The Importance of Finding Your Niche in The Music Industry
03/01/2020 - 4 minute read.
Finally, 2021 is here. A new year means, new energy, a fresh start and a new set of goals to abandon somewhere around March/April… Or does it? Let’s turn things around and focus on making 2021 your best year yet! How? By focussing on your own niche.
As an artist you create. You can create art, design clothes and produce music. But what is most important about your creation (outside of the energy, passion and your obvious love for the process of creating)?
Painters want their paintings to be seen, and eventually bought.
Clothing designers want their clothes to be worn and shown to the world.
Music producers want their records to be heard, and eventually streamed.
What do the above have in common? Every creator wants its creation to be seen, heard, recognized. In this article we’ll be focussing on music and the importance of finding your niche.
What is a niche? Well, it’s not the Spanish word for Nike. A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.
It’s basically how genres work within the music industry. If you love Trance music, chances are slim you’ll enjoy Reggaeton as well. Yet as a Trance lover you might like Psy-Trance even more!
To break this down very simply with more daily life examples:
There are music stores which sell all sorts of instruments and accessoiries, a niche could be opening up a music store focussed on selling guitars. To take it one step further you could focus on selling electric guitars only!
If your market is the pet-industry, your niche could be GPS trackers for pets, biological pet food or customized pet pajamas (they exist).
When you sell cars, you can focus on hybrid cars or dive deeper into selling electric cars only.
The above makes sense, right? But why is it so important in this day and age to find the audience your product, in this case music, resonates most with?
Digital distribution services like Distrokid, Labelworx and Tunecore have made it easy to release your own music. If you, your pet and a family-member (wearing your customized pet pajama) record a song, produce a beat or anything similar to that — you can make it available on Spotify, Apple Music and other DSP’s. This means up and coming or established artists and producers can easily release their latest record within a few clicks. Fantastic!
However, more music on the market means more competition. There are over 40.000 songs being released on Spotify every day! Luckily Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Drake and Post Malone don’t release 10.000 songs a day, however it does mean you need to bring out your a-game. You want to make sure you stand out, and to give you a secret, it doesn’t only happen by releasing music.
How to find your niche within the musical landscape?
1. Identify yourself. Who are you? What do you want to be? Artist, producer, singer, songwriter?
2. Identify your skill set. Once you’ve found out what you aspire to be, what makes you good at what you want to be and what do you enjoy doing most?
3. Who might enjoy what I have to offer? Identify your audience?
All of the above are equally as important. Without the who, you have no idea where to start or what identity you need to create. Without finding out your strengths, you might end up focussing on your weaknesses! And with no clue who likes your freshly produced masterpiece, you have no idea who to tailor it to. However, in today’s day and age defining your audience is the one people tend to overlook.
A lot of artists who release their music think, ‘OK I’ve released my music on Spotify and Apple Music, I’ll just sit and wait until the streams start clocking in’. How great would life be if it would work just like that..
By identifying your audience, and what they like/want, you know how to package your message and where to send it. You might make incredible Techno but for some reason your audience only likes Polka! Does this mean you need to change your genre? No! What this means is you haven’t correctly identified your audience yet.
Find out what platforms fans of your style use most for promotion, Reddit and Facebook groups dedicated to your specific style.
Find out what playlists feature your style of music.
Keep in mind, the bigger the playlist doesn’t always mean the most amount of streams. Sometimes a playlist with 20K follower have higher engagment than a playlist which has 500K followers!
Once you have identified your audience and how they consume their music, you can tailor your promotion, tone of voice and even your sound (to an extent) to maximize reach and potential of your creations.
Keep in mind, more isn’t always better. If you are given the choice to perform in a club with 1.000 people or 100.000 people, which one would you choose? The majority would say 100.000 without blinking an eye. But is it really the right decision? This obviously depends on 1 major detail, the message I’ve tried to convey in this article.
If the club filled with 100.000 are 100% fans of what you do, you should not even think twice. Unfortunately chances are high the club filled with 100.000 people might not like your style (obviously their loss, not yours) and therefore not enjoy the performance which results in the loss of potential fans. Focus on a smaller group which will fully enjoy what you’re giving them, the retention will be infinitely bigger!
So — what are you waiting for? Start! Identify who you are as a creative, what it is you want to create and who is looking for what you have to offer. Once you have those things, dig deeper. Where do people go to consume, find and hear the latest within your genre? What playlist is going the Spotify’s next Mint for your sound?
The industry changes as frequently as your feelings during Monopoly! So keep checking your audience to make sure your messages reaches it’s full potential!