Wisdom Wednesday: Episode 1
Welcome to Wisdom Wednesday, a live monthly series where we answer your questions about music marketing. On this month’s episode we we answer questions about ad targeting, playlist pitching, and email marketing from our featured guest, Harley Rowell (Madison Street Worship).
Want to be a guest on the show or have questions you need answered? Email us at hello@marketingwithwisdom.com.
Kat:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to our Wisdom Wednesday live. Hi, Wisdom.
Wisdom:
Hey.
Kat:
How are you?
Wisdom:
Good. How are you doing?
Kat:
Can't complain. Can't complain. This is our first of hopefully many of these. We're going to be doing them once a month, here on Christian Music Marketing, and then also once a month on the Marketing With Wisdom socials. So we would love for you to submit questions, if you didn't get yours in, in time for this one, for one of our upcoming shows. And you can do that at hello@marketingwithwisdom.com. Send us an email, and we'd love to feature you, and feature your questions, and just have a conversation. Today-
Wisdom:
I'm glad our moms are watching.
Kat:
Our moms?
Wisdom:
Yeah, our moms are watching, so there's a couple people on our very first livestream.
Kat:
Our moms? Thanks, mom. Harley, we're going to go ahead and bring you in.
Harley:
Hello, guys, how are you?
Wisdom:
Hey.
Kat:
Friend, Harley Rowell. He's joining us today to talk questions about music marketing.
Harley:
Yeah. So do you guys want me to just go ahead and start, and just start asking away?
Wisdom:
Yeah, go for it.
Harley:
All right, sweet. So I am an artist with Madison Street Worship, and we are going to be doing some targeting, and some promoting soon. So I just wanted to get y'all's input on some things that we can do that may help streamline everything.
Harley:
So I have a few questions. And my first question was about sponsored ad targeting, and not necessarily how it works, but maybe the best practices to use with sponsored ad targeting. I've heard other people will do multiple sponsored ads, and they'll target it to different people. I didn't know ... I mean, you guys do this stuff every day, so I wanted to get your input on that.
Wisdom:
Yeah. So as far as ads go, obviously there's a lot of different platforms that are built on the ad revenue model. So there's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google [inaudible 00:02:30], even Pandora, Spotify. So there's a lot of options out there.
Wisdom:
So it is overwhelming sometimes to really know where to spend your ad budget. I know most people watching, they have limited ad budget. So you want literally every cent to count when you're spending money on ads. So what we've seen, and we've spent a lot of money on ads, specifically on Facebook and Instagram where we're a preferred advertising partner with them because of how much money we spend with our clients and our own.
Wisdom:
We actually, as a company, we haven't spent a ton on the ads up until just recently. We're pushing more stuff on ads, but we work with clients every week running ads. So yeah, there's a lot of things to consider.
Wisdom:
For Madison Street Worship, you guys are more of an established band and ministry. So it would be probably a little bit different than a brand new artist releasing their very first single.
Harley:
Right.
Wisdom:
So I would really recommend, in most cases, really focusing on Facebook and Instagram. So there's really an unlimited number of ways you could even create ads within Facebook and Instagram. So many options. One thing I'll say is, I don't recommend doing post this post option unless you're just really unsure, and intimidated by Facebook ads. It makes it easy for you to just click and run an ad. But it's not as powerful as using Facebook Ads Manager.
Wisdom:
So yeah, firstly, really for anybody watching that has never done this is to go to Business Manager. So Facebook has a platform called Business Manager. You go on there, and set up an account. It's not the most user friendly interface. I always joke, because I'm like, "Why do you make it so hard to give you money?"
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So it's not the easiest thing to learn. It took me a while to get comfortable with it and stuff. But it's really powerful once you get used to it, and you play around with it. And so I would create that, and then create an ad account, which basically means you're adding a credit card information in there. And you can set a cap on your credit card spend too.
Wisdom:
But you basically create an ad campaign. So you can really create unlimited number of campaigns. And within that, you could create unlimited number of ad sets, which are different ways to target the ad. So when you get into that, you could spend literally all day creating all these different ad sets.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
I really enjoy doing it, because it's really fun, getting to play around with the audience targeting, or even using different creatives, an image versus a video.
Harley:
Right.
Wisdom:
So a lot of it really has to do with experimenting. You want to just spend a little bit to experiment multiple ads. So some people would say you should create maybe a couple of different ads, some people might say create 10 different ads, or I know some people do 100 different ads for the same exact campaign.
