Successful Musician Podcast Episode 58
Interviewee: John Gold
Interviewer: Jason Tonioli
Jason Tonioli:
Welcome to the podcast today. My special guest is a newer friend. His name is John Gold, and he is one of the founders of Hyped It. It’s very, very rare that I get excited about a software platform. Just to set this up, John, a few weeks ago, a friend of mine said, Hey, you got to check out this little software It’s called Hyped It. I’d seen a couple of ads pop up for it. But again, I’m a person that spent, I’ve literally spent over a million dollars on Facebook ads myself on my music. There’s not a lot of people. I’ve been in Facebook ad land. I’ve done YouTube ads. I’ve done advertisements and spent way too much money on it. And anything that is simple and advertising is something that I’ve just seen fail so many times, and I’ve failed myself many times. And I did not John, I’m just going to be honest. I did not believe that this would be effective and work. And my friend’s like, No, it’s the first time I’m getting success. And so he sat with me, and in less than 10 minutes, we set up a Hyped It campaign together.
And then I just thought, I’ll just throw like $5 a month at it and whatever. And I just thought, It won’t be anything. And by the second day, we went back and looked at it, and I had this huge spike. And I’m like, Oh, my gosh, what just happened? Because I didn’t hardly spend any time on it, so it shouldn’t work very well, right? But it did. And just in the last week and a half that I’ve been doing it, I’ve added almost like 600, 800 fans to my fan list as subscribers for YouTube. And so I reached out to you, John, and I just said, I’ve got to talk to this guy, and this is something that people need to know about. They can figure it out if it’s awesome for themselves. But for me, your software was the easiest, most simple way to have an impact as an indie artist that I’ve found ever. I want to pick your brain. I know you live out in the New York area. You have two little girls, but tell us a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself here.
John Gold:
Awesome, Jason. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. This is super exciting. Of course, always great to hear somebody having a positive experience and taking advantage of the things that we have the pleasure building. Love being here. I’m like yourself in an independent music artist, and this is where the whole thing started for me. I’ve always been making music. I’ve studied drums, I’ve studied piano, and so I’ve been playing in bands. Then eventually, I got the electronic music bug when I was a little younger and started playing around with electronic music. The thing that happened at the time is that I had connected with a bunch of record labels who were putting out compilation releases. This isn’t really around anymore, but it was around back then where record labels would just buy 20, 30, 40 electronic dance music songs or house music songs, put them on a compilation and put them out. I was in an extremely lucky situation where all I had to focus on was making good music. I didn’t have to worry about anything else because the labels were going to buy or license the songs, put them out on compilations, and I was able to get royalty income from that.
John Gold:
It was amazing until it wasn’t. Obviously, at one point came the big shift in the music industry where things moved online, shifted to streaming. Nobody would be really selling a lot of CDs or vinyl anymore. I was fired from the labels. They didn’t need me anymore. I hadn’t built myself up as an artist that had any brand recognition with fans. I love being in the studio. I love making music. I hadn’t really tried to become famous for lack of a better word. But that’s what the record labels needed at the point in time. They needed people, or they found themselves in a situation that in order to monetize your music, you had to be a household name, and I simply wasn’t. So I got fired and found myself in this situation where for the first time, I had no idea how to get my music out. I was still making the same music, but all of a sudden, 04:40 I learned that I had been really training myself on making music but not making fans. In order to really advance a music career these days, you need to be good at two things, making great music, but also making fans.
This is something that I had completely left aside. I tried lots of things, how to make fans, so to speak, how to build an audience. At the time, I did what everybody did. Soundcloud was one of the primary outlets. Things were going really, really slow. At one point, I was like, I might have to try things that are a little bit different from what everybody else is doing. One early idea was, Well, 05:26 what happens if I give away music for free in return for social benefits, like people reposting my music or sharing my music in order to earn a free download? That can really help with virality. I tried some of these things manually in order to just figure out if they would be working. Then I found myself at night sending so many people download links because they were excited about the opportunity that I then thought, Well, I got to figure out a way to automate this. This is literally the birth of Hypedit. When I started building software to automate automate some of these music promotion tasks that I was struggling with at the time. Struggling not in the sense that they didn’t work.
