Pariah Carey covers the recent music marketing data bootcamp co-hosted by Water & Music Academy and Music Tomorrow. The month-long series featured eight nutrient-dense sessions on music data, filled with case studies and actionable frameworks to guide folks through the terrifying gauntlet of the digital marketing lifecycle.

Rather than simply recap the bootcamp, though, I’m putting those sessions’ wisdom to the test, offering my own nascent music journey as a guinea pig. The hope is that my journey can be useful for others looking to take their first steps, and that it can help me reach people who find resonance in my music.

In part one, I reviewed data practices and benchmark setting. Then I built the foundation, creating my artist story and developing ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals (I’m tracking them here) for sharing that story and building community. Today I’m focused on sessions three and four, and on finding tools and insights to help structure my content framework, crossing one more item off the proverbial list:

• Understand your story

• Set goals

• Choose the tools (and content pillars) that help you tell that story

• Build a content strategy – across music and social – to achieve those goals

• Observe how people respond to your content 

• Track and adapt

SESSIONS THREE AND FOUR: Developing a Marketing Plan + The Fan Data Goldmine: building a bulletproof fan CRM (customer relationship manager)

Many of this round’s case studies were focused on triumphs like Black Coffee, Moses Sumney and Dua Lipa – artists whose stardom brings into reach the lofty goals that we freshmen still banish to dreams. Black Coffee’s goal, for instance, was to win a Grammy. Moses Sumney’s was to buy a house. 

And sure I’d take a Grammy and a house, but in my (and most artists’) current stages, those goals aren’t realistic, and as such, the strategies aren’t very relevant.

There were other case studies, though, focused on artists who, like me, were starting from scratch and trying to find their first fans. By far, that’s the more prevalent – and more difficult – phase.

Dani Chavez

“It’s easier to go 100 to 500,” said guest speaker Dani Chavez, artist manager and chief marketing officer for the talent agency YMU’s FM Group. “It's hard to go 0 to10.”

Why? “The competition is higher,” said fellow guest Luna Cohen-Solal, senior audience consultant at Atlantic Records. “People’s attention is shrinking every day – I was told 1.5 seconds is how long people stay before they scroll away.”

“Sadly,” she added, “I’m seeing it’s not the most talented who rise to the top, it’s the most ambitious, motivated and good at TikTok.”

Another guest speaker, Alec Ellin – co-founder and chief executive officer at the CRM Laylo – added: “On the social platform side, it’s 90 percent consistency and 10 percent talent.” 

This does not bode well for me, or other artists for whom social media is anathema. Motivation and hard work should absolutely be factors for success, but such a skewed scale is indicative of the outsized control TikTok-like social platforms have over fledgling careers.

And though I think we should focus on building better systems, for this exercise, I’ll shrug my shoulders and embrace our TikTok reality. Truly that’s what Pariah Carey is for, after all – to better understand how to trudge through the shit together.

Gratefully, these sessions catered to that end as well, where case studies were filled with useful tools and soundbites to help young artists – and their champions – grasp how to play to their strengths and transmit a story in resonant, less painful ways.

THE ARTIST SCORECARD

The artist scorecard was one such tool. Maria Gironas, the founder of the music and culture agency, Cool Shit, Cool People, developed the structure to track success. Going into a campaign, Gironas ranks an artist on a scale of one to five across 10 categories – live show, music, media presence, revenue, team, branding, digital interest, timing, audience/community, desire – and then divides by 10 to understand their baseline.

“Why should you do this?” Gironas said. “Don’t make a fish climb a tree.” In other words, play to the artist’s strengths. 

Here’s my own self-assessment:

Live show: 4

Music: 5

Media presence: 4

Revenue: 1

Team: 2

Branding: 2

Digital interest: 2

Timing: 2

Audience/community: 1

Desire: 4

Score: 2.7

A self-assessment can only go so far – there are issues of objectivity here – but it feels fairly accurate. I’m a trained musician and composer. I think my music is good. The community that shoved me out the door seems to think my music is good, and they appear moved when I play for them – as do open mic audiences.

That said, my team – my wife (my personal advisor on everything), a close friend (who’s graciously adopted many agent responsibilities), and my Grey Matter co-founder (who records and produces my music) are all generous familiars, and I personally know most of the people who have gathered around my music to date. The test will be whether any momentum gathers outside that existing amity – a well-trodden and arduous path.

Gironas shared a relevant case study for the young singer-songwriter Jensen McRae, who had no social media presence or published music when they started working together. What McRae had was talent and a team that believed in her. “I think she’s one of the most formidable songwriters of our generation,” Gironas said. “If you put this woman in a subway station, people will miss their trains.”

The team leaned on that talent until an opportunity emerged. In 2021, McRae recorded a “preemptive cover” of what she imagined a yet unreleased Phoebe Bridgers track would sound like. Bridgers retweeted it, launching McRae’s following from one thousand to ten thousand in just a few weeks. Her team jumped into action, releasing music “like crazy” in hopes of capturing lightning in a bottle.

