Top 5 things I learned at the Going Global Music Summit 2014
Going Global is an annual conference aimed at developing and nurturing New Zealand’s growing music industry, and it grants attendees access to an incredible panel of industry leaders across radio, management, labels, publishing, media, festivals, and much more. I was lucky enough to attend this year, and here are some of the golden nuggets that I took away from it as a self-managed artist.
1. Verify your accounts
Stick your release on Soundcloud, Spotify, or Youtube and think it will be found? Turns out, the internet shows preference to accounts that are ‘verified’ and if you do this across all platforms playing your music, your online visibility will increase tremendously. Verification is a manual process, unfortunately, but worth doing if you want to be easily found.
2. Metadata
This topic, whilst excruciatingly boring, is critical to finding and maximising your fanbase. Getting your head around who is listening to and sharing your music (and where, when, etc) is crucial to targeting effective promotional campaigns. Google it for more details, it's worth it.
3. Do your homework
The people in decision making roles within the music industry are inundated with emails every day, and they appreciate it when the message is personalised or shows that you have done your research on them and have targeted them specifically rather than included them in a scatter gun approach. We all like to feel a bit special in that way, right?
4. Listicles
What, you say, is a listicle? Thank you for asking. Increasingly, we find it hard to commit to reading a full article, so lists are a great way to get your content across concisely. Think ‘Top 5 Ways to be More Awesome’ or ‘Top 10 New Words I Learned Over the Weekend, Including Listicle,’ for example.
5. Be Yourself
As cliché as this sounds, don’t be afraid to let your personality show. The first thing we want to do when we hear a great song is to learn more about the band, so make it easy for your growing audience to learn about you. Visuals are really important, and high quality recordings that best represent your skills are key to getting noticed, but the most important thing is that you are genuine or else it just won't connect.
There was so much valuable information provided over the weekend, and if you are an artist trying to break into the industry this is an event you should not miss. The link is http://www.goingglobal.co.nz for more information. Thanks for reading, and please share or comment if you found this useful!
