Your audience contains your blueprint for success

If you’re not making music with your audience in mind, you’re leaving a lot on the table. 

Yes, great art begins with love for the craft. 

But successful art appeals to a specific audience in a way that allows the artist to support themselves from their work. 

Now, ideally, we would all create and release music that we both love to make and that our audience loves to consume. 

But too many of us check the first box—creating art we love—without considering the second. 

Let’s learn how to do both.  

The new economy  

In the age of the internet, people vote with their eyes, ears, and time. 

Attention is the currency du jour. 

And music is no different. 

If we want to earn a living from our work, we need an audience—a customer base—of consumers who vote for our products (i.e. our music, our merch, our shows) with their attention. 

Fortunately, the mechanisms for monitoring attention are pretty straightforward. 

Views. 

Streams. 

Comments. 

Shares. 

We all know this intuitively from using social and streaming platforms as “attention givers” ourselves. 

The issue is that most of us just sort of cruise through this attention economy on autopilot without stopping to consider why certain things earn attention and others don’t. 

As consumers. 

And as creators. 

But if we can adjust our method of engagement ever so slightly, we can learn a ton. 

And then we can apply it. 

Are you paying attention? 

The next time you pick up your phone or hop on your computer to check out social media or listen to music, try taking a more intentional approach. 

When you watch a short-form video all the way through, ask yourself why you did that. 

When you stop on an ad instead of skipping it. 

When you share something with a friend. 

When you comment. 

The next time you listen to music, take a look at the music you’re saving and consider what it is about those songs that made you take that action. 

Why did you put that song on repeat while working? 

Why did you add that one to your playlist? 

What do these songs have in common? 

What do these social media posts have in common? 

And most importantly, how can you take these commonalities and apply them to what you are putting out into the world as an independent artist? 

Application and evolution 

It’s not enough to consider how you’re approaching content as a consumer. 

You have to look at how others are approaching the content they consume from you. 

That’s where the real magic lies. 

Look, at some level, all art is theft. 

Whether you mean to or not, you are naturally going to take the creative work you consume and use it to fuel the work you create. 

There is no creation without consumption. 

Just as you use your consumption to fuel creation, others are using your creation to fuel their consumption. 

Then the cycle repeats. 

How others engage with your creative work can tell you a lot about what to create in the future. 

You can apply commonalities from your consumption to your own creative output, but it is the feedback from your audience that truly makes it better. 

Watch closely for which songs get the most streams, which posts get the most shares, and which videos get the most views. 

When something has an outsized level of success compared to the rest of your work, dissect it, analyze it, and learn from it. 

Look at every data point you can find. 

Music. 

Cover art. 

Video. 

Text posts. 

Figure out precisely what you got right so you can repeat it moving forward. 

The more work you release and the more you understand the results, the more you will learn and the more effective your output will become. 

Creativity is a game of effort and iteration. 

Make things that matter and release them out into the world, then go to work analyzing as much market feedback as you can. 

Keep tightening that feedback loop to create a better experience for your audience, and you’ll be on the fast track from starving artist to thriving entrepreneur in no time.