Spotify Or Die Transcript:

Ariel: Hi, I’m Ariel, but you already know that, and today my
special guest is Mike Warner who wrote this. (Work Hard
Playlist Hard) This is a book that you must buy. Why must you
buy it? Because no one knows what the hell they’re doing on
Spotify, and Mike wrote one of the best guides – actually, it’s
the best guide that I’ve read. In the pre-call, we talked about
how simple this book is but, yet, very complicated. So,
welcome, Mike! It’s so great to have you here.
Mike: Wow with an introduction like that, Ariel, should we just
end this now, just end on a high note? That was amazing.
Ariel: No, no we can’t because I wrote this many questions, so,
no. No, you’re here, you’re staying here. Please do let everyone
know who you are and how you got here today.
Mike: So I’ll give you the short version, and I’m sure the long
version will come later in this conversation, but I started out as a
music lover at a young age. Never picked up an instrument in
my life, but always had a love for music. Growing up would
listen to mixture of Guns and Roses, Michael Jackson, and
NWA – Ice-T and Ice Cube. So, a very broad mix. My love of
music sort of grew from there into other genres, as well. So,
funk, soul, the list goes on. When I was old enough to go out to
nightclubs in Australia, which is only 18, I realized that I
wanted to get more involved. So, I started handing out those
cards that would get people to go into the venue and in return
they would get a drink. You would hope that they would stay
and actually spend some money as well. From there, I wanted to
do more, so I started talking to the DJ’s and the MCs, and then I
did a course called DJ MC Bootcamp, which is not as intense as
it sounds. It was 5 hours per day, for two days, in a five-star
hotel, learning how to beat match and talk on a microphone. But
that gave me the basics that I needed to get out. So then I started
DJing and MCing as well – so, getting on the microphone and
talking and amping the crowd up. From there, I went into
production. Years later I wanted to start creating music as well. I
was never the best producer, but I always had good ideas, so, I
realized how important collaboration was and started creating
music with two friends. We created our own electronic group
called Date Night. As a result of that we’ve now put out one
album, we’ve got probably about 25 tracks online currently, and
when we started releasing music together as Date Night we
decided to go independent. We realized that we’re in a position
where we could, because we’d sent our music to the labels, they
weren’t really responding and weren’t really interested in us at
the time. We put it out and coincidentally at the time I was
moving to the US, and so I had a lot of free time on my hands
because I couldn’t work yet. So, I would spend – every single
day I would wake up, work out, and then I would sit at my desk
and I would look into ways to promote and market our music
online, and that led me to discovering that there’s people out
there that don’t work for Spotify or Apple music – they’re
tastemakers, and they’re essentially just a person like you or me
that has playlists that have significant followings on them and if
you get your music on there, you can get a significant number of
listeners and – most importantly – real listeners and fans. So, I
kept learning and learning and learning, to the point where
people were coming up to me and asking me for advice – which
I would gladly always give. I started writing these really
detailed emails, which are almost a DIY step one do this step
two do this, and then a good friend of mine George Goodrich
actually said to me, ‘Man, why don’t you just release a book?’
and I realized, you know, that actually makes sense, I’ve got a
lot of the material here. When I put the book out, I put it out on
Gumroad – and there it is on the screen right there. I can’t
believe how well-prepared you are. I love that. I’m just looking
at my head floating around, it’s fantastic. And then, of course,
after the book came out I wanted to keep doing more. I started
getting out to various conferences and, we can talk about
upcoming conferences later as well, and then of course creating
the podcast and it’s just really grown from there, I mean, I’m
loving it. I get to go out and meet a bunch of talented artists, and
most importantly they’re prepared to put in the work, they’re
ready to listen, they’re ready to do whatever they need to do,
and so I’m very grateful and here I am today talking with you
Ariel.
Ariel: So on that note, get ready to do the work, I want to break
this interview down into three parts because, as we know,
Spotify and streaming and playlisting is complicated. I
organized Mike’s book in my head before I started talking to
him, and so here’s how it’s going to go. Part one – I want to
have you really take us through the basics of Spotify, and
something that I realized, because we write a lot of marketing
plans and long-term strategies for our artists, is the basics very
often get skipped. People are so anxious to just get the music out
that they choose a random Friday and they don’t really
understand the foundations that need to happen on Spotify. So,
could you kindly walk us through what to do before you hit the
panic button?