Wisdom:
So let's say with your new project, there's the approach of maybe doing a few different ads, or doing literally 100 different ads [inaudible 00:06:33]. I wouldn't really go that extreme in most cases. I would say maybe test out five to 10 different ad variations, whether that's a different video, a different audience. And you can also test US and Canada versus a global, worldwide audience. And within that, you could target the same maybe artists. So artists that are similar to you, maybe in your case it's [inaudible 00:07:07] music, Elevation Worship.
Wisdom:
And you would target these certain artists, but then do a US and Canada audience, and then do also a worldwide audience with the same exact artists, and age demographic and everything, and then just test those. Worldwide tends to do better as far as cost per click if you're looking at cost per click, and even impressions.
Harley:
Okay.
Wisdom:
It may not do as well as far as actual conversion to listeners.
Harley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Wisdom:
But you could almost ... An ad we're currently running right now is costing us $.003 per click. So it's less than half a cent per click.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So it's a lot cheaper, but it may not produce actual results as well as a US and Canada ad. So that's something to consider. I think what works really well too with sending people directly to, let's say Spotify. You just send them ... the CTA, the call to action URL might be the Spotify link to the album.
Wisdom:
And then what works really well is running that as maybe one of these ads that you do is just Instagram stories. So doing a vertical video. Or even, you could do a horizontal video, but then put text above it or below it, or both, to catch people's attention. And then all they have to do is swipe up. So it's a much easier action for the user than clicking on a button on Facebook.
Wisdom:
So we see that doing really well when you do a swipe up Instagram video. There's also, for Instagram stories, you could do somebody talking. So maybe there's music playing in the background, but it feels more just organic, so it doesn't even look like an ad. So those tend to do well too. So what have you tried before?
Harley:
So we've tried what you just talked about, doing as a group, we're like, "Hey, this is Madison Street Worship, and we've got this." And then the music behind there. We've tried that some. And that was more through Integrity I believe. And I think that with this upcoming project that we've got, we get to reuse some of those things.
Harley:
Because we released our Heaven Come Closer album, we released it right when COVID hit. So it did okay, but it wasn't like what we were expecting it to. I know a lot of people went to YouTube, and more videos, watching videos because they were stuck at home, versus [inaudible 00:10:09] commute listening to music, and that kind of thing.
Harley:
So we've tried those, but honestly, I want to hit the ground running a little bit harder with sponsoring and things like that. So I know that we've boosted a couple posts, or I've noticed that some posts were boosted. But a lot of that wasn't necessarily anything that I was in control of at that point. So I'm just ready to be able to take that, and run with it.
Harley:
Yeah. And then with the sponsoring, are there ... Let's see, I did have a question, and I lost it.
Wisdom:
I just have one thing I wanted to mention to you [crosstalk 00:10:55] ad campaigns. There's different objectives that you can select. So that's really the first step when you're creating an ad campaign. So one thing that could maybe help, and sometimes if you've done ads before, you may have to shift your thinking in, is not really going for the ROI of clicks.
Harley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Wisdom:
So the CPC, cost per click. But really more focusing on impressions.
Harley:
Okay.
Wisdom:
So with music, most people know how to find music, they know how to go on Spotify, or Apple Music, or whatever, and look for an artist. So people don't really need you to necessarily really focus on that aspect of it. It's more, you want people to be aware that you have new music out. So it's more of an awareness game.
Wisdom:
So I think maybe focusing on the objective of, it's called reach. So There's a brand awareness objective, which really is great if you're a brand new artist, and you want people to start seeing your name out there. That could give you a lot of impressions for the cost. But it may not convert people to clicking on something necessarily.
Wisdom:
And then there's reach, which is what you might want to do with this ad, and just focus on that objective, which will get you tons of impressions. When we started running an ad for an artist back maybe three, four days ago, and it's already gotten hundreds of thousands of impressions because of the campaign objective we chose. And we're just really focusing on that, and getting this video clip in front of people.
Harley:
Yeah, yeah. Along the sponsored, specifically Facebook, I heard the previous company that I worked for, we couldn't use certain vocabulary. Is that still the same thing with no matter what industry you're in?
Wisdom:
I know, yeah, certain industries, it's a little tricky, because they have policies against certain things. I don't think you would run into that much with music.
Harley:
Okay.
Wisdom:
Unless you're saying, "Listen to this music and lose weight." Or something.
