Keep your listeners engaged between releases

Since you’re reading this blog, I’m assuming that you’re somewhat interested in releasing some music of your own. I’m not sure what your personal goals are with it, but if continually releasing music and growing a fan base is one of them, then here’s something you should consider.

Writing, recording and releasing music is a long process. It might be a year or more between releases for most of you. But if you want to keep a fan base growing and engaged, you should think about having different levels of content that you share with your fans. An album or EP is obviously the thing you’re ultimately interested in sharing, but it takes a lot of time and energy. If that’s all you’re sharing with your fans, they’re likely to forget about your music or lose interest in the meantime.

Create different levels of content

I like having three levels of content. Here is basically what it looks like.

1. Highest workload/quality content released least often (album/EP)
2. Medium workload/quality content released somewhat more often
3. Lower workload/quality content released most often

And just as an example, my three types of content look like this:

1. Album/EP, like this one
2. Ambient Songs video
3. Sketch video

The sketch videos are videos I can do in an evening. I just set up my camera, record a short idea I’ve been working on and then upload it. It’s by far the easiest piece of content I give to people and I’m able to do it more often. The Ambient Song videos take a bit more effort. I’ve got to prepare the song, set up the separate audio and video recording, and then do a good amount of editing after the fact. Obviously this takes much more preparation and work, so I do these less often.

The basic idea here is to keep a relatively constant stream of content to your fans without creating an obscene amount of work for yourself.

My levels of content are pretty basic and they work for me, but there’s a infinite amount of things you can do. What are some ideas you have or things you’re already doing to keep your fans listening and engaged?

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