I guess now then ever the most important thing is to own your information and contact to your fans.

Most big artists have very often used the method to colled fans. The artists that are successful have usually very big resources to mobile their listeners. And with today easy and free tools it should be easier than ever.

Still, all I hear is that the artist is nagging of putting things on social media! Hey its not you that owns your fan base on Facebook or Instagram its the site/app that does that. And in reality, they only let 10% of that fanbase see what you want to communicate. If you want to reach more you have to pay to reach your own fans.

Spotify, Tidal, Deezer is even worse there you can’t even communicate with the fans. Instead, they give you information around what age their bots have been programmed to pretend to be. And then they tell you that you can find good info in data THEY provide. Why are you not owning all the data? 

It’s your songs and your content these companies live off?

Tadaa the answer is that most of you are lazy. Like I wrote, in the beginning, the tools are there but somehow artist like to collect numbers on sites instead of the real data they can own and build their career on.

No, it’s not enough that you can comment back to your fans like you do on Youtube. If that was good enough Ikea, Starbucks and other giant companies would put their loyalty programs there. They won’t because they are smart enough to collect their own so they have the freedom to communicate what they want on their own premiss.

This step seems to be missed in so many ways. Also that it’s very risky to have your fanbase in someone else hands. In the end, you need to use their services to reach the fans you have been building a relation to by hard work. And it doesn’t matter if you are a big company. Remember how the major labels put their fanbase in the hand of Spotify? It was Topsify, Digster, and Filter. All dead now because Spotify thought they became too strong. A really stupid mistake by the labels.

This is an issue that is not talked about so much but a necessary evil that the artist has to start thinking about. Take care of your data.