Wisdom Wednesday: Episode 2

Welcome to Wisdom Wednesday, a live monthly series where we answer your questions about music marketing. In this month’s episode we talk with Christian artist Grace Graber about marketing philosophy, strategy tips, Spotify uploading strategy, and more! Be sure to check out Grace's music!

Want to be a guest on the show or have questions you need answered? Email us at hello@marketingwithwisdom.com.

Kat:
Well, hi everybody. And welcome back to our second CMM installment of Wisdom Wednesday. Wisdom, how are you doing?

Wisdom:
I'm doing good. It's Wednesday. So, yeah. This week actually flew by pretty quickly. So I kind of can't believe it's Wednesday. It's been snowing here for the last couple of days, so that's been interesting. It's not even Halloween yet.

Kat:
That's terrible. That's terrible. I'm wearing a beanie in hopes of bringing fall to Nashville.

Wisdom:
Oh, Okay.

Kat:
We've been having like 70 degree weather, but...

Wisdom:
Oh, wow! Yeah, we could switch. We could, we'll take the Nashville weather, you take the Kansas City weather.

Kat:
Oh, no. I am not at all prepared for snow in any capacity. We're really excited, everybody that we have a great guest here today. She is a singer, songwriter, artist from the West Coast currently located in Portland, and her name is Grace Graber. And we're going to get a chance to hear from her, answer her questions and talk more about what she has going on. So Grace.

Grace:
Hi.

Kat:
Welcome.

Grace:
Thank you.

Wisdom:
Hey.

Grace:
Thank you for having me.

Kat:
Of course. We're super excited to have you on and answer some of your questions about marketing. So why don't you start and just tell people, kind of where you're at in your career.

Grace:
Yeah.

Kat:
To give them the framework for where your questions are coming from.

Grace:
Yeah, yeah. So I'm Grace Graber. I'm an independent artist in Portland, Oregon. Where I'm at? My career is, I just released my second single, on all platforms. I released my first single in quarantine. I actually self produced that and did that all myself. And then I am slowly working on releasing a project each month here. So the recent single came out October 9th, and I'm just doing it all by myself. I'm doing it with my myself, my husband, and I have a producer, his name's Grant Woell. And so he's been a big support, but yeah, it's just been kind of just me.

Kat:
That's awesome. I think that's how most artists feel during quarantine. Like what can I do right now?

Grace:
Yeah, it was either I can sit around and wait for my job to open back up, or I can decide I'm going to do music full-time. I'm going to pursue this. I'm going to see what it's like. So that was kind of the mindset, spent plenty of time on YouTube, researching everything you need to know about production and decided like I just fell in love.

Wisdom:
What software do you use to produce?

Grace:
I use Logic.

Wisdom:
Oh, cool.

Grace:
Yeah. Logic it's the best for song writing I find, it's just really, really quick.

Wisdom:
So you just learn through YouTube mainly?

Grace:
Yeah. Yeah. I just watch YouTubers, people put up stuff all the time. You can be like, oh, if I want my guitars the sound this way, I just write guitars from... I've seen a lot of people do break downs of songs you like. So if you look up on YouTube, the whole production for a certain song, you can actually find out what kind of plugins they used, what kind of things they did for that song. So you can kind of make it your own.

Wisdom:
Wow. I have a good friend who's a producer in Atlanta, his name's Sean Hill. And I met him probably like 12 years ago. And when I first met him, he had just kind of stepped out of faith and started his own production business, full time, went into a full-time, quit his day job. And I have interviewed him on my podcast before and he said that he learned everything on YouTube and this is like 12 years ago. So now there's even so much more content. So really, I think it's just a matter of discipline and having the determination to learn it and grow at it. But yeah, he's doing really well for himself and he works with a lot of artists and stuff, so, hey, maybe there's a production.

Grace:
Yeah. There's no excuse nowadays, if you want it, like I was telling Kat, but I want it so it's I can make it happen. I just have to do the research, I have to put in the time and just make it happen.

Wisdom:
I love that. Yeah. I think, I talk to a lot of artists every week and I think a lot of times artists have this dream of signing with the label and getting a record deal because they feel like then they don't really have to do anything besides make music.