Harley:
Sure.
Wisdom:
That's where they'll reject the ad, if you're promising somebody is going to lose weight, or if it's with political things, there's certain requirements. So you have to be compliant more, yeah, in different industries. But yeah, I think with most music stuff, you wouldn't run into stuff.
Wisdom:
I know sometimes the Facebook automation of their review process sometimes rejects ads. But you could contest that, and request that they review it again manually.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
We actually had a client whose whole ad account, Business Manager was suspended, because they went against the terms of Facebook. So they contested it, and Facebook came back and said, "Oops, that was a mistake. Here's your Business Manager back." So that does happen a lot, especially, I think, leading up to ... I don't know why, but leading up to elections, that happens a lot. So if you get things that reject it, but you feel like it shouldn't be rejected, you can fight that.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
And it should be fine if they review it.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
But yeah, just don't promise wight loss or anything.
Harley:
Yeah. What type of content gets the best return on investment? I know that at some points, videos tend to do best. But with the whole new Instagram reels, and TikTok, and all those types of shorter videos, do you see that those are performing better than anything else? Or tell me [crosstalk 00:15:21].
Wisdom:
And you're talking about just a native post, not an ad?
Harley:
Yeah, not an ad, just a regular post.
Wisdom:
So when you say return on investment, how would you define that?
Harley:
Just more activity on your posts.
Wisdom:
Okay.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So I guess, as a ministry, what will be a good return on your investment of putting out this post? Is it getting more likes, or comments? Or is it people going and listening to your music? How would you define that?
Harley:
Yeah, I guess it depends on just what the content of the post would be. For us, it would be listening to music, or checking out a livestream from church, or stuff like that. I mean, the goal would be not necessarily ... I can't necessarily base likes and comments to be the most important thing. But really just to get people active in what we're putting out, outside of our social media accounts as well.
Wisdom:
Yeah. Yeah, I think likes, and even a lot of comments, they are almost just automated where there's services out there that'll just use bots, and leave random comments on people's posts.
Harley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) .
Wisdom:
So yeah, it's hard to gauge the ROI on that. If people are just scrolling and double tapping, you're not really getting much out of that engagement.
Harley:
Right. Right.
Wisdom:
Or just somebody using a bot to leave an emoji or something. So to me, if you post something, and let's say you get 10 likes, which isn't great, but let's say you get one person that doesn't even double tap, but they go and listen to your music on Spotify, that's a huge ROI, even if the vanity metrics don't say that. So yeah, I think there's so much vanity numbers that we tend to judge things by. And whether that's even follower numbers, and numbers of likes, and even comments.
Wisdom:
But really, your end goal as a ministry isn't to get a lot of followers and likes on your Instagram, it's really to get an actual fan base, and listenership for your music. So I would say sometimes you might be posting something that gets a lot of engagement, but it may not result in actually people going to Spotify and listening to your music. Because maybe the post was funny, so a lot of people double tapped, and commented, because it was funny. But maybe it didn't help you overall.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
Your goals. But yeah, I would say some of the ... what's the best things to create, it depends on your demographic obviously, the age group that you tend to engage with, that are following you, or that you want to engage with that you want them to discover you [inaudible 00:18:39]. Wow, somebody is visiting us, or watching this from Ireland.
Harley:
Hey.
Wisdom:
Hey, Victoria. So if you're really trying to reach the younger demographic like college [inaudible 00:18:52] reels might be a really great thing to try, and experiment with. And also, I've seen Instagram, when they launch a new feature, they really push that feature [inaudible 00:19:04] the same thing.
Wisdom:
So right now, reels is getting a lot of organic push and promotion. So if you're one of the few artists, ministries out there using it well, and doing it well, you may get just tons of organic engagement and reach from it. So that's something to even consider too, is what's the newest feature, and start using that feature. So yeah, I think if you guys are able to create some reels ... I think there's ways to do reels even that are more engaging that boring static image type things.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
If you use reels, or stories, you want to use it in a way that's engaging for people. And I think also to use it as a brand, because I think I talked to a lot of people looking for marketing. And when I talk to them, they're like, "Yeah, I have a 16 year old niece that's on Instagram that's helping me with Instagram." Like, "Well, I don't know that a 16 year old using Instagram personally for personal reasons to connect with their friends would actually know how to use it for business purposes, to reach your customers and fan base."
