Don't Fear the Streamer
LinkedIn Article All independent artists and bands need to find ways of keeping the interest in their new music as soon as they come out of the recording studios with the finished product. Most independent artists simply don’t have the resources or financial clout of the big labels to keep generating that interest.
All the hard work of tweaking, pulling and pushing bits here and there to get the sound you imagined in your creative moments ‘just right’ stops as soon as you walk out with the master copies- so what then?.
At RHMusic we wanted to figure out a way of being able to do just that. Rebecca Hurn had finished her follow up EP Waves in September 2017.
On advice from professionals in the business who have a genuine passion for emerging artists here in Wales it was decided that Spring 2018 would be the optimum time to release Waves, thereby giving us time to get funding in place where possible, (marketing and promo is not cheap) to research for radio pluggers, to basically market the EP by playing the new songs live and getting feedback from live audiences.
Feedback from playing the new songs live was exciting and encouraging, inevitably the post-performance questions to Rebecca were always mainly these two ‘Have you released Waves yet?’ or ‘When is ‘Waves’ going to be released?
We realised pretty quickly at the end of 2017 that to tell people Waves is being released on April 13th 2018 was quite a long gap. Our challenge then was how could we ‘engage fans at the point of contact’ - to harness their enthusiasm for the new songs there and then- to ensure they would not miss out.
Being members of the Association of Independent Music (AIM) We'd remembered an article featured on MusicAlly regarding 'piloting' a pre save functionality offered on Spotify for Laura Marling and her ‘Semper Femina’ album via Kobalt
We reckoned that the ability to pre save music to the Spotify streaming services would be a great way of doing exactly what we needed to do to keep fans engaged, think of it as a pre order for vinyl or CD’s but with zero cost to the fan. Perfect.
Rebecca is one of many ‘Artists Without A Label’ (AWAL) artists/bands who are part of the Kobalt group. At the end of December 2017 we emailed AWAL to see if that pre save functionality was available.
We got the reply back that it was not presently available, they were however interested in how we thought a pre-save function might be useful and could we give them an insight. After a flurry of emails between us AWAL agreed to create a pre save link specifically for Waves
On 5th February 2018 AWAL sent us the pre save link, we can put this on all our social media outlets, websites, get a Spotify URI link, get QR codes to put on posters, business cards, flyers. We can now engage people at the point of contact whether its a live gig, seminar or just out and about.
Rebecca Hurn is the first artist/band in Wales UK to have this pre-save capability to engage with people who enjoy her music.
Thank you AWAL, Kobalt Spotify and thank you Laura Marling and David Emery for his original idea whilst out walking. David now works at Apple Music UK.
Small innovative changes in the way we do things at the start can lead to big outcomes at the end.