Grace:
Yeah.

Wisdom:
Which is not true.

Grace:
No.

Wisdom:
So yeah. I think, work ethic is huge.

Grace:
Yeah. And that's why I love being independent. Just right now, I mean, I'm open to whatever God has for me and wherever I'm going to go, but it's like, it's nice because right now I get to experience it for myself and see what the responsibility looks like. I feel like a lot of people who are starting out in the industry don't realize how big of a responsibility you have as an artist. And that means on social media, that means with just your creative content that nobody sees. It's a big, not integrity thing, but it is a big behind the scenes job as an independent to make sure you're making it for yourself.

Wisdom:
Yeah.

Kat:
Well, and it feels like 90% of being an independent artist is just perseverance, discipline and resilience. The thing to keep going has to come from inside you because it might be years before you ever see the fruit of what you've been in, kind of like working in secret for so long and toiling over. That's really...

Grace:
Thank you. Yeah, no, it's just knowing the seeds. Just sowing, that story in the Bible where you're just sowing seeds, throw out the seeds wherever you go, because you never know where they'll land. And I went to a songwriting competition in Nashville last year, and when I was there, I was just reaching out to people on Instagram. I was just throwing out seeds, hopefully. And someone was like, "Yeah, have coffee with me." And he's now my producer. So it's just like, you got to persevere. You got to just keep going, get the nos, get the yes, because when the yeses come and all the nos have come, it's just even sweeter, right?

Kat:
Those are some good words right there Grace.

Grace:
But yeah, I definitely, I've watched you guys on social media, watched you guys answer questions. You guys are so great at interacting. I just need to say that. Just thank you. I know sometimes I feel like replied your stories. You guys are so interactive. And I think that makes a difference on social media, because that builds relationships with other artists. So that's something that stood out to me about this company. And so I guess a question I would have is, what is marketing? What do you guys do?

Wisdom:
Yeah. What is marketing? I actually, randomly was thinking about this, this morning. I was like, I always have like random ideas. And this morning I was like, I should make a shirt that says marketing is stewardship, because that's what I see as marketing. And that's how we approach marketing. Is really marketing is stewardship. And I was talking to even a business owner yesterday that reached out to do an initial call.

Wisdom:
And when you have a product, or service, or music, then hopefully you're really passionate about it. And you feel like that's something that you've been given as a gift or a talent from God, if you're a Christian and you want to really steward that well, right? So part of the natural thing that artists think about is production or songwriting, but then the stewardship doesn't really stop there because if God's given you a song and you're investing, let's say $2,000 into producing the song, the next step is making sure people will actually confined it and hear it.

Wisdom:
So if you don't take that next step, you end up being one of the majority of the songs out there on Spotify that have the less than 1000 streams next to it. That's literally majority of the songs on Spotify. As Christians I feel like marketing is stewarding the gifts and the talents that God's given you. And with music is so powerful because I was actually talking to my 15 year old about this last night, because he's a rapper to be and producer. And we were talking, we had this whole 45 minute conversation in the car while we're driving back from football practice, about how for a Christian artist, it's not most Christian artists, put so much weight on the message and the lyrics, because they're not, you're not just trying to entertain somebody and just trying to be rich or famous, you're trying to share the good news.

Wisdom:
So if you put all this effort and money into production, but then nobody hears it, to me that's bad stewardship. So even if you look at the parable of the talents, the guy that didn't do anything with what was given to him, was seen as a bad steward of that talent. So I think for artists, it's really shifting that mindset to know, realize marketing isn't just some thing that you really don't want to touch and you don't want to self promote. Marketing is actually a critical part of your music and your ministry.

Wisdom:
So I would say, in a nutshell, that's what marketing is, but of course on the strategy and practical side, there's everything from branding to marketing plans and advertising. But really the first step when I talk to artists is realizing why, the why behind marketing, instead of just the what?