Wisdom:
So you want to think strategically as a brand. That's where the likes don't really matter as much as if you're personally trying to grow your Instagram to be a [inaudible 00:20:42] influencer or something.
Harley:
Right.
Wisdom:
Yeah.
Harley:
No, that's good. No, thank you for that. I think a lot of people to have a hard time necessarily knowing what content works the best. So knowing that they push those new features, it's great.
Wisdom:
Yeah. And I think as a general rule of thumb, videos do better than static images.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
And I think if you're going to do ... really strategize around video content, it's good to have subtitles, the captions, all that, because most people actually watch or look through Instagram on mute.
Harley:
Sure. Yeah.
Wisdom:
I do that. So yeah.
Harley:
Yeah, man, that's good.
Wisdom:
Kat, do you have any thoughts?
Kat:
Yeah, I think too, with the ads, varying your content will really alow you to track what performs best, and identify like, "Wow, this one video performed really well. Let's see if we'll use a different clip of the same song, if that performs just as well." Just trying to identify what the reason something does well actually are.
Kat:
And even, Wisdom, you touched on this, but even when you do post something, and it doesn't help you accomplish your actual goal ... So let's say you post something that's funny, that might be your highest engaged with [inaudible 00:22:11]. And maybe those people don't convert, and go listen to the music, or whatever the CTA actually is. But what it still does is, you're still building that relationship to Instagram, to where now maybe your content gets a higher priority in the algorithm to those people so that they're more often seeing your content, and maybe then they're actually seeing some of the heavier CTA posts. And you get more of a chance to really target them, for lack of a better ...
Harley:
Yeah.
Kat:
[inaudible 00:22:45].
Harley:
No, that's great. Good.
Wisdom:
Yeah, the Instagram algorithm, one of the big things it looks at is, do you have a relationship with this person? So yeah, they guess that by how engaged they are with your content. So yeah, that's a really good point. So even if it is a funny meme that gets a bunch of likes, and doesn't really convert people to listeners, it will help Instagram show your post more to those people that are engaged with it.
Harley:
Got you. No, that's good. Thank you guys so much. Yeah, hopefully I can go back and watch this video, and take some more notes, because right now, I'm taking notes, but I'm not going to be able to catch everything.
Wisdom:
Yeah, this will be up on our Facebook and YouTube.
Harley:
Cool. Awesome. How long is this going to be? Just because I have more questions, but I didn't want to [crosstalk 00:23:46].
Wisdom:
Yeah, go for it.
Harley:
[inaudible 00:23:47].
Kat:
[inaudible 00:23:48] all day. Like a danceathon.
Harley:
Actually, I have a different question. What would be the best way to get people from your social media accounts to your website, and in turn, to your music?
Wisdom:
So what would be the reason of trying to get them to your website from social?
Harley:
Well, I guess to purchase merch, or to go buy our album, or stream our album, or something along those lines.
Wisdom:
Cool. Yeah, so as far as streaming and buying, you probably want to direct them directly to that platform, whether it's Apple Music, or iTunes for the older folks that might be downloading music still. But yeah, I think the less steps that they have to go through, the less clicks, the better conversion you're going to get. So anytime you're wanting people to listen to your music, you want to send them directly to that platform, or to a smart URL kind of thing where they get to pick the platform on the landing page.
Wisdom:
And maybe that landing page, you create on your website. You could have a hidden page on your website that's not in your navigation, but people can ... you can direct people to that page, and then they can click from there. And then that way, you're sending people to your website, and maybe they'll stick around, go to another page, and buy merch or something.
Wisdom:
And if you have a website that will attract those clicks too. Because the thing about the smart URLs, or fan links, they will track the clicks on each platform, so you can see what people are clicking on the most. And they also show the demographics of people clicking, where they live and stuff like that.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So if that's important to you, it might be helpful to have a landing page.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
That's separate. Or a lot of those services too, they will give you an embed code so you can embed it on your website too.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So if you're wanting to send people to your website for something they can only get from your website, like merch, or maybe you guys give away all your cord charts.
Harley:
Yup.
Wisdom:
Stuff like that. If you give them a reason to go to your website and make it easy for them to get there ... So Instagram for example, you could use a service like Linktree, or we also use one called Solo.to. And it allows you to create a landing page with whatever you want on that page.
Harley:
Okay.
Wisdom:
So that you can put that just on your Instagram bio. And then whenever you are promoting something on your stories or posts, you can just say, "Link in bio."