Mike: Yeah look, and I make a really basic here for a minute
which is fine because after that it’s going to get more complex
and people may need to go back and replay this a few times, but
look… firstly, let’s assume that you’ve got music. I sure hope
that you do, whether you’ve released it or not. You need a
distributor, you don’t need to sign to a record label, and we can
get to the discussions for why you may or may not, but you use
a distributor. So that could be someone like CD Baby or
Distrokid, or whoever you choose, and they will take your music
and put it to all of these platforms. They’ll make it available to
purchase on Amazon, iTunes, so make it available to stream on
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube music, the list goes on from
here. Your music is scheduled to be released; what you can do is
you can go to artists.spotify.com, and you can sign up. Now,
some distributors will actually give you direct access so that you
can basically bypass that process and go straight in and see your
stats immediately, which is awesome, but worst case it usually
takes a few days. Once you’ve done that, you go in and if you
have that release – let’s say you have a release coming in the
future, so it could be coming out in two weeks or four weeks
time – the longer the better of course, and we’ll get to that. What
you will do is you will see in Spotify for Artists on your
dashboard, on the home screen, once you log in at the very top,
it will say upcoming release. This usually happens one to two
days after you’ve gone and put that song in with your
distributor. You see upcoming release, you click on that, and
there’ll be an option to submit it to the Spotify editorial team.
Now, there’s two reasons why you want to do this. Number one,
it will go to all of your followers, so if you have 500 followers,
it’s gonna go into release radar for all of those followers.
Another reason is you’re submitting it to the editorial team,
these are people that work at Spotify, they curate the big
playlists, the ones with followers in the millions and significant
active listeners. As well, these are the people that you want
listening to your music, and all you have to do is fill out this
form, tag your music, and it’s very simple. It prompts you, so it
will say ‘a male vocal, female vocal, mixed vocal, multiple
vocalists, other vocals, heavy, soft, is it a happy song, a sad
song, describe the mood or the setting – oh, it’s good for a
coffee shop,’ and then it will also go as far as asking you about
the instruments. So, if you play guitar, it will go as far as saying,
well, what type of guitar? You know, it’s an electric guitar, its
this random guitar that you picked up at the markets on the
weekend and you don’t even know the name of it you have to
google it. Whatever it is, you can add those instruments and
everything in your song basically. So, once you’ve done this and
you filled out the form, it’s gonna get to the right person in the
right editorial team surface. An acoustic guitar track is more
likely to get to the person who actually curates those playlists,
instead of having it go to a team and they have to try and get
through that list of 10-20 thousand songs that get released every
single day now, you’ve actually put yourself to the top of the
pile because you spent that time to tag your song correctly and
get it in front of the right people.
Ariel: And, by the way, you were very generous in your ten and
twenty. There’s actually a new a new tweet going around, thank
you Cherie Hu, that says 40,000 assets are going up on Spotify
every day. So, our advice is do not skip this part where you can
put the maximum amount of tags in, because you really really
want to make sure you give it your best shot to get to the Spotify
editorial board. Okay, so what do you do after you’ve done that,
Mike?
Mike: Well, you certainly don’t sit down on your hands and
hope for the best, which is what some people do because they
don’t know what to do next. So, you submit it, you should feel
good about that – but that’s definitely not your work over.
There’s a number of things that you can do after that, you can go
ahead and create a pre-save campaign, where there’s numerous
websites that will do it for you. There’s Show.co, here’s
Toneden.io.
Ariel: Feature.fm is a third one we recommend. Just backup like
one tiny bit because there was a part of your book that I really,
really appreciated and loved, which was even before you go to
put your music up on Spotify and all the other streaming
services – understand this is a kind of a word that everyone uses
often now – the zeitgeist. What’s in the zeitgeist of music
playlisting these days is really understanding that people need to
understand what you’re doing within a few seconds. So, if you
have a 40 second intro to your song which has spoken word, or
is weird, or you’re not getting to your point very quickly, Mike
has a great tip which is separate the intro out and make a Spotify
playlist for radio edit, and I love that advice. Do you want to add
anything to that, like how many seconds before we get to the
verse or the chorus or the lyric or the voice?
