Category: SpotifyCategory: Spotify

I first saw Sleevenote on Substack. It’s a new music player with no streaming option, playing only music files you’ve bought and own. From their website:

The time has come to get serious about supporting music makers and valuing the music you love. Audition stuff on your phone and what you LOVE, you buy and put it on your Sleevenote.

I’ve been emailing with CEO Tom Kell a bit, and we’ve definitely hit upon the irony of the statement “nobody buys music,” and that everyone just does streaming now. Says Tom:

The statement “nobody buys music” is not true with the relatively healthy vinyl resurgence. The thing is people aren’t buying things that they don’t need to buy, and when buying vinyl (and to a lesser degree merch), music fans are often compelled by the motivation that they are “supporting the artist” with these purchases, and getting some form of physical and tactile experience (for however fleeting) in response. When subscription-based music access came along it cut the legs off the need to buy digital music, for a like-for-like experience – music on your phone. With Sleevenote, all our efforts are going in to making digital music feel more special, and now our ethical responsibility is, if we’re helping make it feel more special, it should now be worth more, and we do everything we can to put friction in the way to achieve that. In the topsy-turvy digital world, people pay for the removal of friction, ads are added so an ad-free version seems valuable.

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From Bree Stilwell, talking about crying upon the experience of human nature and college radio, and how getting there came from a piece I helped with called “Ghosting Spotify: A How-To Guide.”

And here Kid is, with his own radio show, queuing up Amy Winehouse because he and his crew ‘blast her stuff all the time back home’ and telling his dad on-air that hosting his show would never have happened without him.

I cried into my breakfast not only because I’m a mom and often daydream about such flagrant and public gratitude from my own kids

Read the rest of “How a student DJ made me cry into my breakfast.” Then close your music streaming app and find a nearby radio station to listen to.

Kate Ellen and I (mostly Kate!) wrote ‘Ghosting Spotify: A How-To Guide‘ which got people talking.

We laid out why she pulled her music from Spotify: the streams weren’t translating into real support, and the platform made it almost impossible to build direct relationships with listeners.

We talked about how Spotify keeps people inside its walls, as listeners don’t click through to emails, don’t buy vinyl, don’t follow links. The listening numbers might look cool on paper, but they rarely lead to anything that pays the bills or creates momentum. Leaving forced Katie to focus on places where people actually show up, like Bandcamp, her website, and her email list.

Once she made that shift, she started seeing repeat buyers and more meaningful conversations. We dug into how owning the audience gives you room to experiment — releasing small projects, selling limited runs, offering commissions — instead of hoping a playlist bump solves everything.

The takeaway wasn’t “streaming is evil,” but that depending on Spotify (or social media!) as the center of your work keeps you stuck waiting for something that rarely materializes.

If you get people to your website, do your best to keep them there. If you’ve got a new video or song to promote, embed it on your own website and link to it from your newsletter and social media.

Direct people where it’ll have the biggest impact – SALES.

Add the piece of multimedia to your site, where you control the branding and layout. Optimize and make it easier for people to pre-order your new product or service, or even to just find out more about YOU.

Because sending to people to YouTube just keeps people on YouTube, which benefits YouTube.

Sending people to Spotify or Apple Music keeps them in the streaming music world.

Get people to your site, give them a reason to stick around, and don’t let that attention go to waste.

Jon Davis of Conan wrote a great piece on LinkedIn, talking about how bands (or any creative project) can sustain themselves by selling directly to their fans.

Aside from social media, boosting posts, and making a quality product, he also spoke of my favorite thing:

Use email marketing. This is incredibly powerful. Yesterday, after some exporting data from Big Cartel and into EmailOctopus, I wrote to every single person who has ordered merch through the Conan UK page (approx 4700 people) and every single person who has ordered merch through our USA store (approx 3200 people). I was raising awareness of one of my releases. I sent the mail at 15:00 Friday afternoon, and since then (it’s 10:10am the next day now) have sold almost £1500 worth of items.

He sent an email to just under 8,000 former customers, and made £1500 ($1,923) in not even 24 hours.

Can you email everyone that bought your recent thing?
If you can, that’s big business.

From Shopify – “Repeat customers have a higher (customer lifetime value): The more repeat customers trust you, the less they hesitate to buy from you. That’s why promoting new products to repeat buyers takes less effort than promoting the products to new customers.”

From HubSpot – “Acquiring new customers costs 5 to 10 times more than selling to a current customer.” Think about it – make five more REELS, or just email a former customer – which is gonna make you a dollar faster?

From Mailchimp – “The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 20%.”

From Paychex – “Little to no additional marketing is generally required to attract a repeat customer back, as opposed to starting from scratch with people who know nothing about your company.”

The allure of the NEW FAN / NEW FOLLOWER / NEW CUSTOMER is exciting, sure, but don’t neglect the customers you’ve already had over the years.

Like Jon Davis of Conan demonstrated above, he sent one email and made about $2,000.

That’s a lot easier than making a bunch of vertical videos and carousel posts and hoping 30% of your audience will even see them.

And don’t be afraid to sell. Give your fans a chance to give you money. Let them exchange currency for something you make, or offer, or do.

Linking to Spotify is fun, and all the “engagement” of likes and comments are cool, and it’s part of the game, but putting for-real dollars into your bank account is nice, too.