Grace:
I like that. I can relate to that stewardship because that's kind of my... Recently my single, Darkness released and my goal was just, get the streams, get it out there. And I actually made 5,000 streams in one week. And so it was really exciting, I just was connecting with people online, reaching out to playlist. And I also have a really good mentor and friend, my producer Grant, he was like, "This would be a next good step is doing a music video." And really... So I liked that because I can relate to that as advice that I've gotten, not necessarily like, "This is what marketing is." But like, it's just very, the Bible says steward, use it, get it out there. And I really liked that, that's a really great answer. So I think, how would that benefit me as an independent artists then?

Wisdom:
Yeah, so as probably a lot of people know by now on, in an article several months ago, Spotify announced that they get about, we're over 40,000 uploads, songs uploaded every day, every single day of the month, which is crazy. If you aren't intentional about the marketing piece of it, when really marketing is like bringing awareness to what you have, sometimes we'll have like business owners reach out and they want marketing done to send people to this website. But then the website is just very, very poorly built.

Wisdom:
And marketing's job isn't to make the product or service better it's to bring light and awareness to the product or service. So when you think about marketing, it's really how many eyeballs can you put on your music? This is specifically to the right audience, so you can waste a lot of money in marketing the wrong way and getting the eyeballs of the wrong people. And maybe if you don't really know how to run ads and you're just throwing money at boosting posts and things like that, you may just get random likes or sometimes trolls commenting on it.

Wisdom:
So I think being intentional about like, okay, this is what I'm wanting to release, whether it's a music video, lyric video, but then not just throwing it out there and to see what happens with it, but being intentional about how you're going to release it? What kind of lead time you're going to have? Because you don't want to just out of the blue release something big, artists with like millions of followers can do that. And just like, "Surprise, here's a new single."

Grace:
Yeah.

Wisdom:
And everybody is just like, goes and listens to it. But for independent artists, to do that is to really waste a huge asset that you have. And the biggest, really like the biggest gift that you have is your song and your message. So once you release it like a music video, or even a single on Spotify, you can't ever rerelease that as the first time. So that first time is so important. So you want to be thinking about like, what's the plan to actually release this content? Not just like let's release it this Friday.

Wisdom:
So a lot of artists actually come to us and they want to release their single, like let's say four weeks from this Friday, but then they also want to release the lyric video or the music video on the same day. What I always advise them is give people time to listen and sit with the song first, before you present them with another piece of content, then you can kind of keep promoting same song for several more weeks because there's more content that you can re present that song, that same song with.

Grace:
How do you help people find that intention? I know you were talking about finding like being like an intentional audience. How do you help someone narrow that down?

Wisdom:
Your audience? Oh man, we actually do the whole two hours session with artists. We do a brand strategy session and then a big piece that we talk about is your audience. And we actually create a whole course on that too, on the artist mentorship. When it comes to your audience, I've worked at labels where there's much bigger budgets for releases and with that comes with the artists having much bigger expectations too. So I've had a lot of conversations with sign the artists where like, I'll ask them, like, what do you think the audiences is? Who do you think the audience is for this album or whatever? And I've had artists say to me, the whole world. And then we're like... And I would laugh. And they're like, "No, I'm serious. I want every single person on the planet [inaudible 00:16:14]. That's my expectation.

Wisdom:
I don't think any artist that will have that happened to them in the history of the world. I think, if you don't have a target audience and you're just kind of shooting stuff out there very randomly, you're actually going to be less effective with your music and your [inaudible 00:16:38], because you don't even know who you who's listening to your music and you don't know who you're targeting the messaging to, or your song to.

Wisdom:
So the song that might speak to a 20 year old living in the suburbs, in will be really different from somebody that's maybe like 75 years old and living in a very rural area. There's things that you have to think about when it comes to your audience. And that different messages speak differently to people. So I would recommend taking time with you, like your husband or your team to really think through who are actual people that you can picture in your mind that will listen to your music, that you want to reach with your music.

Wisdom:
So literally come up with a person, a persona in other words, like avatar or profile and name person, give that person a name. Maybe that person is Rebecca. And give that person an age, ethnicity, where do they live? A specific city they live in, what kind of hobbies do they have? What kind of social media do they use? Why are they on social media? So they're like the demographics that you want to think about. Even things like their income level, what kind of education do they have? You can really get much detailed with it, but then also getting down to what's called psychographics, which is really the why behind what they do. So their behavior. So if they're listening to your music, why do they listen to your music.

