Modern Music Marketing

Andrew (00:00)
Taran, if you only had one minute to give music artists the best music marketing advice or music business advice you could, what would you say, one minute on the clock?

Taran (00:07)
Go. Okay, I would say stop trying to make your money in Spotify streams. That's going to take forever. And if you've had any even remote success in Spotify streams, you know that that is not even going to be enough money to pay a single, not even a car bill. Right. So my advice is stop looking at streams and start looking at brand deals with other brands that are like minded.

You know, if you are a rock artist that talks mainly about, I don't know, skateboarding, maybe there's some skateboard brands that you can go after that have a lot of money that are trying to get in front of the same audience that you're also catering to that is gonna have this synergistic quality to them that's actually gonna allow them to pay you, you know, way more than what your Spotify streams would be then.

Andrew (00:59)
How big do you have to be as an artist to start actually getting brand deals? Let's say it's on an Instagram account, for example. What's the kind of minimum follower count or view count that someone has to have before they should even bother?

Taran (01:14)
I don't, you know, it really depends, because I mean, I think that if we're talking about, you know, it also matters how big the brand themselves is, right? There are some more, there are smaller brands that are going to take on smaller clients, especially, let's say, local brands, right? Maybe there's like a local restaurant that if you are also an artist that has a little bit of like a local following, even if you're what?

seven seven to ten thousand people they're following you but if but they're localized you know that's an audience that that that that restaurant is going to be able to reach that otherwise they might not be able to reach so so you know obviously we're talking if it's a restaurant that's going to be a smaller amount of money that they're going to be able to offer you you know that i i would say that it scales up as you scale up so right around probably

Somewhere between 30 to 50,000 people is where you start to get into some serious change where you could, if you were hustling full-time, pay all your bills every month off of those numbers with brand deals like that. Again, not like an extreme amount of followers in the whole theme of themes.

Andrew (02:32)
A lot lower than I was kind of expecting to be able to like actually pay your bills with 30 to 50,000 followers.

Taran (02:40)
Yeah, well, and I think that what matters is how distinct your branding is too. If you're kind of all over the place, if you're just saying, I'm a music artist and all you show is your music, obviously that's going to your results a little bit because even a brand is going to look at that and maybe not understand their spot in that. But if you are a brand that has a very strong identity in skate culture,

For instance, that's something then at that point where there are gonna be brands that are gonna go, okay, that's 30,000 people who are in the skating community that we can hit directly for whatever. $2,000 if they post this video or whatever, know, and rent money.

Andrew (03:28)
Yeah, a lot of artists I don't think realize that content creators that are non-musicians, let's say YouTubers, for example, I don't actually make that much money from YouTube. Right. I make all my money on this channel from my products and services and consulting and coaching, courses, ad agency, all that jazz. That's like the vast majority of it. I also have affiliate stuff, which is nice. And then sponsorships.

Which is nice. But I can get one sponsorship in a month and that pays me more than what YouTube gives me in a month. Just for one 90 second brand integration. And for music artists, I don't think they realize that the streaming money is kind of like the YouTube AdSense money. Like honestly, in terms of dollars per thousand views or screens, it's not that different. So I don't think a lot of artists realize that when they get into it, that the music itself

Taran (04:21)
Yeah.

Andrew (04:27)
unfortunately ends up not being the main product. It ends up being the thing that builds the audience that then makes them want to go get your actual products, whether that's like a sponsored thing or like merch or Patreon or Tor.

Taran (04:42)
Absolutely, yeah. And also I think that it's kind of volatile, right? Because if you're trying to, if your business model is that you're trying to make your money off of AdSense or Spotify streams or Instagram views or TikTok views, it's volatile because you're putting your entire business model into someone else's platform.

not into your own brand identity, right? So the moment that that disappears, let's say all of a sudden, I don't know, TikTok gets banned or whatever. That's not gonna happen, but let's say it does, right? All of a sudden you lose your entire business model from someone else's platform. It's not like you have any control over that. So keeping the control in your own world, having something where you can say, hey, this is...

how I make money and no one can take that away from me is, as a musician, important.

Andrew (05:41)
Yeah, absolutely. So for anyone here who doesn't know who you are, you know, who are you? What do do?

