MAKING MUSIC READILY AVAILABLE TO FANS

This article was published on Loud Sound Ghana (https://loudsoundgh.com/2016/02/making-music-readily-available/)

If music is to be done, it should be done well. But after it is done, it should be easily accessible to everyone who wants it. Many-a-time, musicians compose great pieces of music but it gets stuck on their laptop, CD, or even in the studio. Not that the artiste doesn’t have a listening audience, but the music is just hard to reach.

Now, all artistes should grab a seat and be all ears. The listening audience, in other words, fans, uses different devices for listening to songs these days. The most common device is the mobile phone, because he/she can carry it around - in a troski journey, when walking around the hood and almost everywhere. So long as he/she has a headset or earphone plugged in, the person is good to go. Other devices include personal computers, especially laptops and notebooks, mp3 players, iPods, multimedia systems, among others. To keep it real, no one uses a portable CD player these days.

Music Listening; The Evolution
Photo Credit: WhoJamLive

Musicians are like fishers, and fishers aim at grabbing every fish available into their nets. That’s why they apply different skills. Once you’re putting out free music, make sure you serve it at everyone’s doorstep. One very popular way fans get access to new music is from the internet. People usually log on to their favorite music website to download. Other people search for it on the internet. Some prefer to take it from friends via Bluetooth or USB storage drives.

As an upcoming artiste, it’s good to follow the footsteps of a mainstream artiste, but not always. Why am I saying this? Most mainstream artistes release new music via streaming platforms like SoundCloud for free streaming only. That doesn’t mean you should also do same.

Music Listening Apps
Photo Credit: FirstPost

How many people have signed up for such platforms? How many are willing to stream your song every time they want to hear it, knowing well it’s going to pinch off the little internet bundle they have? Not many people would like to go through the stress of trying to get a download link of an upcoming artiste’s song.

I’m not saying don’t upload your song on streaming platforms, but make an easy download link available as well. You’ll need to get your song on authorized streaming platform(s) because that’s one simple way many smartphone users, especially Apple devices users (who are very common nowadays) are able to listen to songs. To make it clear, iPhone users cannot download your free song because of piracy-curbing issues. They can only stream it legally.

People use all sorts of browsers for downloading music. The most common ones include Opera Mini, UC Browser, UC Mini, pre-installed browsers, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. Make sure it can be downloaded with all the browsers mentioned, within a few clicks. Try as much as possible to have a final mp3 output which is not too large a file size.

Share the links widely on social media, thus Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and the likes. There is great power behind the retweet, share and repost buttons. You may never know who’s seeing your link on someone’s timeline.

However, a problem an artiste faces in reaching their fans through music is the Google search list. Your song may be online though but what if your fans stay offline all along, and seasonally go to internet café to update their playlist? Your fishing net must catch them too. To take care of that, ensure your music is available on popular website(s)/blog(s) which ranks good on Google and other search engines.

With all this done, you can be assured you’ve tried a lot to serve your fans. But the hustle doesn’t end there. We’ll discuss how to reach fans that aren’t exposed to internet another time.