Wisdom:
And really try to get deep with it because people, yeah, they like good music. They like well written music, but then why, do they want to listen to your music? So the message that you're writing in your songs and that you're sharing on social media, why does that connect with that person? So maybe your songs and your like brand is really about hope. So maybe that person needs hope for whatever reason, so really... And some of this, you may even do kind of like informal interviews with people that are your ideal avatars and ask them questions about their life. And if they're, for a lot of artists and like people in the music industry, Apple is a huge product, everybody uses Apple products, but we don't buy Apple products because it's a phone and it can take pictures and take phone calls.

Wisdom:
There's a deeper why behind why we use Apple products beyond just the functional reasons. So there's an actual concept that you can Google called the elements of value pyramid, which actually shows a pyramid and like different value that, values that brands provide people. And Apple was actually one of the top brands that hit on more of the values and the needs of people than any other brands. So for example, belonging is a value that I get. There's a higher value that brands can bring.

Wisdom:
So thinking about, not just like the yeah, that's a fun song or it's a cool song, but does it bring hope? Does it bring transformation or provide belonging and as a brand, as an artist, do you provide that? Yeah, I can talk for a long time about the audiences and your brands, because I think to me as an artist, knowing your brand and your audience is really important, because otherwise you actually end up wasting a lot of time and resources trying to reach people, but you don't really know who you're trying to reach. So you don't really have a target. You're just like throwing stuff against the wall.

Grace:
How long does it usually take to like see results from that once you kind of nail that down and you start doing marketing, that's very specific?

Wisdom:
So there's certain things that you'll see immediate results, like streams. If let's say you're running an ad on Facebook or Instagram, you'll see immediate results. Maybe even that same day, you'll start seeing results. Whether it's the impressions on the ads, or clicks, or actual extremes, or follows on Spotify, when it comes to actual branding, it takes time. And really branding isn't really even what you think of yourself as what people think of you. So it takes time to actually brand yourself. So even the word branding comes from is when they would brand cows to mark as like this cow is owned by this company or whatever.

Wisdom:
So when you think about branding, it takes time to really be consistent as a brand, which means everything from your social media posts to your website, your album art, everything that you're communicating. Visually, all those things take time for people to see and then to really brand it in their mind. And they actually say that it takes about 11 impressions before somebody actually goes, "Oh, I should check this out. Or I should look into this product." So, to get those 11 impressions, sometimes you could do it quicker, if you have a bigger budget, versus if you're just trying to do free or a guerrilla marketing, then it may take longer and a lot more effort. So Kat, do you have any thoughts on that?

Kat:
Yeah. Well, obviously there are certain metrics, like Wisdom's talking about that. You can see immediate kind of quantifiable results like your streams, or your Instagram followers, or whatever. But I think too, one thing that people discount is that a lot of times, as you're growing as an artist too, even if it's on a small scale, you're starting to receive feedback from people about what touched them or why it connected to them or something. And that can be super informative moving forward.

Kat:
So lets say it's your first release. You don't have a thousand streams, but you get a DM from your friend or whoever, and they tell you why it matters to them. Well, now you're starting to collect real data from real people about what you are naturally bringing to the table. And listening to those people like Wisdom's saying, your brand is about what other people think of you or other people perceive you to be.

Kat:
And so listening to what those people have to say will really help you lean into your natural tendencies instead of trying to cultivate a persona. And I think especially right now, our generation is super perceptive, and Gen X even Gen Z after us, they're even more intense about we just want the real thing. We want it to be authentic. We want to know who you are and we want it to be consistent. And that's the other piece, like if you're building something that's fake, eventually you're not going to be able to keep that up anymore.

Kat:
And so really finding ways to implement authenticity into what you already are. And then just share that with people, I think is where you really start to see immediate effects. Because that's when we're talking about building community and moving up the pyramid of belonging and meeting some of those, helping create space for some of those deeper needs, instead of just selling a product to people.