No, they did work, but then they sucked up all the time to do manual tasks. 06:15 All I wanted to do at the end of the day was automate making fans so that I could focus my time that I was really excited about on making music. Because that’s why I got into music in the first place. I never wanted to be an expert at making fans. I wanted to be I was passionate about music. I wanted to spend all my time making music. My dream case scenario always was make music and automate the marketing of music.
Jason Tonioli:
That’s awesome. You just had been spending a lot of money in building, testing out Facebook and YouTube and Google Ads, I’m sure. How far down that path did you go before you figured out, wow, this could be automated?
John Gold:
My first My experiences with Facebook and Instagram also go back a number of years. It really was actually a presentation that I saw by a marketer called Billy Jean, which you might actually be familiar with. Billy Jean had this YouTube video. I think it was a YouTube video where he talked about how local businesses can put their product in front of laser targeted potential customers customers for their businesses. He did this for all kinds of local shops, I think, like dentists and chiropractors and those kinds of things. I was like, This is interesting. He’s able to find customers for these businesses with laser targeted ads tracks. The tool exists for everybody. Why can’t we use this as musicians? Why wouldn’t we be able to put our music in front of diehard fans for our music using those same tools? I literally started experimenting with the things that Billy Jean explained in these videos for my music. At first, it wasn’t an immediate success. It definitely took training. But there was a point when all of a sudden, I had cracked the formula. I had figured out what to do with the creative, what to do with the targeting, what to do with the campaign type, traffic versus conversion, all those kinds of things.
At one point, I’d learned enough about the individual steps that it takes to build a good campaign that it really came together. In that year, I kid you not, my music went from practically zero to over a million streams on Spotify just because I cracked that. This was a point in time where I was managing everything manually. I was building all these campaigns manually. Fast forward to today, I basically went into training other music artists on how to run Facebook or Instagram ad for their music first. It was like a step in between. But 09:04 let’s face it, a lot of music artists have so limited time already. A lot of us are not in the fortunate situation yet that we can make music full-time. For a lot of us, it’s a hobby. We have a day job, we have a family, We have kids. The little bit of time that we have to make music, we want to put it into making music, sitting down, composing, recording, doing all that fun stuff, and maybe not take another Facebook, Instagram training at night and spend a couple of hours on this and then starting to experiment.
The idea grew in me to say, Well, look, if this is working for me and it worked for a lot of artists who I had the pleasure of explaining this and training them on, can we automate this? I mean, this is really just software applications talking to each other. 09:49 What if we just package up this winning formula that’s been working so well across genres for music, and we basically build it into templates and a piece of software where a music artist, all they have to do is bring their song and tell us basically in which countries they want to promote it and maybe the names of a couple sounded like artists, and then the software does the rest. This is where we’ve taken Hyped It. This is where we are today. It’s really been this mission to make or lower the entry hurdle and make promoting your music on Facebook and Instagram as easy and as simple as it can be for music artists, not for professional digital marketers, no, for people who actually don’t use Facebook and Instagram ads, otherwise and on a daily basis.
Jason Tonioli:
Well, and I think what’s interesting is if you listen to where the world is right now, Spotify and some of the others are, you’ve got these AI bots that people go pay and listen to your music. And I know Spotify is cracked down big time on some of these fake playlists. I think there’s been some situations where even millions of have been paid out to not real artists that were part of some bot scam or whatever. What I’ve been really impressed with is this is literally like going to real people, real fans, and getting them to follow, whether it’s follow you on YouTube or follow your playlist that you own. If you want to make your own playlist or send them to another playlist, that’s fine. But it’s like real organic, not pretend stuff. You’re hearing the problems out there on Spotify. Are you running across that? I’m just curious what you’ve seen in that world or what people should know if they’re like, Oh, I’m going to go pay for this group to get me a whole bunch of fans. What do people need to watch out for?
