Trend #022 - ✨ The million-dollar viral Spotify Streaming formula

Hey,

FUN FACT: Most artists are not business people, and most business people are not artists.

This week, we are looking at how combining both is the perfect million-dollar viral formula and what you can do to take advantage of the lucrative world of Spotify streaming even if you are NOT a musician.

Also sharing a juicy announcement at the end so stay tuned.

What you will learn:

• The lucrative world of Spotify streaming

• What is an “Opening Skit” and why it matters for TikTok music

• The viral video format that got this video 72 million streams → Connor & Breanne’s first $100k month

• How to get into Spotify streaming as a NON-musician

🔎 The opportunity in Spotify Streaming

Here’s the deal. Spotify pays artists to create music for their platform. In the past, musicians worked with record labels who’d take an 80% cut on their revenue (ouch!). Although some musicians still do that, there’s a growing number of musicians that go directly to Spotify themselves. This means they have to get good at marketing themselves (hard!).

👀 Case Study - Connor and Breanna Price’s Spotify Music Empire

Breanna spent years convincing Connor to take social media seriously to grow his music career. Eventually, she rolled up her sleeves and used her experience creating viral FB ads for a pet brand (Alpha Paw) to help Connor promote his music on TikTok. One of their videos popped off, netting them >$100k from Spotify streaming payouts that month.

👁 The Numbers 

• Spotify pays $4,000 per 1 million streams on average (Here’s a Spotify royalties calculator)

• Connor averages 60 million streams a month = $240,000/month

• Connor’s main sources of traffic = TikTok (5.1M followers) and YouTube (2.2M followers, 197 videos)

Based on his numbers, you’d need about 120k followers across your social platforms to get $4k/month (1 million streams).

This may sound like a lot but we're about to breakdown their viral growth formula below. 👇

🔥 Opportunities 

Before we do… If you are NOT an artist, you can partner with one. Reach out to independent artists and propose a trade where you create their social videos for a cut. You’d want to find artists who are already earning money from streaming to weed out ones who’d never pay you. (Use Spotify indie playlists like this one to find trending artists.)

✨ Connor & Breanna’s Spotify x TikTok Music Playbook  

Here are 6 strategies they incorporated to blow up their music using short-form video content as a distribution channel:

1) Create for the Medium - Music on TikTok needs to be quick, catchy, and provide visual context. Not every song is TikTok material, but if you craft with the platform in mind, you’d 10x the chances of your song catching fire. I’ll show you what this means later on.

2) Opening Skits - The Curiosity Gap - We all know the first few seconds of a video is important. But exactly HOW do we do this? Connor and Breanna use “Opening Skits”. They use the first 5 seconds to create a curiosity gap that makes people want to find out what happens next.

Example: Imagine overhearing a conversation where someone said “I can’t believe he did this to me, he’s rich anyway!” You’d be wondering “What did he do? Who is this rich guy? Do I know of him?” That is a curiosity gap.

3) Making It Look Like You're Not Selling Anything Toss out pleas like "Hey, check out my song". You are not asking them to do anything. You are there to show them something interesting. To entertain your audience. And in the process, they get to know your song, your story and feel the thrill of hunting you down on Spotify.

4) Create “Contentable Moments” - Most people make music and THEN think about how to market it. They flip the script by first thinking about “contentable moments” - sections of the music that have viral potential and then work backwards to create music that fits.

For example, their first viral video was one where he said “I’m going to spin the globe. Wherever my finger lands, I’m going to find an artist from that country and create a song together.” That turned into a series of music collaborations with artists around the world.

5) Change Things Up Every 4 to 5 Seconds - Every time someone’s attention span lapses, change the scene or add in another curiosity gap to keep things engaging. For Connnor, that meant cutting down longer segments of a song, or adding in background noise (they once recorded during a fire alarm drill) to change things up and keep things interesting.

6) Ditch music labels I didn’t know this, but record labels keep 80% of revenue, paying artists 20% of the money earned. By streaming their own music they get to keep 100% of the income.

🔗 Elsewhere on the Internet

• The interview that inspired this post

• A hack to make your own autonomous agent within ChatGPT (like AutoGPT, but free and without code)

📣 FREEBIE Time - Want to speak with me?

I want to meet you too! I want to know what kind of stuff you’re stuck with so I can write better emails that can help you.

That’s why I am offering a couple of FREE consulting calls to help you brainstorm, run through you ideas, plan your next steps… whatever. If you’d like to speak, drop me a reply and let’s get you set up.

Until the next one,

Hazel

P/s: did you already know about the ChatGPT hack above? Because apparently this is old news but I just found out!

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