Kat:
And I was going to say earlier, when we were talking about connecting with an actual target audience, one of my favorite podcasts talks about this and he gives this really simple analogy for it, where he says, that it's much easier to sell 100 dog leashes to 1000 dog owners, than a million people who have cats. When you're thinking about like the numbers, you're like, "No, this doesn't make sense. Maybe those people have a dog too. Maybe, and then if I get it out to a million people, surely there's a higher likelihood that people will buy these dog leashes." When in reality, you're trying to provide something for a need that already exists and you're just trying to show that to people. So the more specific we can be in building brands, and building platforms, and building communities, I think is where you start to see much faster results.

Wisdom:
Yeah. And I think Grace, I love your work ethic and your approach, because right now, really for artists, there is no excuse for not doing it right. Because there's so many tools there and there's more tools to promote your music than ever before. So even targeting ads on Facebook, there's some really powerful things you can do just even on Facebook and Instagram with ads, where you can get very specific. So if Rebecca is your avatar, you can literally create Rebecca in the ad targeting. With the age and even income level, you could even target people who are Republicans, if you want.

Wisdom:
You can do so many different things with ads where like you're not wasting a lot of money on impressions on people that are really your true fans. So yeah, I think, the mindset of what you have of like, I'm just going to go get it done and figure this out. I love that because I think so many artists want it easy and want it like immediate. And it's just not how it is. It's not reality. And especially because now there's way more music than ever before too.

Grace:
Yeah.

Wisdom:
So there's the whole catalog of all the songs that's ever been released available on all these digital platforms, but then there's 40,000 songs being released every day. So when we think about how much music is out there, there's so much noise. So it's harder than ever to really promote your music. But then you also have so many less barriers where before, the labels kind of controlled distribution of music.

Wisdom:
So if you weren't signed, it's hard to get distribution to music stores and bookstores, but now within 10 minutes you can upload your music and get it out on Spotify. My son, he's been doing his own upload since he was 12. A 12 year old can upload music and distributed all over the world. So that's not a problem that people have nowadays. It's the advertising, the marketing, the promotion side, the awareness piece of it, that really is the big challenge that a lot of artists have.

Grace:
I love that. It's making me think, thank you. These answers are making me think, because as an artist my only goal is just to save a life. A song saved my life one day and ever since then, I've experienced Jesus through the kindness of those old Christian contemporary bands and that's why I make music. So just hearing that answer just really helps me think. And thinking about me when that song saved my life, what age was I? Where was I? That kind of thing. That's super helpful. So where would you suggest someone who's in this position just starting out as an independent artist, where would you suggest they start then?

Wisdom:
I would say, start with patience. And don't, I mean, really expect to put in a lot of hard work and don't expect a return right off the bat. I posted about this on my Instagram, but there was a marketer from, I think, Universal Records that share that, there, you have to release about 26 releases before you can break as an artist. And this is looking at statistics over time with different artists. But what most artists expect is release the first single and get 20,000 streams on the first single, or release the third single, or their first album and all of a sudden have a million streams on it.

Wisdom:
So I think really being patient and having a long-term mindset, versus within the next three months, I have to generate revenue from music. If you want to make me money, music is not the right [inaudible 00:30:51] for you. Yeah. I mean, if people tell me, I want to make money and get wealthy or whatever, I tell them, this is not the right industry for that. If you want to maybe eventually over time, be able to self-sustain, and do music as a full-time career, and support yourself, give yourself like five years for that, not five months.

Wisdom:
So I would say be patient and really have a plan, write out a plan and what your goals are, but be realistic about it. And also I think the other thing, although I love data, I love numbers and seeing numbers grow, like we have our own playlists and stuff. I love checking on the numbers every day and seeing our playlists grow. But at the same time, I think it's easy for artists to forget that every stream is a person that's listening to your music.

Wisdom:
So even if you have 100 people listen to your song that you just released, it's easy to get discouraged by that. But when you actually think about, you're reaching 100 people around the world with your song, that's actually really powerful. So yeah, I think, if you have a mission with your music, then you want to, obviously you want to reach more people and stuff, but also think about the streams are actual people actually listening to your song, and the lives that are being impacted. Just like what you were talking about. You are to save somebody's life through your music, that's your mission. But through music and so you should be encouraged when you see one person stream your song, it's that one person that probably needed to hear that message.

