Every time you stream your favorite artist’s songs, you’re supporting them. This is a great first step to supporting your favorite aspiring music artists. However, supporting your favorite musicians goes beyond streaming their music. To create a longer term impact that can help them grow in a really difficult industry, along with streaming their music, there are tons of other ways you can support your favorite indie artists, with many being super simple.
How and Why to Support Your Favorite Aspiring Music Artists
Here is a list of ways to support your favorite music artists followed by more details of each one, including why it is helpful.
- Stream
- Share
- Save
- Attend and Interact
- Purchases
- Spread the word
Stream
The easiest and most common way to support your favorite aspiring music artists is to stream their music. There are many platforms for this including Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, their musician webpage (GLITAmusic.com), Apple Music, etc. The more plays your aspiring artist gets, the more recognition they receive from each of these platforms, which leads to other potential opportunities such as better algorithms, more recognition on partner sites, opportunities for collaborations, and even notices from record labels.
Share
Sharing your favorite aspiring artist’s songs with your friends and family and even your social media accounts exposes them to new audiences and helps them grow their fanbase. When you share, this also increases streaming, which increases all the opportunities mentioned in the previous “stream” section. There are all sorts of tools available to share music. For instance, on Spotify, you can click the three dots next to a song, album, or artist to reveal a menu (see image below). On this menu, click on share. There, you can share directly through your contacts or apps or you can copy the link and share the link.
Save
Saving new songs by aspiring artists gets overlooked sometimes. You can save songs on Spotify along with other music platforms. On Spotify, “saving” means that the song will come up in your rotation, thus improving the algorithm and increasing streams. Another way to save is through pre-saves on Spotify. You may notice that your favorite artists occasionally market new songs coming out on Spotify and a link to “pre-save” appears. What this means is that the song will automatically be added to your saved songs upon its release. This helps the artist by automatically saving the moment their song is released along with letting Spotify know that people are looking out for this particular artist’s new music.
Attend and Interact
While attending shows is the ideal way of supporting your favorite artists, sometimes this isn’t possible. If you aren’t able to attend live events and shows, you can still interact with aspiring artists by engaging with them online. This can be through their musician website or other social media platforms. You don’t have to have anything groundbreaking to say, just let them know what you like or simply that you liked their song or music. Interacting online helps by boosting the artist’s visibility because the algorithms love engagement. So, in turn, this pushes your favorite songs or artists and their content to a larger audience. Aside from algorithms and growth though, just letting artists know you like their stuff is encouraging, feels good, and is always appreciated.
Purchases
When you buy artist merchandise or pay for downloads, you’re not just paying for the items, you’re giving the artist financial help. Every sale helps them focus more of their time on music by providing some funds to support it. Even if it doesn’t seem like a lot, it makes a difference.
Spread the Word
Leaving reviews, sharing your favorite aspiring artist’s music, or sharing your experience on your own blog are all ways to spread the word. Along with all the ways already mentioned to share and interact, word of mouth is another powerful tool to help out emerging artists.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are tons of ways to help support your favorite aspiring musicians. While some of them seem small, such as just “liking” a song on social media, they aren’t small. One “like” is a really big deal for artists starting off. Imagine if ten people all did one time thing by “liking” a song they enjoyed listening to. Sure, ten doesn’t seem like a big deal but that is where it starts. Even the small steps can make big impacts.
~GLITA
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