John Gold:
Yeah. You’re putting your finger on one of the biggest problems out there right now. Obviously, there’s a lot of Spotify manipulation going on. Some of it as business models, some of it as money laundry. It’s crazy. But when When independent music artists put out their music on Spotify and they first concerned themselves about music promotion, how do I get my stuff heard? 12:15 Because, sadly, back in the days, if you rewind time by decades, probably, there was a time and place where good music really made the difference. If you had good music, it would find its way and it would get heard. Today, the The hurdle to making good music has been lowered so much to technology and the access to great sounds and synthesizers and sample packs and what have you that there is a lot of good music coming out, and there’s literally millions of songs going on Spotify every single month. The idea that good music alone will get you heard, unfortunately, is something that is far from reality today. This mentality of build it and they’ll come doesn’t exist in the music space. It doesn’t exist in a lot of spaces, but certainly not in the music space these days.
You got to do something in order to get your music in front of an audience if you want to grow. Especially when it comes to Spotify, the first idea or the first music promotion channel that most music artists look at is playlist promotion. That’s because most artists do it, and it’s become somewhat of the default option for a lot of artists. Now, there are two big problems with that. 13:39 The first one is that if you outsource your music promotion to someone else, like a playlist promotion platform, you don’t really know what you’re getting. You don’t know how these playlist curators are populating their playlist. You don’t know if it’s real fans or if it’s fake streams and bots. Fake and bots obviously don’t have any value, but now they even risk your music on Spotify because if Spotify detects it, they might take you down. It might not be because you did anything wrong. You obviously went to a playlist curator that somewhere on their website said, real fans only, and we really care about quality and all of that. And yet you ended up being bought it through some of these playlists. Now, that’s the first challenge.
Even if you get on a playlist that has real fans only, then consider how fans listen to playlists. It’s usually in a passive way. 14:40 If somebody listens to a playlist, they hit play on it, and then they do something else. They might listen to a playlist while they’re working out at the gym or while they’re at work or they’re driving in a car or whatever they might be doing. The music plays in the background. Yes, it means you do get technically a listener, you do get a stream, your music reaches someone’s ears, but they don’t really pay attention. I have a smooth jazz playlist that I have listened to virtually every night for the last, I don’t know, 180 days or so. I love the mood this sets over dinner. And you could ask me for any song or artist on the playlist, I could name you none, because all I do is I hit play, I let the playlist run, and that’s it. If you’re an artist on a playlist like this, it’s great while you’re on it, but once you get all your results basically dropped right to where they were before. That’s because you didn’t really gain any fans.
You didn’t really gain any attention. You just got hit with a couple of passive listeners, but they go away the moment you come off the playlist. 15:44 It’s either you have a problem, whether they’re real fans, and if they’re real fans, they are mostly passive listeners. That is not a way to build a long-term audience of fans that come back over and over, listen to your music, and give you a basically continuous nonstop path to growth. What you need are fans that are here for your music, that stick around, that follow you, that save your music, and help you raise your popularity profile on Spotify that way. That is something that ads have done for me right from the beginning. It makes sense because if you run ads, whether it’s on Facebook and Instagram or whether it’s on YouTube, whatever audience you put yourself in front of, and if they take action to come over either to your YouTube profile or they come over to your Spotify profile, they are there just for you. So you replace the situation where you are one among 100 or one among 200 or 300 on a playlist to a situation where you are one of one.
They come just for you. And the difference in quality of those fans is phenomenal. These fans are so likely to engage with your music. Again, follow, save, stream multiple of your songs. It makes a world of a difference. 17:08 The dream case scenario then would obviously be, how can we make music promotion as effective as running ads, but at the same time as easy as doing plaintiff promotion, which is essentially just handing somebody the link to your Spotify stream. And so that’s the mission that we’re on.
Jason Tonioli:
Well, and I think with the playlist, one of the things, you think about who had the power 20 years ago, the radio station operators all control the playlist, right? And that shifted with the Spotify and all the streaming services. And there’s still playlists out there, but some are curated by Spotify or the other services, or there’s all these user-owned or created playlists that can be shared. If you think about it from an artist standpoint, I can create my own playlist now, and I can even put myself right next to whatever that artist that’s like me or who I like to listen to that’s similar. Now, when I come out with a new song, I essentially can add myself to the radio station playlist, and I own the playlist. What I really think is brilliant with what you’re doing is you’re able to push people to that playlist that you actually own as an artist now. If you’re going to spend the money on getting people to follow the playlist or follow you as an artist, you should have control of it rather than the record label or even the Spotify or Apple or whoever it is to control it.
