Get More Online Streams By Promoting Your Music Along With A Cause

It’s not easy getting people to listen to your music. In today’s music industry, online streaming is just as important, if not more important, to an artist’s success than playing shows. If you’re not building a presence online and getting people to listen to your music, it’s near impossible to get anyone to come see you play a show and ultimately make money. Even more proof of this is the fact that Billboard just recently started including online streaming into how it determines who makes it onto the charts - something that used to be determined strictly by album sales. The industry is changing, and artists need to keep up.

Unfortunately, getting people to listen to your music online is not an easy task. With Spotify specifically, there are so many artists that it’s really challenging to get discovered organically. It takes work and likely some investment to get placed into a popular playlist, and even then, it’s no guarantee that you’ll increase the number of streams on the platform.

A great way to increase the number of people who listen to your music online is by aligning your release campaign with a cause. Strategically partnering with a cause or specific nonprofit during promotion for your release can open you up to an entirely new audience that will stream your music. There are so many ways this can happen; the organization can place your music in a promotional video and point their audience to your album on Spotify or another streaming platform, they can create and promote a Spotify playlist of their favorite songs and include some of your music on it, etc.

So many artists resort to paying tons of money to have their music placed on Spotify playlists and promoted on streaming platforms, but what return does that really bring? Thoughtfully and strategically aligning with a cause or organization can not only open you up to a wider audience and help build a positive reputation among your fans, but it can also help you get more streams organically, without investing a ton of money in something that will get you little or no return.