Mike: Of course. So, to let you know the reason that I – I don’t
want to say discovered this, because I’m sure people have been
doing this for a long time – but, when I released the debut album
with my group Date Night, and I feel like I’ve said the name a
lot it’s not a shameless plug it’s just that that’s where a lot of my
learnings come from is by actually doing this stuff. We put out
our album, and before we went to release it, I listened to it. I
realize five or six of these songs have these long intros at the
start, interludes if you will, where we’re just jamming away
playing some strings, what have you. So, I said, well, these are
too beautiful to take out and for people that listen to the album
start to finish, they’re really going to enjoy this. But, if you put
this song in a playlist with this for 40 long – 45, excuse me – 45
second long intro, people are going to tune out and lose interest
and go to the next track. So, I said, why don’t we separate it into
another track? So, what happens is the album track 2 is an
interlude, the next track is the actual song. So, the best thing that
can happen is people can listen to the interlude followed by the
song, and that’s two streams because they’re treated as two
separate tracks. The worst thing that can happen is they skip it
and go straight to the song and the other part of this is when
people put their songs in the playlists, they’re looking for songs
that get to the point pretty quickly because they know that
people will lose interest in that song and, in turn, lose interest in
that playlist and go somewhere else. So, that’s why we made
sure that the songs when they started it was very playlist-
friendly, there was no roll over from the previous track that
wouldn’t make sense, there was no talking at the end of the song
or anything like that, and that really worked in our favor as far
as placement as well because there’s no way that Spotify can
come back to you and say, ‘hey, we really like your song, but
can you cut out that minute of talking at the end we can put it in
this playlist?’ No one’s going to do that, no one’s going to come
to you and ask you to change that, because that was your
creative decision.

Ariel: And again, for those of you that are sitting here rolling
your eyes at us, this is not about compromising your artistic
integrity, this is just about if you want to play the game. Hate
the game, not the player, right? So, this is about if you do want
to be viable in Spotify playlists, this is a suggestion. So, moving
on. We were talking about pre-saving and the necessity of
creating a pre-save campaign. So, Toneden, we talked about
feature.fm, and then for the CD Babies out there, Show.co is
their platform. Tell us about a pre-save campaign, what are we
doing?
Mike: Sure! So, the way that I describe it is – it’s similar to
CDs, remember CDs back in the day? You would going to your
record store, your music store, and you would pre-order a CD,
an album that was coming out in two weeks time – you would
put your name down, and that way you would be guaranteed.
You would go in there on release day and you would pick it up,
you would have it, you could listen. That translated into pre-
saves or pre-orders online, as well. So what you’ve got in
Spotify and Apple music, there’s pre-saves and pre-ads. What
basically means is on release day that song is going to be saved
and stored into your library, so it’s immediately there on release
day. If you set your library to automatically save offline so that
you can listen when you’re going for a run where you don’t
have any data or things like that, song is just there stored in your
device, you can listen to it and you’re set. So what people are
doing is running these campaigns and encouraging their fans
and their followers to go and pre-save their song or their album,
but what else is happening in that process is they’re also
capturing you as a follower. So that way, even if you miss the
fact that you save that release into your library, you’re still
going to hit their Release Radar, and it’s also going to keep you
as a follower long term as well, of course. Other things that
they’re starting to do in these is they’ll actually ask you for your
email address as well, and then they’ve captured you in that
way. So, even if that person decides to start using a new
streaming service in the future, or they take a break from
streaming services in general, you’ve got their email, you’ve got
another way that you can reach them, you can start to get more
information about who that person is, perhaps, where they’re
based so that you could start targeting email campaigns to them
if you’re performing in this city. So, really, capturing a bunch of
information there.
Ariel: Another word for this is gating, and if you study any type
of marketing platform you will hear this, and you can get
anything. You can you can get a music video, for example,
using Show.co, or any of these platforms, and it basically means
that on the day the video is released or in a pre-roll, before that,
few days leading up to it, ‘Please come and check out my video,
you have to subscribe to the channel to do so,’ so you’re putting
a little gateway between you and your fans to take an action. But
talking about pre-sales, I actually today got a text from one of
my favorite artists and clients here at Cyber PR and it was
wonderful. He just sent a little text saying ‘I have a new release
tomorrow, would you mind saving?’ It’s so simple, there’s a
little graphic of what it looks like, and it took me three seconds
– I just pressed the link right from my mobile phone. I guarantee
you that Eli Lev is spending most of today texting everyone he
knows because that’s the kind of artist he is – so this is a great
way, and you can do this on email. Mike talks a lot in the book
about how to promote pre-sales across your social channels. Of
course you want to put it on Facebook and make a tile and put it
on Instagram and add it to a story and it is your job to get the
maximum amount of people pre-saving, which I guess you’ve
just explained. Also, it means following. So a pre-save also
equals a follow for the next iteration of your next track, is that
right?
Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. So, you’ve captured them ongoing
as well.
Ariel: So, that’s great. So, every single that you put out is an
opportunity to get people to come and follow – wundabar! Okay
so Spotify basics – so we’ve got pre-save, we’ve got follow. I do
notice a lot of times people don’t take the maximum amount of
bio real estate, and they don’t put a lot of photographs or links. I
would highly encourage you that while you’re setting up your
Spotify profile, even go back make sure you have attractive
photos. I think you’re allowed to put five or six photos.
Mike: It’s actually in the hundreds now
Ariel: Okay, so, put a minimum of a hundred photos – no, put a
lot of photos. Think about it, look at your Instagram, the selfies
that are performing well, album artwork, you performing – go
and curate some photos because you have to remember a lot of
times people that are finding you on Spotify might not actually
know who you are, they don’t know about your Instagram feed,
they might not get to your website. It is a great way of taking
them on what us nerdy marketers call a customer journey. So, if
I only know you through the Spotify portal, and I click on a
song that I like, and then I click over and there’s like one snarky
sentence like, ‘I make music,’ that is not taking me on a journey.
That’s just you being too cool for school – don’t do it. Say
where you’re from, put use the entire space, put a good bio in
there. Don’t make it like a typical music industry boring bio. Do
something fun – again, take your fan or your potential fan on a
journey. And then of course Spotify also allows you to put your
Facebook and your Instagram link, so you want to make sure
that’s filled out in the profile. So, part two of this – is there
anything else you want to say about Spotify basics, Mike?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m glad you mentioned social
media because when I find a song by an artist I like on Spotify, I
go immediately to their profile and hit follow, and then I go to
about and I look for opportunities where I can help them,
because I’m a fan, so I’m invested in that artist now, I care
about them. But also I will click and I will do exactly what you
said, I’ll click on their Twitter and their Instagram, see a little bit
more about what they’re about, and also follow them there as
well. But what’s important is, check those links, make sure
they’re correct, because otherwise you’re sending people
nowhere. When you upload those photos, you’re not just
uploading them to show off a little more of your personality or
your fashion sense or what you look like when you perform on
stage, you’re also giving Spotify a permission to use those
images in marketing, and so what that looks like is from time to
time Spotify will send out emails to people that follow you
saying that you’ve got a new song in Release Radar today, and
there’s a photo of you that they’ve used that you’ve uploaded
and given them permission to use.

Mike: Additionally, they send out emails to followers based on

their city, saying upcoming shows in your city and there’ll be a
photo of you performing and there’ll be a link so you buy
tickets, and a link to listen to your music on Spotify. Another
thing about the bio is you can actually tag artists, songs,
playlists, and albums within your bio when you’re typing it out
in Spotify for Artists. You just do the little app tag and then you
start typing an artist name, or a song name, and of course if the
search results are really long – it’s a really common name – you
can actually do the little app and then paste the URL and it will
make sure that it links correctly to the right artist in your bio. I
always encourage people, I say give love to other artists. If
you’ve collaborated with somebody, remixed them, performed
alongside them, whatever it is – give them some love in your bio
as well and tag them. I use it in my bio, I direct people to my
originals playlist which has every original song that’s been
created, which is another thing for every artist out there. If you
don’t have a playlist of all of the music that you’ve created,
make one now, because if people discover you and go to that
playlist and hit play, they’re gonna listen to your entire
catalogue instead of just one song and you control the order they
listen in. So you get to put your strongest songs up top. And I’ve
even used that to start building the structure for an album,
releasing individual songs one song after the other putting it in
this playlist and changing the order to see what feels the best
and getting feedback from people. So when the album comes
out they go, ‘yeah, this feels good, I really like the order of this.’
Ariel: That’s great, it’s like crowdsourcing with your fans. This
is the perfect part two, which is all about creating playlists.
