How To Make Money With Spotify - SMS114

The Savvy Musician Show

Are you trying to figure out how to get more streams on Spotify? Did you know we offer a course on this? This week C.J. welcomes Dave Powers, the co-founder of the course, and Kirk Smith, one of its top students and rising stars.

Dave and Kirk tell how they started making hundreds of dollars and thousands of streams a day by focusing on getting on big playlists by building relationships with curators and sending them steady streams of singles. You could do this too and it all starts with learning more with this weeks episode of The Savvy Musician Show.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Introduction to Dave Powers and Kirk Smith
• Why focus on Spotify?
• What is a curator?
• The power of the playlist
• Releasing singles instead of albums
• Staying consistent with reaching out to curators
• A steady stream of content
• Spotify is content marketing
• User-generated, algorithm, and editorial playlists
• Keeping users on the platform
• The music business is a relational business
• Getting past rejection
• Why you should be in the Spotify course
• Focusing on one music style
• Bad quality music fails quickly
• Having faith in yourself and the principles
• The Spotify course group

Tweetables:

“I ought to focus on a platform that actually could make me money rather me spending money to grow.” - @Mtncitymusic [00:04:08]

“I put the record out. I probably should’ve been putting out singles, but I learned that lesson.” - Kirk Smith [00:08:39]

“I’m starting to see like, ‘Okay, I need to plan stuff out to where I’m putting out every six to eight weeks or every couple months.’” - Kirk Smith [00:11:30]

“Spotify is content marketing, and the content is the music… their main thing isn’t to get music to people. Their main thing is to get people to Spotify.” - Kirk Smith [00:11:56]

“You have to be consistent with reaching out and with making the content.” - Kirk Smith [00:18:52]

“The sole purpose of any platform is to keep people on the platform.” - @metalmotivation [00:21:22]

“Selling your music is not the end. It’s a means to an end. It’s one part of all the things that you will do in this new era of social media-driven marketing where you're sharing a lot more of your life than just the music itself.” @metalmotivation [00:22:05]

“If your desire with everything that you post is to keep people on the platform, attract them to it, and keep them on the platform for as long as possible, guess what the algorithm is going to do with your content? It’s going to favor it.” - @metalmotivation [00:22:55]

“I think in the last couple of years, there’s been a real understanding among artists that culturally people are listening to one song as opposed to albums more frequently.” @Mtncitymusic [00:24:20]

“Whereas Spotify is technically the label now. The curator becomes A&R.” - @metalmotivation [00:30:19]

“The music business has always been a relational business, but I don’t know of a time when there’s more opportunity for an artist to develop relationships that can advance your career outside the context of a record label.” - @Mtncitymusic [00:31:42]

“If you have bad quality music, good marketing helps bad products fail quickly.” - @Mtncitymusic [00:50:52]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Kirk Smith (Spotify) — https://spoti.fi/2FcCAFM Dave Powers — https://www.facebook.com/mountaincitymusic/ Spotify for Musicians — https://savvymusicianacademy.com/spotify/