Grace:
Spotify has the little, the app where you can see who's listening. I always say a little prayer because that is, that could be impacting someone's life on their way to work. That could be the moment somebody life is getting changed. Say a prayer. As an artist, say a prayer right there. I have a question about Spotify. I know we're a little overtime, but I do have a question about Spotify. So something I've seen as an artist, and something I'm really curious about doing is artists who have projects, like me I have an EP coming out at the end of the year, but I want to give time for each song to really have a moment to sit. So I'm releasing each song each month. I'm curious to how I get it to stack on Spotify so that I don't have a bunch of singles just sitting in there, but I have like, oh, eventually I have my EP, and I have the one single that I wanted to be a single. And how do I do that?

Wisdom:
Yeah. Kat I wish we could have done this video two years ago, because two years ago, we were telling artists to do this. And we've told tons of artists to do this starting two years ago and nobody did it.

Grace:
Wow.

Wisdom:
And now we see artists like Kari Jobe, NeedToBreathe doing this, really strategy, which I love the strategy. But I think a lot of artists tend to be afraid of trying something new if they don't see their favorite artists doing it already. So that's one thing that I wish we could have done a public video to tell people, "Go do this. Release music this way." So yeah, what you're talking about is... And we actually taught even our current clients and stuff, when we're talking about new releases, we always recommend this strategy of release singles up to an EP, or album, or whatever you're working on.

Wisdom:
So let's say you have a five song EP, you release your first single, and then maybe 30 days later, you release the second single. Or you release it with the first single, and then yeah, you keep stacking it. And then the last single is the EP, because all of it is out at that point. So the way to do that is actually super easy. So what distributor do you use?

Grace:
I use DistroKid?

Wisdom:
So DistroKid, it's like stupid easy to do.

Grace:
That's right.

Wisdom:
So what you do is upload your new song and then you upload your other song. So if you already have another song out, you upload that old song with it, but you have to make sure you use the same ISRC code when you're uploading. Which DistroKid gives you the code. So when you go back and like look at your previous release, you'll see the ISRC code.

Wisdom:
So you add that ISRC code and you also mark that it's already a released song. So when you do it that way, both songs will show up as one release. And then, what you do after the whole EP is out too, maybe like a month later, you can pull down all the other releases and just have the EP up and you don't lose all the streams, or playlist, or anything. Because you're identifying that basically the ISRC is like a social security number, unique to the song. So it will still accumulate all the strings and everything. And it keeps your Spotify profile cleaner too, when you have just like one EP, when everything's out.

Grace:
Okay. Well, I got to hop. So does that work even? Because I have one in DistroKid waiting to release on November 13th, everyone waiting, but this one's already out. So am I able to, because I have one coming out in December, just put the ISRC code in with the, my third song. Is that...

Wisdom:
Yeah.

Grace:
Okay.

Wisdom:
Yeah. So if you want it to do it for the November single, you could remove it from the stores and re-upload it with the first single. And then yeah, you could schedule it for the December release all three songs too.

Grace:
Okay, cool.

Wisdom:
Kat do you have anything else to add to that?

Kat:
Yeah, I do. Well, not about that, but yes, that is like, isn't that shocking how easy that is?

Grace:
Yeah. I'm like, oh wow. I wish that... Yeah, there should be a YouTube video. I've looked up on YouTube, how do I do this? And everyone is like stacking songs on Spotify.

Kat:
And I always wondered how the streams got transferred, really. If I release a single and then I roll it into my EP and re upload it, do I lose those streams? Now look like this song has dreadful less than a thousand. And so now, like once I learned that the ISRC like Wisdom's saying, is that unique identifying code for the song. So you can put it out as many times as you want, like in different bundles. It's a really powerful strategy, but I was going to say two things that you asked earlier about where an independent artist should start.

Kat:
And I feel like one of the most important things that we do talk about quite a bit is, be honest with yourself about your budget ahead of time. Because what tends to happen is people accidentally overspend on production, like Wisdom was saying earlier. And then when you do that, you leave nothing, where what happens after the music is made. And you can make the best song in the world, and if no one ever hears it, then that's great for you, but that's great for you.