Taran (05:48)
Sure, my name's Taryn Gray. I live in Los Angeles from San Diego. My dad is a lighting designer for theater, so I grew up, like literally every adult around me was acting and singing and dancing. And that's just what adults did in my world. They were like storytellers. So I come by it very naturally. Tried to get into, did a lot of pop music. Started a label in San Diego, started working

with other larger labels doing A &R and everything like that, got the chance to, when I moved up here 10 years ago to LA, started working with Atlantic and Universal with new artists on their labels, and then quickly realized that there was more money. That was during the time period of Facebook pages and Twitter. And so,

When I was in all that, started obviously gaining tools in the digital advertising space through that. Realized during the rise of Instagram that there was more money outside of the music field and in plastic surgery. So I worked with a lot of different plastic surgeons on building their brand identity, because they all wanted to be rock stars of their community, basically. So it's a lot of the same tools, to be honest. And then when TikTok came around, I was actually on Musical.ly.

way back in the day, which is like kind of a cringey weird thing. I don't know if it's like a proud statement, but I was on Musically and watched it transition to TikTok and then got this opportunity while I was working with, was working with some other influencers in the beauty and fashion space at the time and got an opportunity from Yamaha Music to come on board with them.

as their creative director for TikTok. So I did that, I'm still there. And that's like one of my mainstays. And then on the side, I run this company with my wife called Social Play Digital, where we help brands on TikTok figure out first of all, their target audience, their tone of voice, what kind of content they want, what kind of posting cadence they wanna do, and just deliver content for them in the TikTok space.

Andrew (08:09)
Nice. Yeah, and the way I've found or heard about you was at NAMM

Taran (08:17)
Advanced

strategies for TikTok, but focusing mainly on SEO because that's really what I believe is the future. We're already in the future, but it's where we are and moving forward with the future of TikTok is really going to be favoring is they're competing with YouTube and Google as a search engine, not Instagram. So the more that you think about TikTok like Google and less like Instagram, that's where

that's where we're headed to. think the last time I heard the number was like, I think it's like 36 % of all Gen Z searches on TikTok first, not Google, and it's obviously a number that's rising. And so it's a viable thing where it's like, if that's a huge chunk of people who are going to TikTok for information prior to any other search engine. And so the more we can sort of look at it,

TikTok that way, not as a place to create fun videos, but as a place to create videos that have great search engine optimization, the more we're gonna be successful at getting seen in that space.

Andrew (09:31)
Yeah. And your talk at NAMM on TikTok was a little bit like, I don't want to call it life change. That might be blowing a little too much smoke up your back. But like I would say in terms of how I think of TikTok, it like completely changed how I think about the platform. And we kind of changed our entire TikTok strategy for this channel. Wow. makes so much sense.

Taran (09:57)
That's awesome.

Andrew (09:59)
And like we haven't seen if like the changes will actually cause a positive improvement yet, but just intuitively it made a lot of sense. So we are like, just let's just dive right into this. makes sense. So the thing that I thought was most interesting about how you talk about TikTok is, obviously the whole, it's, it's an SEO platform. People are searching for stuff. So you need to optimize for that. But how does the TikTok algorithm know what you're posting about?

And you gave some examples for like how do they interpret your video? How do they interpret what you say? How should you talk about the text in your post? And how should you think about the hashtags in your post? So could you kind of walk through?

Taran (10:42)
Totally. Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, when it comes to the actual video that you have, I think one of the things that a lot of us don't think about, or maybe most of us don't even know, I didn't know to be honest until I started studying this area, is that TikTok has tools, obviously, I know AI is such a buzzword, but it really is. It's AI inside of TikTok that is

that is able to track your footage and take out key features of your footage. So if I was to upload a video of me right now, as you see me, onto TikTok, it would automatically target that there's a guitar in my shot, and it would take that into account. maybe this footage that he's creating is something for the guitar community. And so we're gonna take a little bit of his audience that...

