#007: Acquiring Funding vs The Breakout Hit || The Music Industries ‘Chicken or the Egg’
“Labels sign fans, not bands”
What comes first — the funding or the hit? In the music industry, this is the modern day ‘chicken or the egg’. It’s difficult to get the hit without the funding, but you can’t get the funding without the hit. Like many things in the music industry, if there’s a will, there’s a way!
There are four primary paths — ideally to all be used in combination — to have a song become a hit. These four channels are: playlists/streaming promotion (1), influencer marketing (2), digital advertising (3) and traditional media channels (4). Getting your song added to a massive playlist on Spotify (1), having a well known influencer on Instagram or TikTok use and tag your song (2), executing a highly targeted and effective Facebook/Instagram advertising campaign (3) or getting your recent single added into rotation on FM or SiriusXM radio (4) will have a large impact on breaking a song. The audience reception to the artist and music, the size of the budget, the effectiveness of the spend and the duration of the campaign will dictate how big the song will grow. But the catch-22 is as follows: Quality streaming promoters, social media influencers, large digital ad campaigns and radio promoters all cost a lot of money. And a lot of money is not a normal situation for an independent artist.
In order to raise funding, the three primary paths are: major record labels (1), independent record labels (2) or music distributors with label services (3). Without going into the pro’s and con’s of each of these options — we can save that for a future article — the one consistent metric that all funding partners will be looking for is a level of past success for the artist in music streaming. Even better? One song that has surpassed multi-million streams and acts as a clear proof-of-concept. So a very similar catch-22 exists here: It is difficult to acquire funding from these partners without having a history of success in streaming and/or a breakout hit.
So what can you do as a recording artist or music manager to get past this dilemma? First off, focus on the music over everything. The best marketing strategy or a large budget will not take a mediocre song and make it a hit. The song has to be great. Once you have that, don’t spread the budget and marketing resources out over a 5-song EP or a 10-song album. Instead, focus a majority of those resources into 1-2 singles maximum. Having one song with 2.5 million Spotify streams is more impressive to industry folks and will speed up the process to secure funding vs. having 10 songs with 250,000 streams each. Lastly, don’t stupidly give up revenue percentages on streaming or publishing, but don’t be afraid to offer these up early on to the right people. Maybe you don’t have a large budget yet, but finding the early believers in an artist who are willing to take less now to help blow up a single because they see the path ahead can go a long way. Getting that first song over the hump is way more difficult than getting a second or third, so if there is utmost belief in a single or song is already showing signs that it is outperforming everything released prior to it, pull out all of the stops to make it go big!
