Source Discovery - Music

As I briefly mentioned in the Maze/Quiz Strategy write-up, I had done a lot of work in the music niche between the years of 2018 and 2020. I had some large hip-hop themed pages I was growing/managing and I was working with a decent amount of artists back then before the crypto craze came along. I initially chose to specialize in the music niche because I had (and still have) an active interest in it, I was well aware of the trends happening within it and I was well-versed in its various sub-genres and styles. My onboarding process would then comprise of:

1. Listening to the client’s music

2. Analyzing their style and choosing a few respective sub-genres most suited for it

3. Consulting with the client as to who their major influences were along with their respective list of competitors

4. Crafting a mind map consisting of said influences and their respective sources

5. Filtering through each source until you have a list of targets belonging to each sub-category of their target audience

So let’s say for example, an artist comes to me trying to promote their new single. Upon listening to it, I deem it as being a mixture of two genres: horrorcore and ambient. I consult with the artist and we settle on a few major influences that we think would have the largest overlap in fan bases. That means big name artists and a list of their albums exhibiting as close a style to the single as possible.

Here’s a simple diagram of what that would look like:

The reason we hone in on specific albums and singles is because I’ve found it to drastically increase conversion rates and narrow down our target audience. Most hip-hop artists these days alternate heavily between various sub-genres of rap with versatility being at an all-time high. I’m all for experimentation but some projects simply deviate too far from one another and wouldn’t appeal to the same subset of fans.

With that said, the first level of targeting would be to obviously scrape the followers and likers of the target artists themselves whom we believe to be most similar to ours. If the artist is large enough, you’ll also tend to get higher conversion rates scraping for users from their fan pages. That’s where you’ll find their most loyal fanbase with the highest likelihood of converting.

The next level of targeting would be to generate a list of keywords associated with our diagram. That means the album titles as listed above, names of the singles in that album, names of the artists, artist taglines (i.e. 92 to infinity; most dope; etc.) and common nicknames. Once you’ve generated a list of all of the positive keywords you could think of for that niche/sub-genre, you can methodically search them up in the Instagram search bar. Chances are, you will find a lot of music-related theme pages that had made a post on said artist or their album and all of the users who had liked or commented on the post are all potential targets. I’ve found that the best converting users came from theme pages focusing on cultivating discussion in the comments, along the lines of @rapdebates_ or @jahtalksmusic.

With this method, you are guaranteed to find an absolute ton of publications to scrape likes from, easily garnering millions of potential targets from pages that have covered said artist in the past.