How Singer Songwriters Should Build a Personal Brand
In the year 2022, Luminate – a well established entertainment industry research & analytics firm – reported that, on average per day, over 120,000 songs were being uploaded to music streaming services globally. Calculated annually, they put the total volume of uploaded music at 34 million songs – a 12% increase over 2021. They predicted that in 2023, this total would rise to a staggering 43 million songs, and continue to soar as we approach the 2030s.
If there’s one thing to take away from these statistics is that the market for digital audio content, whether music, podcasts or fictional audio, is rapidly beginning to saturate. Content is readily available to consumers, meaning that it’s ever more important for artists to invest time and resources into building, maintaining and communicating a unique brand identity. But how exactly do you do that?
With 2025 well underway, we here at Future School wanted to dip our toes into the ocean of musical branding and share 3 tips for building and/or growing your artist identity over the next year (and beyond!). These recommendations will come in handy particularly for artists who are starting out, but may also be useful if you’re already in the business and looking for some fresh ideas for your musical creations. With that said, let’s get into it:
Future Tip #1: Focus on your story
If you’ve ever taken a marketing course, then you’ll know that marketers often describe branding as storytelling. This comparison bears some truth, but in our opinion, what ultimately matters more are the parts of your story that people remember, and even more so, the parts they don’t. Like with any other profession, impressions determine perception, so it’s crucial to cement in the minds of your listeners the closest story to the one you want them to know.
Bollywood (and Reddit) has shown that it can be difficult to change public perceptions once they’ve been cemented. This is why branding, in effect, is actually the art of controlling the residual perception of something in the minds of your listeners. Doing this means having a consistent story, and a set of guiding principles to ensure that you can adapt to an evolving market and still stay true to yourself.
For example, if you’re a singer-songwriter that primarily writes love songs, think about how your public attitude, and visual and written communication (i.e. – content and aesthetic) complement your thematic and musical content. Also consider how changes to any one of these may impact your fans’ perception of you.
Future Tip #2: Know your Audience
“Don’t sell oranges to someone looking for apples”. It may sound obvious, but market research is crucial for achieving success in commercial music. More than following trends, understanding how your fanbase interacts with your content and, more generally, what sort of content they enjoy, makes it easier to predict how receptive they will be to new ideas. This also allows you to identify new ways to reach them.
Audience research also involves identifying new audiences to share your music with. This could be as simple as identifying genres or sub-genres of music containing your style and sharing your music with their respective communities. You could even find new audiences by collaborating with fusion/mix-genre artists (to reach their audiences) or creating content/music that just so slightly caters to them.
Future Tip #3: The Attention Economy
Whether you like it or not, art, in the digisphere at least, is commercially akin to ‘content’. You, the musical content creators, are constantly in competition with other creators over a limited resource – your audience’s attention – and it’s the finiteness of this ‘attention’ that makes it pivotal for musicians to constantly innovate to keep their audiences engaged. This means creating (at least some) digital content that allows you to reach new audiences (“algorithm friendly”) while still catering to existing ones.
Achieving this, like in our previous tip, involves doing some research on your audience to understand their interests and behaviour and what other creators are doing to cater to them. This could be as simple as picking 5 artists who make music similar to yours (with a sizable social following) and studying the sort of online content they make, and how their audience engages with them. Based on your observations, think about:
- New content that you could create to engage your listeners.
- Existing ideas you could adapt with your unique style.
Conclusion
Given the speed at which new artists emerge into (and fade from) the limelight, being adaptive and receptive towards new ideas while still holding on to what makes you unique is the best approach to building an audience base that is loyal and also constantly growing. Personal branding is a process, one which takes time and consistent effort to get right, so make sure to invest time into crafting the brand identity best suited to your art and artistic persona!