Transforming inflection points into sustainable communities is essential, and Chavez revealed a similar truth in her case study of Yung Gravy. The American rapper started releasing music on SoundCloud in 2016, and it wasn’t until 2022 that he “popped off,” when his new single, “Betty,” generated enormous spikes in engagement while garnering sponsorship deals and billboard spots.

“It was a massive moment,” Chavez said. “To the general public, it looks like Betty comes out of nowhere. The reality is, it did not.”

In actuality, “Betty” followed years of incremental successes. “It takes five years to blow up,” Chavez said. “Sometimes it takes until year 7 when these things happen. It really is a marathon, not a sprint.”

And to begin: “Fanbase first, virality after,” Chavez said. “Cultivate the fanbase and get it in front of the right ears…the rest follows.”

ARTIST DNA

How do we know where the right ears are? Or who they belong to? Or when they’ve heard your music? That answer must begin with the artist. In her case study of the young UK artist Issey Cross, Cohen-Solal endorsed the “artist proposition.” “We’re working with her to build out an artist proposition,” she said, “so we can answer that question: ‘who is Issey Cross?’”

Cohen-Solal worked with Cross to understand what she called her “DNA,” unearthing differentiating characteristics like her relatability, her strong voice and her recognizable fashion style. From there, Cohen-Solal extrapolated that DNA into content pillars to ensure Cross’s digital persona was reflective of her whole self.

To recreate the exercise, I channeled my inner journalist and interviewed myself, asking many of the broad questions Cohen-Solal mentioned in her presentation, like “Why do I make music?,” “What's my dream?” and “What emotions do I want to inspire?”

The full list of questions (and answers) are here. It was more revealing than I thought it would be, and like Cohen-Solal, I broke the insights out into content pillars. For the third piece in the Pariah Carey series, I’ll use the pillars to form a content strategy that I’ll experiment with in the new year. 

Still, the question persists of where to execute these plans, and on which platforms to spend my time building. 

WHERE TO BUILD

During her presentation, Cohen-Solal advised artist champions to “focus on platforms and modes of communication the artist is comfortable with to ensure sustainability.”

Outside of this exercise, I don’t use TikTok. I barely touch Instagram. Admittedly, I’m not that great at Twitter either. In my work as a journalist, I regularly advocate for more niche-based social platforms. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t much care for digital interaction. I want the pheromonal handshakes. I like house parties and real life 1:1 conversations over coffees or beers.

Clearly, by most metrics of “success,” I’m doing myself a disservice by disregarding digital channels, but might there still be a way to orient toward the tactile? I’ve identified my music and live performance as strengths, so how can the digital become an extension of my predilection for the physical?

When trying to answer that question, I was reminded of some sage advice I once got from Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the agency Visionary Rising, LaTecia Johnson: “think local, grow global.”

Alec Ellin

That stuck with me because it appealed to a more intimate, connective marketing strategy. Gratefully, the prevailing counsel in the bootcamp seemed to echo that. There were even some consistencies that emerged across the emergent and established artist campaigns: keep it simple, be consistent, be authentic and have a single call to action.

For Laylo co-founder Alec Ellin, that call to action is key. He referenced a case study with the artist Sadie Jean, a singer-songwriter from California who at the time was a student at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. Jean wrote “WYD NOW” with two classmates, Grace Enger and David Alexander Levya, and posted a snippet to TikTok.

It started to go viral, but Jean had never released a song before – how do you convert viewers to listeners when there’s nothing yet to listen to? Jean used Laylo to “turn hype into first party data,” leveraging the comments section to direct people to her ‘link-in-bio’ – furnished by Laylo – so they could be notified when the song did actually drop. (Laylo turned the case study into a freely available playbook.)

On Laylo, signing up for a drop – be it a song, merch, an entire album, etc – means a fan is opting in with their email address or phone number – i.e. data points that aren’t owned by another platform. It’s a way for artists to capture more curious top-of-funnel folks and bring them closer – without sacrificing agency.

Laylo has a free tier for exploration – which I set up – but much of its features come in its premium subscription. In the first Pariah Carey, I committed to paying no money until I’ve achieved some semblance of loyalty, so in that interim I’ll do all my tracking and CRM maintenance in Google Sheets. 

And regardless of the platform, gathering first party data should be the priority. It allows you to connect with people on your terms, bypassing the severely limiting terms of engagement that exist on TikTok and Instagram. Both platforms – especially the former – still got a lot of attention during these two sessions, but it was nice to hear in tandem about the emerging tools and mindsets that circumvent their limitations.

Thus far, I have a fresh Instagram account, and I’m using Bonfire as my hub, but I’m still honing in, tracking and developing my toolset on this Miro board. As I transition from content pillars to content strategy, I’ll continue to add nuance, incorporating many of the more granular gems I’ve glossed over here. 

That strategy’s coming next, alongside recaps of sessions five and six, which focused on marketing automation and discoverability. Meanwhile, for the early artists reading this, take a deep breath and disregard the ‘viral or bust’ fallacy. It takes a lot of work to build a community, but there’s solace in knowing that that’s true for everyone, and that the key constituents for success are making good music and being yourself.

Until next time, here's to you Mariah 🥂

lead image: Maria Gironas