Harley:
Got you.
Wisdom:
And then you just keep that updated. And then you can have a button that says, "Merch." Or a button that says, "Free cord charts."
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So yeah, Kat, do you have any other thoughts?
Kat:
No, I think, I mean, we see a lot of conversions when we do correctly use a link in bio solo link type thing, just because like Wisdom is saying, if you can eliminate all these steps for people, suddenly it becomes so much easier to get them exactly where you are leading them basically. And like he said too, the built in feature being able to track which one actually performed the best, even from that list of links. Let's say you link Spotify, Apple, Amazon, whatever else you're using, and the merch bundle. Being able to see which of those is even where people are actually going can be really helpful when you try to evaluate what content worked, what didn't, where you should really be pushing people.
Harley:
Yeah, cool.
Kat:
[inaudible 00:27:53].
Wisdom:
Yeah, when we look at our Google analytics on our website, one of our top, our referral sites is our solo page, which we only share on our Instagram bio. So we're getting some of our most traffic from Instagram by doing that.
Harley:
Okay. That's good to know. Yeah, I'll [crosstalk 00:28:17].
Kat:
[crosstalk 00:28:16] Harley.
Harley:
Okay.
Kat:
I think Linktree is free, and there might even be another one that you don't even have to pay for it to use it.
Wisdom:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:28:28] I think free, is a freemium model. So you can do [inaudible 00:28:32] upgrading if you need more features.
Harley:
Okay. Yeah, I definitely want to use something like that. And I think we do. I believe it's through Corey Voss' website, and he's got a Linktree on his.
Wisdom:
Okay.
Harley:
So I'm not 100% sure how that works, but I'll look into that. And I also really want to pull people onto our website, so that way if they do get a cord chart, or if they do get merch, I can also get their email address so we can stay in contact. Because that's a whole nother world.
Wisdom:
Yeah.
Harley:
That I'd love to dive into as well.
Wisdom:
Yeah, I mean, I think email is one of the most important things you can capture, because really when you think about social media, it's all borrowed real estate. You don't have any control over what happens with the platform. And you get to use the platform, but if they change the algorithm for example, then you really don't have any control over it. Whereas, email, you have full control over the email.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So yeah, anything you can do to collect email addresses, that's really great. And I think a big mistake that a lot of people make is putting a form on their website that says, "Get our newsletter." And then people don't really want another newsletter in their inbox. So you want to give them something of value, maybe it's all your cord charts or something. Yeah, so if you are offering something that makes them willing to give up their email address, because I think we're pretty protective of our email addresses.
Harley:
Yeah. I know I am.
Wisdom:
Yeah. That's why I have a separate more spam email that I give on forums, that yeah, I don't want in my main inbox, but once in a while I'll check this other email account where I get more the spammy emails. But yeah, I think the key really is to give them a lot of value through the email list, and email marketing.
Harley:
Yeah, no, that's good. I'm thinking about devotional series and things like that as well that we can put out, which we already have created, we just have to do something with them.
Wisdom:
That's awesome.
Harley:
Yeah, I'd love to put that out.
Kat:
Even in the future, and easy way to get email addresses is to ... I saw you guys just did something, was that Lee University?
Harley:
Yeah.
Kat:
[inaudible 00:31:12]. Yeah. We sometimes would do a thing where we would take stickers, and anyone who signs up for our email list gets a sticker. And stickers are not really cost heavy, it depends on how you do it. And you'd be amazed at how many people are willing to give you their email just to have a sticker.
Harley:
Yeah, I know, we had several sticker sales at Lee when we went, just because at a college like that, most college students don't have a lot of money to spend, and they're already streaming music anyway, they're not really going to probably purchase a CD.
Kat:
Yeah.
Harley:
Necessarily all the time. But we did have a lot of people wanting a sticker. So that's a great point that I can incorporate into our travel and things like that.
Kat:
Yeah. And stickers are great, because then at college campuses or wherever, they stick them on their water bottles, or their laptops, and then people see it everywhere, which is cool.
Harley:
That's good. That's a great point. Thank you so much. And then I think my last question would be, how does it typically work getting your music on editorial Spotify playlists, or Apple playlists? I know that Madison Street Worship has more on Spotify playlisting than we do on Apple playlisting. But I'd love to go and dive into that whole world as well.
Wisdom:
Yeah.
Harley:
And I know probably Integrity does a lot of that for us, and they have those connections. But how would that work from an indie ...