It puts the driver stick in your hands. The next thing that I think is critical that any artist ought to think about, though, is as much as I want you to listen on Spotify or whatever the platform is or YouTube, the key is, can I get something in some way in place that I can then communicate with you? Because if you really think about it, as much as I want to think I own that YouTube channel or the Facebook page or whatever it is, all it takes is a single snap. If YouTube decides to ban you, too bad, so sad. You could be gone. Mr. Beast, I guess they could turn his channel off tomorrow. I don’t know that they do that to him, but for a normal musician artist, what would you do if they took that thing away from you? Or if they banned you from Spotify, then what happens? I think the key thing is, can you collect email addresses or contact information so that you are in the driver’s seat now? In case all of that went away, can you still continue communicate?
John Gold:
Yes. Yeah, great question. And I agree 100 %. 19:35 Your Spotify fans aren’t really owned by you. They are owned by Spotify. And it’s the same for all the other platforms. Whether they ban you or the platform goes away, you are at the mercy of what they allow you to do. And so I think of email, as you alluded to, as really the most effective way to essentially back up your fan base. 20:04 I look at email literally as a backup of fan base, which is funny because as musicians, we already back up a bunch of our stuff. We back up probably our songs, our midi files, whatever you create as part of making music, you probably have a backup of it somewhere so that if your computer breaks or something like that, you can get back into it. I’m a big fan of thinking about a fan base the same way and backing up a fan base. Now, the way to do this effectively is with email. You get the benefit of what I said, backup. You can always reach out to these fans and have them connect with you on a different platform. It’s also an amazing sales channel.
If you sell merchandise, there’s a lot of stuff you can do these days with print on demand. I love that stuff. Or in my music space, sample packs is a big thing. I said sample packs, I know you sell sheet music. Having an email is literally also an income stream at the same time. 21:13 The best way that I found these days to grow your email list is with Spotify presaves. What I do with Spotify presaves, in my case, is I give away a free download of the song before its actual release date. I go out to my audience and I do that with ads. Ads. I would run an ad and basically feature a snippet of an upcoming song. That’s important. The song can’t be out yet. The song has to be unreleased. Then I give people the option to get a copy of that song before its extra release date. The value to the fan is that they’re getting something exclusive that the rest of the world can’t listen to yet. In order to unlock that access to the song early, they pre-saved the song on Spotify and leave their email address at the same time. You are basically helping grow your audience on Spotify and getting an email address as a backup at the same time. I found this to work really well.
Jason Tonioli:
Are you just using a CRM system to do that, or is Spotify providing that list of emails to you? How does that work?
John Gold:
In this case, Hyped It is really the mechanism to do that. 22:29 Hyped It has a promotion campaign template built in which is called grow my Spotify presaves, and that has the capability to do what I just described. Basically, you upload your song. Again, it should be an unreleased song. Hyped It creates the ad campaign, sets it up with the proper landing pages in order to capture these email addresses, and then delivers the email addresses to you. What Hypedee doesn’t do at the moment is send the emails, so you would still want to be signed up with an email marketing tool. I use Mailchimp, for example. I have in this… It’s For those who want to set their music promotion up a little bit more professionally, I have my Hyped It link to Mailchimp directly via Zapier. All those email addresses get imported into Mailchimp directly, so I can send an email to my fans at any point in time, automatically knowing that all the latest fans are already on the list. Those kinds of things are possible. But it really all starts with capturing the email addresses in the first place.
Jason Tonioli:
I still remember sitting at a conference one time. For anybody who’s really into marketing, they should recognize the name Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson. But I was at a funnel hacking live event there, and Dan Kennedy has been teaching marketing for 30 plus years. He’s literally probably taught the entire Almost anybody who’s in the industry of e-commerce and web stuff knows the name Dan Kennedy. And he said, The value is in the email list. And unless you have that email, you don’t really have anything. You’re at mercy of all these other providers. And so the key is have that email list. It’s interesting for my music. With those emails, I can follow up with people, whether I have my sheet music or new song coming out or I have a new recording. I’ll take that list and I can email everybody when it goes live, and I can immediately cause a spike in YouTube or Spotify or whatever by sending those links. And those algorithms love to see that, oh, my gosh, there’s people that are interested. So it’s one of those things that I think helps with any launch of a song. And then the other thing that I think that I’ve been able to do is you have what’s called retargeting ads.