Kat:
And so I think one of those things is just really being honest like I have this much to spend. And so if I have to learn how to play this part myself on piano, or ask a friend, or do this, or whatever it's going to take to cut down on some of those costs, it allows you to allocate actual resources towards marketing as well. Whatever you want to do for that, shoot video assets, run ads, any type of strategy that you want to go with afterwards.

Wisdom:
So Kat, I want to interject because we have actually a really helpful tool on the artistmentorship.com, where we built a calculator, where you put in a budget for everything really like around the release and you can... And we also give you estimated budgets for different items, like a music video, or lyric video, or album cover design, all those things. So you can plug in your numbers and see basically what the total investment is for your release and be able to kind of play around with the numbers, so that you can be realistic about... And think through all the aspects that maybe, it's hard to think about on your own.

Kat:
It's super help. That's actually where I was going next.

Wisdom:
Oh, go on.

Kat:
But the other thing too is something we say a lot. And when you said like, where should someone start? And we say a lot that most of the time when someone's making music and they're not seeing the results that they're looking for, there's two reasons for that. Either one, the content or the quality of the material is not up to par. So you can't get placements on playlist, your production quality isn't high enough for radio. The parts just aren't high enough quality for the industry standard, or the songs just needed a little more workshopping or whatever it might be.

Kat:
So either A, the content just isn't up to par, or B, people don't know about it. So like we were saying, you can make the best song in the world and if no one hears it, it's just there. And so I think to the other part when you're starting out, is really evaluating which of those things is your problem area, and then figuring out how to attack those. And really so much that it's just being honest with yourself, right? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? How do I overcome those things, and really push into where I'm strongest, and get help from other people in order to make my goals happen?

Grace:
That's good, asking for help is really. I know a lot of my friends have... I have a friend, she does all my photography. And then I have another friend who does my graphic. I know like that, that is... I didn't really budget campaigning when I started releasing everything. And so we had to get it all quick kind of budgeted because we realized, yeah, you've got it. There's some places where they require like, "Hey, 10 bucks here to put you on our playlist." Or, "Hey, it costs money now to do ads on YouTube, get your song to show up before others."

Grace:
But those are really good strategies because that gets you kind of get... That gets people, traffic. It gets the Pete song out there too. So I found, I've definitely learned about that a lot within the last month since Darkness released. I had the music video on top of the single coming out. So I was budgeting for ads on YouTube and trying to get playlisted and yeah. You've answered my questions.

Kat:
Thanks so much for coming on Grace.

Grace:
Of course.

Kat:
You want to tell people about what you have going on? Where they can find your music and or follow you?

Grace:
Yeah. I'm Grace Graber. You can follow me on Instagram @gracegrabermusic, or on Facebook at gracegrabermusic. I also have a website, gracegraber.com. And you can read more about my story there. Darkness released on October 9th, it's the first of four songs. My first EP it's called In My Head. The whole project was produced by Grant Woell. And that project will be slowly releasing each month until January 1st. So the last one is actually a tribute to all of you old Hawk Nelson or [inaudible 00:43:06] fans. It's a tribute to all of those bands, it's called I Miss The Old Days and that'll be out on January 1st.

Wisdom:
Awesome. So Grace, what will be really fun is if we had you back on maybe end of January or something, after you EP is out, and have you kind of talk about how it went, and maybe how you implemented some of the things that we talked about today too.

Grace:
That's so great. Yeah. I'm going to make like a music, like for like, okay, this is what [inaudible 00:43:38] music marketing, this is so helpful. This has blessed me so much. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Kat:
Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on.

Grace:
Yeah. Perfect.

Kat:
We hope you all enjoyed our CMM Wisdom Wednesday. And Wisdom, we're having another one of these pretty soon over on Marketing With Wisdom.

Wisdom:
Next Wednesday, yeah.

Kat:
Next Wednesday. And that one will be a little broader, just about marketing in general, not just music, but we'd love for you all to tune in over there as well and hope you guys have a great day.

Wisdom:
Thanks.

Grace:
Bye.