Secrets for Spotify Success

Jason Carter:
Hi everybody, this is Jason Carter with Atomic Disc and I want to thank you for tuning in to our first ever artist spotlight podcast. Each month I'll be interviewing an artist or music industry expert to share their secrets, advice, and success stories to help you with your career. Today we have the honor of picking the brain of upcoming hip hop artist , Nathan Kawaguchi, better known as Enkay 47. Nathan is currently based out of Idaho and is a rising star in the hip hop world. He's had tremendous success marketing his career via social media and has some great advice for us all about Spotify. Nathan, how are you?

Enkay 47:
I'm doing fantastic Jason, how are you?

Jason Carter:
Great. Thank you so much for joining us for this call. Let's just get right into it. Huh?

Enkay 47:
Heck yeah, thanks for having me.

Jason Carter:
Nathan, you've been doing this since about mid 2015, is that correct?

Enkay 47:
Yeah, just about three years now.

Jason Carter:
When did you first realize you wanted to become a hip hop artist?

Enkay 47:
I want to say, ever since I was about 14 or 15 years old.

Jason Carter:
Okay, and do you mind us asking you your age now?

Enkay 47:
21 years old now. I started about six years ago, but it really took me three or so years to get going.

Jason Carter:
If you were to compare yourself with somebody, I know artists hate to be asked that question, but for people listening out there who don't know who you are, who would you most likely compare yourself to as an artist?

Enkay 47:

Yeah, no worries at all. If I were to compare myself with an artist, to do it strictly based off of sound and listener preferences, I'd have to say Eminem or an up and coming artist named, NF. I think our sounds are extremely similar and we're kind of in the same niche as far as hip hop goes.

Jason Carter:
I'd say that's an honest comparison. I would also point out that your songs have melodic components, you tend to sing quite often.

Enkay 47:
Yeah, honestly, I'd be singing a lot more, but I'm trying to really build myself up as a vocalist. I think I've gotten far as the melodies go, I think I know how to write melodies in accordance to the instrumental, but I'm not that big of a vocalist yet. So once I get that down, we'll be doing a lot more singing songs.

Jason Carter:
All right, well let's just dive right into the meat and potatoes of this call. The unchartered territory right now, or I should say the mysterious territory for most artists, is online revenue and online streaming services. Here at Atomic Disc we manufacture tangible products. We manufacture CDs and vinyl and other merchandise that musicians sell at their shows primarily. Obviously there are other streams of revenue which artists are having a difficult time navigating the waters in. So in your case, you have gone from having zero followers on Spotify to, I believe, you're approaching 80,000 monthly listeners. Is that right? Can you share with us how you got to those numbers? Did you find some magic formula or a code that you cracked? Was it trial and error? Did you use other forms of social media to build your audience? How did you go about getting and obtaining your 80,000 monthly listeners?

Enkay 47:
Kind of a mix of all those. To be honest, when I started from zero, it really took about two and a half to three years to get things going. I mean, up until about a year ago, I was only having maybe four or five thousand listeners a month. However, once I really started delving into it, I realized that playlists were a huge part of Spotify's algorithm, and not necessarily big playlists, but a lot of really small ones. And so I started asking my followers to put every new song of mine that was released into their playlist and make sure they listen to the whole duration of the song. If someone only listens to part of a song or they skip it, your popularity actually goes down on Spotify. Spotify actually rewards you based on how many songs you put into their algorithm monthly. So, at a minimum, you need to release at least one song every 21 days. That is a minimum. However, I saw the most success in the last six months. I went from about 40,000 monthly listeners to now I'm at about 80,000 and rising. I’m expected to be at 100,000 monthly listeners by the end of January.

Ideally you should start releasing at least one song every two weeks in order to really get your numbers going. And the reason is, the majority of Spotify’s listeners end up getting their songs from Release Radar and Discover Weekly. Basically, it’s algorithm based playlists that Spotify puts together for the listener. But in order to really take full use of those playlists, you need to end up releasing music frequently and have your users constantly interact with the music. The way to do this or at least the way I did this, was just by asking them. I would message 50 to 100 people a day asking them, hey, can you go follow this link? Can you send this to 50 other friends. Really the biggest thing is just networking and word of mouth. And if you release at least one song every 21 days, at least in my experience and my close associates, the numbers will actually continue stockpiling. This is a combination of word of mouth and the algorithm based playlists like Release Radar and Discover Weekly. I'm sorry, I could write a novel on this. There's just so much to go into about it.