that we're gonna serve this to at the beginning, the sample audience to check who likes it or not, and we're gonna serve some of that to guitarists because clearly he is one and so maybe they're gonna be interested in that. But here's the thing, if I'm not talking about guitars, if I'm talking about, I don't know, Tylenol and the effects of Tylenol, then the guitarist is gonna see it and not give a hoot, right? So I'm automatically gonna lose a little bit of my sample audience to someone who is

not interested in my content because of the guitar in the back of my shot. That's obviously a pretty crazy situation, but the situations beyond that, or the other factors beyond that are a little less crazy, which is the idea of keywords, right? So if I was making a video where I'm reviewing Elixir guitar strings, and I jump on the video and I say,

Hey everyone, just got home from work and I was shopping on Amazon and I found these Polyweb Elixir Guitar Strings. Usually I use D'Addario's, but check these. I'm gonna try Elixir Guitar Strings out today and see how they sound. Okay, if I do that, I've already added keywords to that video that it's gonna, again, the algorithm is gonna serve that sample audience to people who might be interested in Amazon, because I said Amazon. It might serve it to people who are interested in D'Addario, because I said D'Addario.

You know, so really it's about creating your script and creating your concept before you start shooting. Even your copy, like create it all before you start shooting so that you're really making sure that the algorithm knows, okay, you only want to reach this group of people. Like really niche down as much as you can. I feel like I need to take a shot every time I say the word niche, because I it all the time. But niche down as much as you can.

Andrew (13:31)
drinking game for this video.

Taran (13:33)
Yeah, right, yeah. Just start the little. Yeah, but yeah, it's, know, for those that don't know, TikTok, every time you upload a video to TikTok, it serves it to 300 to 500 people. Of those 300 to 500 people, that's called your sample audience, and it's taking everything into account that we're talking about. Stuff in your background.

Andrew (13:36)
I'm terrified.

Taran (14:01)
keywords that you're saying, what your copy is, what your hashtags are, what any onscreen titles are. It's taking all of that into account. looking at all those different keywords, all those different images, and deciding, okay, let's serve it to all of these people and see which group of those people stick to this content so we can keep serving more of it to them. That's why all of your videos, even if it's a crappy video that doesn't end up doing anything, has at least

200 to 300 views on it because it's serving it to, that's the sample audience. It's just not passing the sample audience and moving forward into something beyond that.

Andrew (14:41)
I've seen an interesting case where people would notice that, oh, I'm going to get 200 to 300 views per video almost no matter what because of that sample audience. So then they're like, I'm just going to post three times a day. And then they do that. And then it seems like the algorithm is almost like,

throttling it even more. Sure. I'm cases like they're like, you're you're never punching past the seed audience. And so they're like, well, if I can get 300 views, I'll just post a million times a day. overall, it's gonna be a lot. And then the algorithm starts throttling it to like 50. You've seen like the videos aren't working and the algorithms like, okay, they're trying to milk it. So let's just throttle it even more.

Taran (15:20)
That's interesting. don't know personally, I haven't seen those situations, but in what I understand of SEO, it makes sense, right? Because if you are creating videos, especially if they're not thought through and targeted, mean, three videos a day, there's no way you can be putting tons of pre-production into that, right? And so that's the thing, if you are diluting

more and more what you're about, then it's like the algorithm's not gonna know who you're for and therefore you are gonna end up with low review counts anyway just because who are you for, right? You're lukewarm, there's nothing about you that is explaining anything to a specific audience. And so in that situation, I believe that. That if you do three videos a day and it's kind of just about whatever, maybe one's a trend, maybe one is like you talking

Like, who knows what you're talking about? Billion keywords right there. You know what I mean? It's like, at that point, what audience are you for? And that works.

Andrew (16:31)
Clips of music so like this particular person that I'm thinking of does instrumental music and they they make YouTube videos where they sync their instrumental music to like beautiful footage like underwater I mean on underwater hour-long video And then they'll cut that up into chunks and this kind of schedule them out. So it's it's like very specific what they're doing. Yeah

You know, they're just kind of cranking it out because they love, they'll make this hour long video and now from that one hour long video, they could get like 40 cuts or something, you know.