I don’t know what you have with Hyped It, but with that email list, I can run those retargeting ads. So only people that have done, maybe they’ve bought a certain song or maybe they’ve clicked that they liked a song, I can push that out to the Facebook or YouTube or Google, and I can tell it, Hey, only show it to these people that have done that thing. The other thing that I think is really powerful, and I’m sure you guys are using a similar thing of that, is there’s what’s called a lookalike audience. I can take my entire fan list of whatever tens of thousands of people, and I can tell Facebook, Go find people that look very similar to these people because that’s probably who’s going to be your fans. And so now when you’re spending money to generate fans or get people to buy more of that same thing that they bought, you’re eliminating hundreds of millions of people Facebook or Google would have had to figure out on their own. And you’ve just made it way easier for the little algorithm bot to do its job with.
John Gold:
Yeah, 100 %. Retargeting lookalike audiences. And the people who have given you the email address are likely one of the most qualified ones who want to be connected with you the most. Being able to build audiences around that, I agree, is a very powerful feature.
Jason Tonioli:
One of the big challenges I see just with musicians in general, and I’m sure you’ve run across this, is most music people have that… You got the left brain, right brain. They don’t think in marketing terms. So like putting math or spreadsheets or marketing stuff in front of a music transition, they just melt down and they’re like, I can’t do that. Versus if you put them in front of a guitar or a piano or whatever it is, they can just do music all day long. It’s very rare to find somebody who’s willing to delve into the marketing side. So I love what you’ve done where it just takes that hard thing for that music brain to figure out, and you’ve just made it so it works. And the other thing that I think is amazing is you’ve made it so you don’t have to spend crazy amounts of money. The campaign that I’ve run so far, I think I’m spending $3 and $5 a day. That’s it. So it’s like a cup of coffee. I applaud you for making what you’ve done accessible to everybody. Definitely, you can scale it up. If I want to spend $100 a day.
I guess you could if you can afford it. But I’ve seen the needle move more with that $5 a day that I’ve put in than almost anything that I’ve done to promote the fan base. I’m just impressed. I’m a fan, and I have no doubt I’m going to be diving in more to what Hypedic can do. But I just think it’s something that people need to be aware of and go check out for their own music for sure.
John Gold:
No, I really appreciate that. I agree with What are your thoughts on budget. When you run ads, the magic is that you’re working with a system that is learning and improving on its own. Because every time a fan engages with your ad, whether it’s on Instagram or if it’s on Facebook or if it’s on YouTube, the platform behind it, so whether it’s, again, Facebook ads or meta ads or Google ads, they learn who those people are, what interest they have, their demographic profile. The more interactions happen on your ads, the more these platforms learn, Hey, what do the people that love Jason’s music, what do they have in common? The more the platform figures this out, the more it’s able to send or put your ads in front of a better and better audience. In a way, you could think of the first day of your campaign as the worst day. The second day might the second worst day of the campaign. It’s not as linear, but conceptually, the start of a campaign is when it performs at its worst. Over time, it just gets better and better and better. 28:47 If an artist comes to me and said, I have a budget of $150 to promote this song. What should I do? I would always recommend take a small budget on a daily basis and just run it for a longer period of time. If you had $150, I would always run $5 a day for 30 days rather than try to do a promotion explosion for three days with $50 a day. That’s simply because you will get so much better results if you drip the budget slowly over a longer period of time, because now you’re coasting into that zone where the ads are being optimized by the algorithm and the AI.
Jason Tonioli:
It’s been amazing to me. One of the things I’ve found with the ads I’ve run so far is with that small budget, it’s gotten better and better. And normally with Facebook ads, I found that I had to spend about $1,000 to be able to find out whether the Facebook ad was going to work, and it would start dialing in and getting smarter. And what I’m shocked at is like, oh, my gosh, three and five dollar a day budget. After less than three days, it was getting smarter and better. And I think my cost for conversions that it was tracking had gone down to less than a fourth the price of what it was on day one. So, I think you’re exactly right with the way that pricing works. But one thing that I think is interesting that’s not measurable is I feel like after even a week and a half or so, the organic traffic, I think, is picking up more.
