement overall, or you might have great engagement when it comes to topics other than your music, and then you make a post to promote your music and you hit dead air.
Common mistakes are to believe that this means people are not interested in your music or that your audience has heard your music but that they don’t like it or believe that your music is really poor.
The Consequences
You want to create an upward spiral from your activity. You post to an increasing reach, which results in increased engagement and an increased following. As a result, the social platform AI detects an increasing trend on your account and so shows your posts to a growing percentage of possible listeners giving you an increased reach for your next activity.
If you build for the wrong audience you almost certainly make posts about your music only to get really poor engagement. As a result, the social platform AI detects disinterest and downgrades your reach, ie it shows your posts to fewer and fewer people. This is how you shadow-ban yourself. Inevitably even friends and family can feel you are spamming them with unwanted promotional posts. You will cross an invisible line of activity and be muted, unfollowed or worse, reported.
The Solution
You Have Built A F4F Based Following (Or Through Other Fake Fan Relationships)
The first step is to clean up your account by removing accounts that don’t interact with you. Be pretty ruthless. First, you must remove the dead wood to grow fresh green shoots.
Focusing on communicating with your actual audience is a much faster way of establishing better engagement. The closer you can get to saying “All my followers are fans” the better your engagement will be. This is about getting the best ROI (Return On Investment) even if that investment is purely your time.
You have to build a real audience. Your real audience. It takes time time and effort. Reaching beyond people you know in order to find your real audience isn’t automatic for most artists. It takes learning and experience. That means that you have to try different ways to find and build your audience. You must be consistent and active. If it seems too easy, or too good to be true, it probably is.
You Have A Friends And Family Based Following
This situation is at its worst when you have one account on a platform that you use to talk to all your connections—bad idea. See “Dedicated Artist Account” below.
Either way, you need to direct your focus towards your target audience. In short, that means you must try to connect with people who are likely to like your music. Less scatter gun, more rifle. The best way to build your fanbase is to go to where they hang out and put your music in front of them.
You need to reach beyond friends and family and find your audience. It is not sufficient to toss your message onto the seven seas and wait and hope that someone plucks your message from the receding tide. You have to give your music the maximum chance of ending up in the hands of people who are likely to enjoy your music. A little bit of effort goes a long way.
Dedicated Artist Account
No one says you have to have one account for everything. Social media is great for connecting with listeners. Forums are excellent for connecting with other artists/music producers/musicians, songwriters etc. Partition your public life so that you can have some kind of control. You get to choose what to share with what group of people.
Most of your friends and family are not interested in the details of your music. They are likely to generally support you, but, again, they are not as likely to be fans of your music. Eventually they will switch off from your music posts… giving you poor engagement rates and unintentionally damaging your social media presence. Far better to let your family and friends know about your artist account but at the same time plead with them NOT to follow you if they are not big fans of your music. Explain to them that although they might mean well, it can actually damage you. If you do this right then only those who actually like your music will follow your artist account. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
Build The Right Audience For Your Music
You are probably beginning to get the idea, that building the right audience for your music is crucial for long-term success and growth as an artist. To help you, here’s a step-by-step guide to help you attract and engage the right listeners.
Understand Your Identity as an Artist
Define Your Sound: Be clear about the genre, style, and message of your music. Knowing who you are musically will help you attract the right audience.
Know Your Story: Every artist has a unique journey and story. Share yours to create a connection with your audience.
Identify Your Target Audience
Research Similar Artists: Look at artists who make music similar to yours. Analyze their fanbase to understand who is most likely to enjoy your music.
Demographics: Consider the age, location, interests, and behaviors of the people who are most likely to resonate with your music.
Create Quality Content
Focus on Music Quality: Ensure your recordings are professional and your performances are polished.
Engaging Visuals: Use high-quality images, videos, and album art that reflect your brand. Visuals are often the first impression, so make them count.
Leverage Social Media
Choose the Right Platforms: Not every platform is suited for every artist. Focus on the platforms where your potential fans are most active, whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube.
Consistent Posting: Regularly share content that highlights your music, personality, and behind-the-scenes moments. Consistency keeps you in your audience’s mind.
Engage with Your Audience: Respond to comments, messages, and engage with your followers’ content. Building relationships with your audience fosters loyalty.
Use Email Marketing
Build an Email List: Encourage fans to sign up for your newsletter by offering exclusive content, early access to releases, or free downloads.
Regular Updates: Send regular updates about new music, tour dates, and personal stories. This keeps your audience engaged and in the loop.
Collaborate with Other Artists
Collaborations: Partner with artists who have a similar or slightly larger audience. This exposes your music to their fans, who are likely to enjoy your style.
Features and Remixes: Offer to feature on other artists’ tracks or have them remix your songs. This cross-pollination can help you reach new listeners.
Perform Live
Local Gigs: Start by performing at local venues and events. Live performances are a powerful way to connect with an audience and turn casual listeners into dedicated fans.
Live Streaming: Use platforms like Instagram Live, YouTube, or Twitch to perform for a broader audience. This can help you reach fans who can’t attend live shows.
Engage with Music Communities
Online Forums and Groups: Participate in online communities related to your genre or music in general. Share your music when appropriate and contribute to discussions.
Fan Clubs: Encourage the formation of fan clubs or online groups where your most dedicated fans can connect and promote your music.
Run Targeted Ads
Social Media Ads: Use platforms like Facebook and Instagram to run ads targeting people who are likely to enjoy your music. You can target by interests, demographics, and even lookalike audiences based on your current fans.
Spotify and YouTube Ads: These platforms allow you to run ads that promote your music directly to listeners who are already streaming similar artists.
Monitor and Adapt
Analytics: Keep track of your social media metrics, streaming stats, and audience engagement. Tools like Spotify for Artists and YouTube Analytics can help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
Feedback: Pay attention to feedback from your audience. Adapt your content and strategy based on what resonates most with them.
Stay True to Yourself
Authenticity: The most important factor in building the right audience is staying true to who you are as an artist. Authenticity attracts people who genuinely connect with your music, leading to a more loyal and engaged fanbase.
Conclusion
Building the right audience for your music is critical.
If you are building the wrong audience, at the soonest opportunity, stop building and change how you are building your audience.
By focusing on the strategies above, you can gradually build a dedicated audience that appreciates your music and supports your career. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint—building the right audience takes time, but the payoff is worth it.
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