The landscape of the music industry is quickly changing. Gone are the days of live in-person performances being a primary source for earning an income as a musician. These days you can earn a comfortable living doing music without ever having to step outside of your front door.
Since the pandemic, live streaming has become a popular choice for musicians to maintain engagement with their fans and earn money in the process. For so many of us though, the question is how do we attract more people to our shows and earn even more money. In today’s post, we’ll discuss 8 Tips to Build an Audience for Your Live Stream Music shows…
Establish a routine of going live on social media.
Pick 1 or 2 platforms to go live on regularly. Choose the platforms where you are most engaged with your audience. For added effectiveness, make your live stream a series or a regular event and promote it heavily. Brand it and make a big deal out of it. Try some of these ideas:
- Wicked Wednesdays
- Happy Hour Sessions
- Live on Saturdays
- Late Night Mondays
This gets your audience used to seeing you live on camera. It gives you the opportunity to build up anticipation among your followers where they start expecting to see you live on a certain day at a certain time.
These sessions can be 10 or 15 minutes. What’s great about this is that you don’t even have to do music the entire time. You can discuss things like current events, answer FAQs, share fun trivia facts, or even review an album. What people are after is the experience, the entertainment, and the interactiveness of it all. Your fans and even prospective fans want to get to know you. They want to learn more about your personality. That’s how we all find connections with each other, by establishing a rapport. If they like what they see and resonate with you, they will crave more and more content from you. With this in mind, it’s important to showcase your personality by being interactive, answering questions, greeting people by name, asking questions, encouraging people to participate, etc. Make your viewers feel comfortable by not only being entertaining but also interacting and engaging with them. After doing these events a few times, you’ll find that it’s going to attract your ideal tribe and they will want to come to your lives on a consistent basis.
After hosting these mini-events, you’ll have an audience that you can promote to. You can then host and promote larger live streams where you can start selling tickets for or requiring a donation upon entry.
Collaborate with other artists.
Work with other artists to create content jointly. Choose artists with a similar audience as you. If their fans are following them, those same fans would probably enjoy your music too. Create video content together. Duets, interviews, conversations, and joint reviews are great content ideas you could start with. Use a service like Streamyard to jointly record and broadcast your videos. Streamyard has a free version, but there’s more functionality available like customized banners, logos and other features with the premium version. If you choose to go the premium route, use my affiliate link to sign up and you’ll get $10 off. Use my link to sign up and get ready for easy broadcasting and live streaming.
Do I recommend OBS? Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is a great free alternative to Streamyard. It’s an open-source program that downloads onto your computer. There is a lot more functionality and flexibility available with OBS as compared to Streamyard. I would love to use OBS, but it uses a lot of bandwidth on my computer and it’s also really hard for me to find a strong internet connection while streaming with OBS. The other thing is that you’ll have to spend quite a bit of time learning the system. Meanwhile, it’s not very intuitive. So if you have the time and the bandwidth, then yes OBS is a great option. If not, Streamyard is great too!
A collaborative video with another artist can be pre-recorded or hosted live. Put it on their channel, or put it on your channel, or both. This puts you in front of their audience, and them in front of your audience. Don’t forget to promote, promote, promote your live streams during this collaborative video. Have your links, hashtags, and handles ready to share during the video to let everyone know where to find you and when your next live will be.
The other thing you can do to collaborate is exchange promotion messages with other artists to share with their mailing list. Have them promote your next live on their newsletter and you can do the same for them on your next newsletter.
Fold messaging into your current content strategy.
Since you’re likely already putting out content consistently (or you should be) it’s not too difficult to add in some posts about your upcoming live streams. Don’t just give the boring when and where details. Make it fun and build suspense around it by sharing what you’ll be doing during your live and why people should come. You could plan interactive games, giveaways, highlight a viewer, or perform a mystery cover. Post about your live streams periodically along with your current content. Just don’t overdo it!
Add a blurb about your live streams into your social media bios.
This is a really quick and simple way to promote your live streams and passively build an audience. Add a few words about your live streams to the bio section on your social media platforms. Here are some examples…
- Join me live for Rowdy Rock Mondays at 8PM EST
- Party with me Wednesday evenings for Pop Tunes and Outakes at 9pm CST
- Going live every Friday with Sensible Soul click here for details
Try to make your blurb fun and intriguing and include a link for people to find out more. The link should go to a landing page that gives them information about your next live and how to join. More on landing pages below.
Related Posts…
• Free Live Streaming Platforms for Musicians to Get Paid
• Live Streaming Equipment List for Musicians
• 8 Best Live Streaming Web Cams for Musicians
• Ten Ways to Get People to Come to Your Live Streams
Engage outside of your social media profiles.
Keep a collection of hashtags that you will use with your live streams. Select hashtags that are popular and relevant. Use them for every live stream. Do a search for these hashtags and start engaging with the people using these hashtags. Utilizing hashtags on your content can potentially open up more exposure for you, but you can double that by engaging with others who are using these same hashtags.
Cyber networking anyone?
Share it with your mailing list subscribers.
Whenever you have an upcoming live, treat it like you would an in-person gig. Promote it with your current database of supporters. Send an invite out to your mailing list subscribers every time. It’d be even better if you could collect phone numbers from your subscribers as well as email addresses. That way, you can fire off a quick text message right before you’re about to go live and get people to come to your live via text message.
Add a landing page to your website.
Here’s where you can get crafty with promoting your lives and building an audience! Create a special landing page on your website dedicated to sharing information about your lives. Talk about your next live. Share some snippets from previous lives. Create a call-to-action where people can sign up to be notified of when you’re hosting your next live. Collect email addresses and phone numbers. Share all the hashtags associated with your lives. Share reviews from previous guests. This can be clippings you gather from the comments section at the end of your shows.
Every time you mention your live streams anywhere else, add a link back to this page so people can go check it out. This gives you a nice little information hub where you can keep track of all of your lives, post surveys and questions, run your giveaways from, accept donations or ticket sales, and convert the casual listener/viewer to a loyal follower.
Add yourself to various live streaming platforms.
There are a lot of platforms available with streaming features for musicians which can double as a way to build an audience. Each platform has its own features and pros. Take a look at Sessions, LiveKrowd, StreetJelly and Twitch to name a few. Check out our article here about these platforms and a few more free platforms to host paid live streams. You could also add yourself to classic gig booking platforms like GigSalad as well. People are looking for artists to provide virtual entertainment on these platforms as well, believe it or not.
In these times of lockdown and uncertainty, lots of us musicians are facing the same challenges — trying to figure out how to practice social distancing while still finding practical ways to earn money as a musician. It’s not easy. But, building an audience for live streaming is well worth it.
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5 Ways to Book Paid Virtual Music Gigs
Free Live Streaming Platforms For Musicians & Singers To Get Paid
10 Ways to Get Fans to Tune In To Your Live Streams
Best Live Streaming Equipment for Musicians
The other thing to consider about building an audience for live music streaming is experimenting with different times. As you go live on a more consistent basis, you’ll begin to notice the best times to go live for your audience that will give you the most engagement. So pay attention to your attendance as you go live at different times!