Before we even get to getting on playlist, which is a whole part
three. And we don’t have much time so we’re gonna speed
through this, but Mike does spend quite a bit of time in the book
– which you need to buy, and there will be a link in the show
notes where you can buy it through me and I get paid, thank you
Mike. But what we’re gonna do here is talk about the
importance of curating your own playlist, not only with your
own music. I love- one of the things that you recommended
artists do was curate playlists including other indie artists in
your genre or from your hometown or in a theme that makes
sense, and then you can begin to swap playlists with those other
artists. Can you take us through this a little bit?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So, when you’re starting out creating a
playlist, if you add a major artist they’re not necessarily going to
be excited enough to start posting it on social media and talking
about you. That’s no disrespect to your curation or your playlist,
it’s just that they can only do so many shoutouts per day. If you
go to local artists, whether it’s friends or just people that you’ve
seen perform and they fit within your genre and they’ll fit within
your playlist that you’ve curated – it’s one thing to add them,
but you need to tell them that you’ve done it. They may not
discover that, not all of these artists are active on Spotify for
Artists or other services out there like Chartmetric or Spot On
Track. So, they’re not actively watching to see who’s adding
them to these playlists. So, tell them. You know, it could be as
simple as a tweet and tag them, just make sure they’re actually
active on Twitter first, or a DM on Instagram, or an email if you
have their email address, and then I just simply tell them. Most
of the time they’re so stoked that they come back and they just
want to do a shout out and they want to tell people. As far as
you know, it could even be the first playlist that they’ve ever
been added to. I’ve had that happen a few times and it’s mind-
blowing. It’s the best feeling to know that I added a song
because I loved it, and it was the first playlist some had ever
been added to.
Ariel: And it’s also a really wonderful way of building a tribe
for yourself, I mean artists always come to me and they’re like,
‘well, how do I open for a band – a big band, how do I?’ It’s
like, well, who are you already playing with? What little tribe or
medium tribe are large tribe are you already running in? We see
the big superstar artists like the hip hop artists and pop artists
doing all these collabs – think about your own little brand of
collab, and a simple way to do it is just like this – add an artist
that you really like and, you know, not Lady Gaga, but let go
down a hundred steps into someone that’s maybe a year or two
ahead of where you would like to be. This is a fantastic idea,
and so the idea here is to get everyone in the community that’s
included on these playlists that you’ve curated and thought out
sharing and retweeting and posting on the different social
channels. Very cool, okay. So, that’s playlisting. How many
playlists should one artist have on Spotify? I seem to feel like I
read conflicting information about this.
Mike: Well, the way I put it is- unless you’re trying to become
known as a curator, then I would keep it minimal. So, yes, the
artists playlist with all of your original music is essential, and
yes, one other playlist where you add songs that are from artists
that have a similar sound to you or similar vibe or they inspire
you. Outside of that, there’s no real expectation to create more
playlists unless you want to. So, what I’ve seen artists do is they
might create a playlist of their live set, and so what that could
mean is, ‘here’s what I played at my show this week,’ so then
everyone can go online and listen to those songs. You know,
they didn’t necessarily go and record the set and upload it or
anything like that, but all of those songs were already released
so they just put it in a separate playlist and then that playlist they
may change whenever they have other shows coming up, and
then they use that as a way to promote what they’re going to
play at their shows and interact with their fans and get feedback
about, ‘hey, this is what we’re playing in the live show, how do
you feel about this, is there anything we should add, anything
we should swap out?’ But, outside of that, I mean, if you want to
create more playlists by all means, but only if you actually
enjoying doing it. I feel once you’ve got those essential
playlists, you’re good, you can go back to creating music and
then just go back and check in on your playlists every now and
then. I mean, the originals playlist you just need to drag a new
track and whenever it’s live and the other playlists if you keep it
manageable, I always suggest anywhere between 40 to 100
songs. 40 is roughly 2 to 3 hours long, and that’s long enough
for people to get in, get hooked, and enjoy it, and potentially
want more. 100 if you just can’t get that number down that’s
fine, but just keep the curation tight. Actually, I always suggest
listening to the playlist on shuffle as well from start to finish
because you want to make sure that the experience is great for
the listener no matter how they listen to that. And, of course, if
they’re not on the premium subscription of Spotify it’s probably
going to be shuffling it for them anyway, so just see how your
playlist sounds by putting it on shuffle, and you may realize
there’s actually a few songs in there that sound really out of
place, and then you may decide- you may make the creative
decision just to pull those out.
Ariel: Or switch them out. Same artist, different track.
Mike: Exactly.
Ariel: Okay, part 3. How the hell do I get on playlist, Mike?