I’ve got to get into the details, but what I think has happened is I’ve hit some with the one video I’m promoting it hit this threshold, and now it’s like, oh, YouTube is just going to start showing it because it thinks it’s a good video now. And it made it over that pump to cut through the clutter. And now it’s basically free organic traffic because of the a little bit of… It’s almost like for the $100, a little push got it started, and then the ball got rolling down the hill, and now it’s going better. Is that something you see happen a lot with songs and artists?
John Gold:
Well, I mean, 31:13 free exposure from Any platform is one of the most valuable and exciting things we can get. You got this on YouTube, you got it on Spotify in a big way with the algorithmic playlist. Getting on Discover Weekly, getting on Release rate are obviously getting on Spotify radio. Those can drive a massive number of streams and exposure for the music. What they all have in common is that they are essentially for free because you’re not paying Spotify for any of those. The challenge always is cracking them in the first place and getting your music included in the first place. There are usually two aspects to getting this right and cracking this algorithm. The first one is there are certain popularity hurdles in the first place. So your song needs to reach a certain level of popularity to be considered for these playlists. And some of your listeners may have heard of the popularity score. This is an internal metric that Spotify measures. It goes from zero to 100, and it’s relative to all other songs on Spotify to tell you where you stand, or your song stands. It’s something you can look for free on the internet.
I mean, the popularity score for your own music. Hyped it tracks as well. Hyped it will give you your popularity score for a song you run ad campaign on as well. But you want to get your popularity score in a zone of 20 to 30. This is usually when you have a shot at the algorithmic playlists. That’s when Spotify takes notice. And that’s actually not that difficult. But the second part of this is that Spotify’s goal is to keep listeners on platform. The longer people listen to Spotify, the more likely are they to stay Spotify subscribers, and that’s essentially the number one goal of their business model. Spotify is really concerned about the quality of the music recommendations that they make. In order to make a good music recommendation, they need to have a good understanding of who likes what music. This is when ads really are at a huge advantage over other promotion platforms. Because the people who come and check out your music as a result of seeing your ad somewhere are already highly qualified, already diehard fans, and they present a very consistent picture to Spotify about who is highly engaged with your music.
Essentially, it allows Spotify to learn very well the listening habits and profile of the people who love your music. 34:00 If you run ads, Spotify knows exactly, Hey, those are the people who love Jason’s music. That means when Spotify now gives you the first shot at Discover Weekly on Spotify radio and puts you in these playlists, and they do it with this profile of the people that you attracted with ads in mind, you have a much higher probability that these placements are successful, and Spotify is going to scale this up. One of my tracks has been in Discover Weekly for close to two years, every week, every Monday, again and again and again and again. It’s just because Spotify has learned so well who loves that song, that there’s always new people that can put it in front of, always hitting that core audience, always getting positive feedback. Again, that’s very different from other promotion methods where you might get a hodgepodge of people listening to your music and Or you’re on a playlist that’s really diverse. Some people listen to the playlist because they love one style. A couple of people listen to the playlist because they love another style, and it’s all mixed. That makes it very hard for Spotify to figure out Who really loves that music? I would say that ads in general are a very powerful tool when it comes to cracking the algorithm. This is where you unlock just a lot of free streams and free exposure. I really love that benefit of it.
Jason Tonioli:
Well, John, I know you’re a busy guy and you got a lot going on. I would love to have you come back and maybe we dive in deeper. I don’t do that normally with these types of interviews, but I think you’ve got probably a wealth of information to share with people, especially the indie artists that are trying to figure out how to get their music in front of people. Like I said, I’ve been blown away with the results on such a low threshold of a budget. I love that it’s accessible to everybody if they want to just spend a few minutes. So again, I appreciate your time. I want to dive in on the next interview we do more into the success and what you define that is, but I know you’ve got to go. So thank you so much for your time today.
John Gold:
Jason, thank you. Really appreciate. Have a good one.