Wisdom:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the benefit ... a big benefit nowadays of signing to a label is distribution. Distribution always has been a big reason you would sign to a label. But back in the day, it was Christian book stores, and getting massive CD sales through these huge Christian book stores all over the country.
Wisdom:
But now, distribution is more playlists, and streaming. And so if you have a label, they should be doing a lot of that for you, especially editorial wise. That's where they focus a lot of the distribution efforts into.
Harley:
Got you.
Wisdom:
So as an indie, you don't have those benefits. So sometimes independent artists will sign with a distribution company that offers that as a part of their distribution. So if you take for example Distrokid, they strictly just do distribution. They don't pitch to editorial. But also, they don't take a cut from the revenue. So if you work with a distribution company that does pitching for you, what they typically will do is take a cut off the top. So they may take 10 to 15% off the top for helping. Or hopefully they are pitching your stuff for you. Otherwise, it may not make sense to work with the company and give up 15% of your revenue.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So that's one way to do it as an independent artist, it maybe work with a distribution company that does it for you. I think one thing to keep in mind too, whenever you're working with somebody, whether it's a label that you're in conversation with, or distribution company, is to ask a lot of questions, and look at their track record. So id there's a distribution company, you want to look at their track record of editorial placements.
Wisdom:
So for Spotify, they made it really easy a couple years ago to allow anybody to be able to pitch or submit their song to editorial playlists. So the way you do that is, go to spotifyforartists.com, and then submit your upcoming release for your editorial. So you want to do that weeks in advance. And depending on your genre ... for Christian music, four weeks is usually when you end up trying to submit that. For other genres like pop, you want to do it way more in advance.
Wisdom:
So you fill out their pitch form is what they call it. So you fill out their pitch form. You can only pitch one song per upcoming release. So let's say you have an album coming out, you can only pitch one song from that album. If you have three singles coming out, let's say 30 days apart, you can pitch every single song. As soon as that first song is out, that same day, you can pitch the next song.
Wisdom:
So that's partly the reason we recommend singles for most artists [inaudible 00:36:17] versus albums is because then every song has the opportunity to get pitched. So Spotify makes it super easy for you to do that yourself, or for anybody. Even labels use that same platform.
Wisdom:
So for Apple, so platforms like Apple, Pandora, Amazon, those are more hard to pitch to. They don't have a portal you can go on and pitch your music.
Harley:
Right.
Wisdom:
And they typically have one specific curator on staff that just does Christian music, or they do Christian and rock or something.
Harley:
Right.
Wisdom:
So you would need to basically figure out a way to connect with that person and get an open invite to send them your music, which is very hard to do, because they mainly are going to focus on label relationships, because then they're not having to do the work of filtering good music. I mean, imagine being the head of Christian music at Apple, and how many requests you get and pitches you get. So they do keep that pretty exclusive to certain key contacts that they have. So Universal being a giant in the music industry in general, they're going to have a pretty big piece of the pie when it comes to how many songs are going to get on the playlist on Apple Music, or even Spotify.
Harley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Wisdom:
So as an indie artist, it is really hard to get on those kind of playlists outside of Spotify, to get on editorial playlists.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
So for the artists that we work with, we do the editorial pitching, but we also do independent curator pitching too. So we do have a relationship directly with Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music. So yeah, that's something that either a label, distribution company, or a marketing agency can typically help with.
Wisdom:
So yeah, I hope that answers your question [inaudible 00:38:40] with your situation, it's a little different probably from most people watching this, because they don't have that label relationship.
Harley:
Right. Right. Well, that's good. That's so good to know just going forward. I really do appreciate that. I've learned a lot. And like I said, I'm going to go back and watch this, because it's going to be a few bytes at a time probably for me. But yeah, thank you guys so much.
Wisdom:
Cool. Tell us again when your music is releasing so people can look it up [crosstalk 00:39:18].
Harley:
Yeah. So right now, we are going to be releasing, it's more of an acoustic vibe. It's sort of similar to Bethel Without Words a little bit, but we're singing. And it's going to be mainly one vocal, possibly one harmony on the song. So it's going to be a lot more stripped down, a lot simpler, a lot more accessible for churches possibly to do. And we will have tracks for those as well, if there's churches that are using track, but they don't have a full band, they can still use these tracks. So that's going to come out sometime hopefully in November, before the Christmas push with all the Christmas music. So we're trying to get that out before the Thanksgiving ...