Jason Carter:
Let me ask you this. Let's say my band just left the studio. We recorded a full length record of 10 songs. We're obviously going to put our record out on a hard copy so we can sell it at shows. Would you recommend rather than releasing the full album at one time on Spotify we release one song from the album every 21 days.

Enkay 47:
If you could do that, that would be perfect because Spotify rewards their artists more with singles versus albums. They don't want an album. They want, I guess constant material they can put on Release Radar and Discover Weekly for their listeners. So if you guys ended up doing that you could do a 10 week cycle and release a song a week that would get you on every single Release Radar, every single Discover Weekly. You're looking at at least 10,000 monthly listeners during that time period.

Jason Carter:
That's a great idea. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how to go about distributing your music online, we really like DistroKid right now. The nice thing about DistroKid, is that as an artist, you can just pay $20 a year which allows you unlimited singles and albums. The old model with companies like Tunecore and CD Baby charge you a fee per album or single release. With DistroKid you don't have to worry about spending a ton of money on several singles, you just pay one flat rate a year for unlimited uploads. So that would solve that problem, wouldn't it?

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Enkay 47:
Oh yeah. One hundred percent.

Jason Carter:
Any other tricks that you can share with us?

Enkay 47:
Ask your Spotify followers to hit the follow button every single time. Followers have immediate access to your songs before they're released to the general public giving your listeners an incentive. I always advertise that my Spotify release will be there three days early. I tell my followers that they get to hear my song three days earlier than the rest of my fan base. So giving people that incentive and using Spotify's tools they already give you to be successful, that's, that's huge and I'm telling you within six months if you release a song, every two weeks, do your usual advertising, use word of mouth and have people share it and follow you… you can add at least 10 to 20,000 lucky listeners just in that timeframe.

Jason Carter:
That's great. You touched briefly on playlists. A lot of artists ask us, how do I get my song on a playlist? What's the quickest and easiest route to be able to pull that off?

Enkay 47:
Well, unfortunately it's kind of like weight loss. I mean there's no magic pill to lose a bunch of weight. There's no magic pill.

Jason Carter:
Seriously, I thought there was a magic pill for everything.

Enkay 47:
Man I wish there was. I think the easiest way to get there, if there even is an easy way, is to just have as many people as you can, put your song in their playlist. There's some online features that are really helpful. I've used them. One of them is called Submit Hub. What happens is the website actually pushes your song into thousands of playlists, really, really small playlists. But then again, I mean pennies a day ends up adding to a dollar. The more playlists you're on and the more your song is downloaded and played, the higher chance you have of being put into Spotify's algorithm. That algorithm gets you a lot of monthly listeners, I want to say in the last two months, just two months by releasing a song every two weeks at four songs. In the last two months I've probably reached about 10 to 20,000 additional monthly listeners from those Release Radars and a Discover Weekly playlists. And while not everyone's going to be a fan, even if you get half of that, that's a potential 10,000 additional monthly listeners you can get.

Jason Carter:
Let me ask you, do you have an idea what the numbers translate to? If, let's say in your case you have 80,000 monthly listeners, how many streams does that translate into roughly a month?

Enkay 47:
That's where things get really complicated. And you know, me personally, I'm not the best with math. So generally I get about 300 to 500,000 streams a month. I'm not going to get into my personal finances or anything like that. But on average you can expect about, I want to say $5 to $6 per thousand streams. It gets complicated once you get into who subscribed to Spotify, who's not, et cetera. It really depends because the more your song is listened to all the way through, plays a huge role in how your streams are measured. Spotify only counts a stream if you listen to at least 30 seconds of a song, so if you have someone only listening to 10 or 20 seconds, you're going to get less money than an artist who's getting their songs fully streamed. Does that make sense?

Jason Carter:
Yeah. Does your play counter represent plays up to the 30 second mark or only after that?

Enkay 47:
Don't quote me on this, I believe it is between 10 and 20 seconds. It's definitely right below 30 seconds and you have to reach that certain point before it counts as an actual stream.

