4theheads

Let’s be honest…

Although the course of the music industry has been nothing but phenomenal for new, fresh-faced independent artists, perhaps such as yourself, is the way of being heard nowadays how you want to go around it? Thousands of influential artists that have shaped avenues of sound have been exposed to the world by Tik Tok and other social media, such as Lil Nas X, Bbno$, and Kaash Paige which was noted by Solenne Ducasse on PENTOS. It’s now affordable for most anyone to show off their musical prowess to the world and get heard!

However!

I think some will agree with me when I say that the way of going around to getting your music heard may be not what represents you! The downside of the potential meteoric rise of anyone who tries is that people don’t get recognition based solely on their artistic performance anymore. Artists are now content creators. Making content for fun or to promote your song or yourself, in general, is good and encouraged, however, artists have lost their desire to make just good, quality music, and instead have been reduced to flushing out content constantly to hold on to their sliver of fame, even if the content is just bad! A.K.A. quantity over quality. 

Don’t get me wrong.

We’re not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, however lots of artists, perhaps including yourself, don’t want to buy into the normality of social media marketing that is set in place, some want to keep it true to the music, and to that, we say, bravo… oh yes, and we would like to help. 

Why us?

Yes, there are A LOT of other options out there for getting heard, whether it be from an IG account with lots of followers, Spotify curators, Spotify’s own playlists, and more. These options can lead to great success for the indie artist, however, this, in a lot of cases, is a rare outcome. Back in time, sure indie artists could be scammed out by fake record labels, fake bloggers wanting to “share your story,” and fake managers as noted by Michael Peres on his article in Grit Daily. But the most conniving and stealthlike scammers can be more casual, such as an IG account.

This ain’t the first rodeo.

There are a lot of people on social media who come across as professional, as sometimes even a business, they’ll offer you opportunities to get on “booming Spotify playlists.” But many times, these so-called curators, have made playlists that run off of fake streamers. Fake-streamers can be also known as bot-streamers, fake listens by a kid who added you on a playlist for $50, clicked shuffle play on his laptop, tilted the screen down, and drove to school. Either that or you don’t even get any robot streams and the whole thing was fake! But alas, you already PayPal’d the ‘curator’ and you can’t get your money back. Gladly, although it happens a lot, a good amount of the time simple research will show if the playlists/accounts are unnatural or fake. 

The repercussions of fake listens.

Fake streams are bad for both you and the rest of the independent music community. For starters, “it steals rightful revenue from other independent artists” (SymphonicBlog, 2021). Artists that are accruing fake listens are stealing away money from actual talent and hard workers trying to live off of decent tactics, “streaming services operate with a system called a “shared pool” model” (SymphonicBlog, 2021). This means that streaming services divvy up total streaming revenue and share based on a percentage of total streams from each artist separately. Rolling Stone said that “fake streams could be costing artists $300 million a year” stated by Elias Leight. It is mostly bad for you, however, if you were to try to purchase fake streams. Firstly, you are just wasting your time and money! From personal experience, I have had fake streams before on one of my old releases “2020,” of course was unintentional and was from a shady IG account when I first attempted to market my music. I got around 2,000 listens per song, however, it was obvious that they were bot streams due to the fact that I didn’t accrue barely anymore from listeners of that playlist when I got booted off of it. It’s nonorganic marketing that will only give fake status. Secondly, it can lead to your account getting deactivated if it goes too far, which no one wants.

How we do things,

Not only are we real, independent artist supporters, but we also make sure to force organic marketing practices, which is the only correct way to build a fan base, the first stepping stone in a musician’s journey. As explained earlier, inorganic marketing is things such as fake listens. How we market is putting our playlists in the ears of actual listeners willing to make meaningful connections with new, underground artists, that are organic. Through this, these actual listeners may start promoting your song to their friends, this is called word-of-mouth marketing, another very natural tactic that can occur. 

Unlike others,

Yes, of course, there are other curators that do this and have organic marketing strategies, but due to the rareness it is quite expensive and most of them have it on a month-to-month pay cycle between them and the independent artist. This is due to the fact that lots of them have only a couple of playlists that are actually striving and getting real listens, so to keep the competitive nature going and to lead to more sales, they cut off people monthly. We are planning to have more than a couple of playlists that we try to promote equally and just as much. Once you pay the initial payment to get on a playlist (based on merit and sound) you only have to ask and pay a small fee to hop back on that playlist again the next month and so on and so forth.

Like a record label… but not!

We are most certainly not going to strip you away of your creative freedoms, status freedoms (how you want to present yourself to the media), and other quintessential factors that independent artist stays indie for. We are like a record label in certain ways that matter for the indie artist, we aren’t paying you like a record label, but we are naturally building connections between you and your viewers, and you and the other artists that are involved with the 4theheads community. We will promote you like a record label would as well, and on top of all that, there are no binding contracts, of course, it’s a community that just has the best qualities of a record label. 

Although we can’t organically build you a whole fan base without using the normal tactics of today (Tik Tok) on our own, our organic playlist placemen, Instagram promotion, and our growing connections you can use will boost those numbers of your fan base, 100% guaranteed.