Wisdom:
So is it going to be called With Words?
Harley:
You know, that's a good question. I don't even know if they have a ... I know Adrian at Integrity is working on that with us a lot, and we've got Lee [Botelier 00:40:18] and Jared [Bogier 00:40:20], they're in house, and they're producing it, and they're doing an incredible job. It sounds awesome. I tracked ... We're doing Look What Got Us Done, so I'll give you that teaser, that's going to be one of the songs. And I just tracked vocals on that a couple weeks ago. So it's coming along, and it sounds awesome. I'm excited.
Wisdom:
Yeah, that's exciting.
Harley:
Yeah.
Wisdom:
And where can people find you on ... you and also Madison Street Worship socials?
Harley:
Yeah, so on all of our socials, Madison Street Worship is going to be our handle. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We even have TikTok, if you're on TikTok, we do have a TikTok.
Wisdom:
[inaudible 00:41:03] download the app now.
Harley:
Right. Yeah, I don't even know what's going to happen with that. And honestly, I haven't invested a whole lot of my time into that, deleting it, or getting rid of it.
Kat:
You're just going to have to start making reels instead.
Harley:
Yeah. Yeah. And then my handle on Instagram is Harley Rowell Music. Harley like the motorcycle, Rowell, R-O-W-E-L-L, music. And then I believe it's Harley Rowell Music on Facebook as well.
Wisdom:
Cool.
Harley:
So yeah. And then we have all of our other artists too. If you go to Madison Street Worship on Instagram, you can see us, we tag all of our other artists that we have. And then we also have a link to our website, madisonstreetworship.com in our website. Yeah.
Kat:
Awesome. Well, thanks, Harley.
Harley:
Yeah, thank you guys. You guys are awesome. I've been wanting to chat, and wanting to learn. So I'm all yours anytime.
Kat:
Yeah. We can't wait to hear it, for real.
Harley:
Thank you. Thank you. I'm really excited, it's going to be really good.
Kat:
Yeah. All right, well, thank you, Harley.
Wisdom:
All right, we'll see you again.
Harley:
All right, sounds good. All right, bye-bye.
Kat:
Well, great job, Wisdom.
Wisdom:
You did a great job too.
Kat:
Oh, thanks. Thank you all so much for watching. This will be posted later. So obviously you'll know that if you're seeing this later. But we'll be hosting these again once a month on both this page and also our Marketing With Wisdom socials. So be sure to check both of those out. And if you have a question about music marketing, or marketing in general, feel free to submit any and all of those to hello@marketingwithwisdom.com.
Wisdom:
So actually, because we're doing it on two different platforms, you'll be able to watch us twice a month. So yeah, once a month on our Christian Music Marketing, and then once a month we'll do it on our agency Marketing With Wisdom socials. And then we're also doing another livestream, which is a brand new thing. We're doing a podcast. So it'll be Christian Music Marketing podcast. And there'll be four of us on it like this, but it'll be four screens. And we're going to be ... Kat maybe you can share about what that's going to look like.
Kat:
Yeah, so we are pretty pumped about this. There's going to be four of us, as Wisdom said. And we realized that we are all pretty passionate about marketing and get fired up about interesting things that artists do as a way to promote their music. But that we often don't have anywhere to talk about that, because I don't know anyone else as nerdy as me who cares. And so this podcast will now feature a layout where we unpack the strategies that popular Christian artists, and sometimes other artists are using to promote their music as it comes out, and what did they do creatively to generate buzz? What did they do organically? What do we think about the artwork? Which singles did we love and why? And so we're just going to sit and have a real conversation about all the things that we loved about someone's latest release.
Wisdom:
Or maybe disliked about it.
Kat:
Well, yeah. Definitely [crosstalk 00:44:44].
Wisdom:
So yeah, that'll be fun. So you can basically watch us live three different times a month if you really into live streams, or you can watch it later as a YouTube video and stuff too. So cool. All right, well, thanks, Kat for hosting our very first Livestream.
Kat:
Our very first Wisdom Wednesday.
Wisdom:
Yeah.
Kat: Thank you guys for watching.
Wisdom:
Yeah, we had a lot of fun. So send us your questions, and we'll send you a form to fill out, and you can tell us on there if you want to join us live, and chat like Harley did today. We much prefer that versus just the two of us talking.
Kat:
Definitely.
Wisdom:
Awesome. All right, thanks, everybody.