Taran (17:05)
Yeah,

well, I mean, not to jump the gun in our conversation, but, and maybe we can come back to this if you want, but I mean, branding has a ton to do with that, right? Because, you know, the other thing that you have to consider is like, are fans of your music scuba divers? Like is there, you know what I mean though? what is the connection, what is the contact point?

to your target audience visually that keeps people sticking around. And if it's an underwater thing, and you're doing, I don't know, synthwave music, that might not be the best, you might not get the best result just because it's not an image that that community is even interested in or looking for. I do wanna say though that the opposite is not only true, I've seen it be effective.

which is like, there was this, I just saw this interview with this guy who, he's a country artist and he created a TikTok where there's like someone wakeboarding on the back of a boat and the guy asked him like, why did you choose, like are you a wakeboarder? And he was like, no, I've actually never been wakeboarding. He's like, but my community, like the country fans love going to the lake. Like they love wakeboarding.

And so I knew it was something that the fans would be interested in because wakeboarding is adjacent to country music. It's like one of the offshoots of the culture. And so there is something to that in that brilliance, right? And kind of also, not to mention going back to what we're talking about with brand partnerships, country music, a wakeboarding company is appropriate to reach out to and ask for a sponsorship or a partnership, collaboration.

Andrew (19:00)
But when it comes to hashtag strategies, there's like a million people online that talk about hashtag strategies for Instagram and TikTok. And in the past, there was a period for Instagram where was just, they give you a maximum of 30, so stuff in like 28 or something. And I think that those, I don't think those people are still recommending that, but what's the general vibe with TikTok and hashtag? Do they matter?

Taran (19:27)
Yeah, it does matter. They're way more important on TikTok than Instagram. know Instagram has a little bit of, it kind of, on Instagram it's more about sticking you into a subfolder than it is searchability at this point when it comes to hashtags. On TikTok it's still very much about searchability, right? Because you have these large,

these large hashtag cultures, know, music talk is a huge culture on TikTok and that's built around that hashtag. I will say though that that is, and this is something else that I really preach, is the idea that you have to niche down way further than music talk to be seen. Like if you go to music talk right now and you search hashtag music talk and you pull that up and you see the videos, but not,

First of all, most of them aren't gonna be from like right now, right? They're gonna be the top videos that are performing which could be from two years ago, three years ago. You're gonna see a lot of blue check marks. You're gonna see a lot of major label artists or large influencers on TikTok. You're just not gonna, it's still, it's not niche enough. Like, and this is.

This is kind of the big thing that I really try to emphasize is that if you think you're niche, you're probably not niche enough yet. Like hashtag heavy metal is not niched down enough even if you're a heavy metal band. Because you're competing with all the people who are the most popular in that hashtag. And if you're trying to be discovered as a heavy metal band, there's just.

It's pointless. So my point is to go down even more than that. What I like to do is three to four hashtags. If you're doing four, then one of those hashtags I reserve for whatever your specific brand identity is. So for me it would be Taren Gray, hashtag Taren Gray. That way, it's like I am the expert on myself, right? This is generally what I talk about. It's like Taren Gray.

So that would be how I reserve one of those. And then the other three would be like, I say niche, mid-niche, super niche. So like niche would be, if you're heavy metal, niche would be like heavy metal Los Angeles, if you're living in Los Angeles. Or look for something, I'm not saying that's even a hashtag, but look for something that has,

like a little bit.

Andrew (22:18)
I guess one example, instead of using heavy metal as your main niche, maybe it's a sub, you're in a sub genre of heavy metal, like alternative metal. Alternative metal probably doesn't have a huge volume or maybe your metal core. Would that be enough?

More of like a size thing. if you're looking at like the number of posts using the hashtags or do you like go in the hashtag pages and look at how big the videos are?

people I see all the time I don't know their date like there's the guy with the dog with the mouth snappies you know you know the guy who would be he's like a teacher and he's in the school room and he'd be making fun of the kids and you'd like fall over and knock the desk over I don't know any of their names

One thing I want to make sure I cover is how do you feel about running ads on social media? Does that impact organic reach? I get this question all the time. I've always told people in my experience, they'll be like, well, they see you're giving them money, so they're going to stop giving organic reach and force you to pay for it. In my experience, I've never seen any evidence whatsoever for that. Yeah. What's your...

Well, thanks so much for hopping on the show.

Yeah, everyone check out Taren's links below and

works going.