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Have you ever wanted to share your favorite piece of music with someone?
I listen to video game soundtracks while listening to music or studying. Sometimes, in the middle of listening, I would think about someone special to me and want to share the joy of listening to and admiring the beautiful piece of music. I send them a Spotify or a YouTube link to the music, with a short and enticing description of why I think they might like it and that they should check it out. I then receive one of the following two responses:
'No engagement - I sit to ponder for a moment whether my music taste is downright horrendous. Maybe I’m not even considered a friend to them at all. Or-
”Cool!” - An immaculately short response. I know that they didn’t listen to it, because if they did, they’d be foaming at their mouths talking about how good the music was and how awesome of a friend I am for recommending it to them.
9 times out of 10, most people don’t listen to music recommendations that they receive out of nowhere, through a text message. They just move on with their day. In fact, I do this too, whenever my friends send me things to listen to. Here’s what I realized today while thinking about this weird juxtaposition. I love music! But why do I hesitate before clicking on other people’s favorite music that they recommended to me?
Familiarity & Commitment
Have you ever heard “Mere-exposure effect”?
This is a psychological phenomenon where people develop preferences and likings of things that are familiar to them. Your favorite restaurant, and a brand of cereal you buy - are things that you’re familiar with.
This is why our mind briefly hesitates when we’re given a link to listen to something new. Beyond that click, we don’t know what we’re going to get. Why should we listen to something new when there’s already a large list of music that we’re familiar with and that would make us feel good?
It’s a bit less of a hesitation for new music released by artists or brands that you already know. For example, picture the face of the most recent musical artist that you listened to today. If that person release a new song - you’d instantly want to check it out because you’re familiar with their style and work.
But what about new artists that you’ve never listened to before? If you saw a picture of a random artist on Spotify, would you ever just click on their picture to listen to their music? Chances are, you wouldn’t.
Listening to something new is a commitment. Oftentimes, when we’re presented with a link (an extra step) and we’re able to see the length of the song before we could listen to it - it actually prevents us from wanting to listen to it. The longer the music is, the less likely that we’ll want to click on that link.
The listener could be in the middle of reading, watching a video, or studying, now those 3 minutes and 30 seconds is time that they must sacrifice out of their ordinary schedule to gamble and find out if this music would be good enough for them.
People don’t look for good music - they run into it
The best way to introduce people to your music is to let them discover it in an organic manner. It requires the user to almost accidentally “find” you and engage with your music.
This is why TikTok, YouTube shorts are a great way to advertise your music right now. A lot of artists are employing this method of adding their music to a content platform where people constantly scroll through an endless stream of media. If you can grab their attention within the first 3 seconds of watching your video, then bingo. You’ve hooked them, and now they’ll want to listen to your music.
Here’s how I discovered a new artist named Connor Price, for example, through this TikTok video:
It is important to identify what is ‘intrusive’ and what is a ‘pleasant surprise’. Intrusive methods to try to get audio in front of your audience are ads that auto-play sounds when visit a website that you didn’t expect. Often times, you’d get annoyed and mute the video or exit out completely. This negative feeling comes from feeling like you’ve lost control.
A lesser intrusive method is when you go to a bathroom/mall/gym and you hear a music playing. If you really liked the music, you would try to remember the lyrics and look it up later (or you can use Shazam to find what the music is called) and save it to listen to later.
Another example is through watching a movie, playing video games or listening to a piece of music through any kind of media. Music usually comes as a secondary means to serve the product. Whatever is, we can agree that our favorite piece of music probably didn’t come from us searching for it, but rather, it finding us.
The world is moving faster and faster each day. YouTube Ads that promote movies resort to having a 5 seconds summary ads that can capture people’s attention before they can press the “Skip” button. TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram stories are becoming more and prevalent form of media that an average day consumers watch.
Perhaps your new strategy for promoting your music can be through having it featured in short form videos like TikTok. I can also see platforms like Spotify promote ‘preview’ feature that lets people scroll through and listen to 8 second preview of the chorus of a music.
Talk to you on the next one.
~ Daniel K