Jason Carter:
So let's move on here. This call was really just to touch on your take with Spotify. You do more on social media than most artists I've seen…you're active on Facebook, you're active on Instagram, you release video content on both Facebook and Youtube. What other strategies have you been using via Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, so forth. And do you think those strategies are contributing to your Spotify success?

Enkay 47:
Thank you for bringing that up. I actually wanted to talk about that. So, I'm not just only using Spotify. One of the main reasons I was able to grow and get my foot in the door with Spotify in the first place, was because of my other social media. Just like anything with life, just like anything commission based or sales based, you need to build a connection with whoever is buying from you. And that's part of the reason I'm so active on my other social medias. Every single day I make it a goal to send it least 50 links to at least 50 people. I link to my songs, my videos, etc. And at first it might not translate to a lot, but if you start doing this for six months or a year, it eventually turns into thousands of new fans, which is the case I'm dealing with now. I always take advantage of Facebook advertisements as well as Instagram advertisements. And this is where the water gets a little bit murky. I'm not a hundred percent sure how much translates. There's no way to tell how many listeners go from your Facebook and Instagram to your Spotify. But I can say whenever somebody hits me up as a new fan because they saw my video on Facebook or Instagram. The very first link I send them is my Spotify link. And I think that's helped me immensely. I know for a fact it's given me more followers.

Jason Carter:
So you're actively responding on Facebook to people who are responding to your content that you're putting up.

Enkay 47:
Oh, definitely.

Jason Carter:
So sending them a Spotify link. That's smart

Enkay 47:
On that same note though, one of the things I found really, really helpful is… instead of sending them a single track or a single song you're promoting, send them a playlist, Spotify rewards their users and their listeners, especially artists for making and curating playlists. That's what their entire platform is based off of. So if you make a playlist of all of your songs, I have one called "Enkay47’s Favorites". It’s constantly one of my highest played platforms because whenever I have a new song, I put that new song at the top of the playlist. So everybody following the playlist, which is I think about a thousand right now, automatically generates a thousand brand new plays and hopefully a thousand new downloads for the new track. And that helps immensely with Spotify’s algorithms.

Jason Carter:
That's genius. Are you currently curating just one playlist, or do you find that multiple playlists are something that an artist should be doing?

Enkay 47:
You should definitely curate multiple playlists if you have the time and the resources. At one point I was doing three playlists, but I found it was just too hectic to juggle everything else I was doing. So I currently have the one, but as many as you can make, definitely do that as long as you can maintain them.

Jason Carter:
Okay, great. I'm gonna ask you one more question and this is just pertaining to you as an artist. Would you briefly share with us what your timeline and your blueprint is for releasing a single. Starting from the day that you finish recording in the studio, what's your first step?

Enkay 47:
First off, I always like to plan out at least a couple of months in advance before a release. That way I can get a good video together whether it be a scripted video, or a simple one camera shot in the studio. I give my audience as much time as I need to build up anticipation for the release. The minimum amount of time I do for this is seven days. I typically do a countdown on my social media. I'm constantly messaging people. Whenever they message me back I say, oh, by the way, brand new song, brand new video coming November 27th for example. I really just do my best to build anticipation. I always have at least a few hundred dollars of marketing money set aside for the release. That way I can do Facebook advertisements, Youtube advertisement, et cetera. The day right before the release is crucial. I don't see enough artists doing this. You guys need to sign up for a link to be able to create smartlinks. A smart link is extremely important because people don't want to click on 20 different links for 20 different stores. They want to have one link that has everything they're looking for. Smart links are crucial. I think my subscription is like $10 a month or something. It's called smart link url. Definitely get that.

Jason Carter:
Great advice, man. You've given us some really good information. I know there's a ton of more stuff we could get into and I think if it's cool with you, I want to have a follow up call with you where we can talk more in depth on other aspects of marketing. I know you've had some success with your Youtube video views and even bigger counts on your Facebook videos… so maybe we can do that in another call, huh?

Enkay 47:
Yeah, I’d love to.

Jason Carter:
Cool. Nathan, thank you so much for talking with us! You can check out Enkay47 at enkay47.com. If you google search Enkay47 you’ll get a ton of links you can check out. His Spotify and Youtube channels are both Enkay47. You’re everywhere, you're the man. Thank you so much.

Enkay 47:
Thanks again, Jason. You have a great night.

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