How do- I mean, you’ve already talked of course about Spotify
curators. But, of course, there is a huge trend in the industry at
this very moment. We’ve all been told that playlists are the new
radio, and playlists are gonna save the industry, and playlists are
the only way you’re gonna make money, and I think there is a
little bit of anxiety around getting included on the maximum
amount of playlists. So, should I just go to Google, ‘get me on
playlists,’ and hire the first company that pops up?
Mike: Definitely not without doing your research first. You
know, everyone now, it’s gotten to the point where they’ve
realized, ‘okay, I can game this system, I can take money from
people and give something in return,’ but it’s not necessarily
good. What we mean by that is you go and you pay somebody
let’s say five hundred dollars to promote your song or market it
to playlist curators, and then what happens is two weeks later
you look and you’re on five playlists and you’ve got ten
monthly listeners and maybe fifteen streams. And you go, ‘okay,
I don’t think anyone was actually listening to those two playlists
and I am down five hundred dollars and this person has a gmail
address and I can’t reach them anymore.’ So in saying that there
are companies out there that do this and do a good job of it,
there are people out there that actually doing some really good
work. Of course, with anything in the industry they’re going to
cost you a lot of money. I’m always careful to recommend
anyone, because it can change so quickly. What I would suggest
is do your research, and what that means is if they only have a
gmail address or a hotmail address.
Ariel: Or their name is not on the website or they say something
like, ‘we’re industry veterans!’ Really, are you? Are you sure?
Do your homework. Google will tell you so much, and also, for
any of you that are in Facebook groups or forums where for my
ladies that are in women in music, just posting and on the group
and saying, ‘hey, has anyone heard of this company? Can you
please share with me off list what your experience is this?’ This
is a great way of betting, and I know there’s there’s also a kind
of a gray area and I have seen in my research companies that are
like guaranteeing X amount of plays. Don’t do this. Don’t. This
is very, very bad, and the reason why is they’re gaming the
system somehow. These are not real plays, just sort of like when
you pay for fake Facebook fans – they’re not real fans, we all
know that, right? It’s 2019, we know that. So, please do stay
away from that. Resist the urge. I know when you see that
negative a thousand next to your newly posted song it’s painful,
but read Mike’s book. I think you’re really gonna get some great
insight on how to get real numbers on Spotify, which is what we
want you to do. So in our pre-call I said I was gonna ask you
one question, but we’re way too deep into this interview to do
that. I do have one question I would love if we could part with,
and that is, what should an indie artist who only has about one
hour a week to dedicate to Spotify and playlisting in general do
with that one hour?

Mike: Okay, one hour a week. Look, the most important thing
that you can do is submit to editorial, because that is gonna at
least guarantee you a playlist. If you have one follower, you’re
going on to their release radar. You’re on one playlist that takes
five minutes. With the other 55 minutes, I would suggest going
online and doing a few posts. You’ve already got some
followers out there, you’ve got friends, you’ve got fans. Let
them know, and some of them may even do a little work for you
and share it. If you’ve still got some time left after that, of
course, there is more that you can do. There’s services out there
where you can go and submit your songs to curators for a few
dollars, so shout out to Submithub. You know, obviously,
results may vary based on the song, based on the time of day,
based on the curators, but, you know, you can submit for free on
that, and some of them you can pay two dollars, five dollars, to
get them to listen within 48 hours, and at least give you some
feedback. There are other services out there that cost more, but
if you’re new and you haven’t necessarily started making money
from streaming yet, I wouldn’t suggest going out taking out a
loan, getting a credit card and using these services. I always
look at it and I go, ‘I’m willing to take a risk when I try one of
these services.’ One of the legit services, I should mention. So, I
would say once you started to make some revenue from
streaming, put it aside and then use a portion of that and invest it
into marketing. But until then I wouldn’t suggest going and
spending $500 or $1,000 trying one of these services. Make sure
that you do your research. Once again, I can’t say that enough.
Don’t go looking at someone who doesn’t give you their details.
Go on LinkedIn, Facebook, start asking people. Surely, you’ve
got at least one mutual contact if you know anyone in this
industry, and just start asking before you actually give them any
money.

Ariel: Fabuloso, thank you so much. I would say, take 20

minutes a week, read the book. Links will be all over this blog
post, everything that Mike has mentioned so generously, plus a
link to his book plus, a link to some of my how-to articles on
how to run a Spotify pre-sale, etc. Thank you so much for your
time today, I deeply appreciate all of your insight and helping to
fight the fight for all indie artists out there. We are delighted to
have you in our tribe.
Mike: Thank you, Ariel.