Andy Parker:
With Spotify, I think it's something like 40,000 songs every day released on Spotify. So for your noise to be heard as such, you've got to stick your head above the parapet somehow. You've got to stand out from the noise there. There's different ways to do that, but I think you've just got to make sure everything you do is a very certain quality or you've got a story to tell.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution of today's music industry and this is your imitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.
All right. I'm excited to be here today with Andy Parker. Andy is a musician and a music-obsessed industry professional. He runs the artist services team at Music Gateway, which is a full service digital music distribution platform. He works to develop the teams and the processes for artists to be able to fully realize their mission statement, which is to empower independent artists, which is awesome.
We were just talking a little bit backstage just about how special of a time it is right now be an independent musician, where in this new model, the music industry, you don't necessarily have to have a major record label to have millions of fans, but you can't really have a sustainable, really great career, a great living independently as a musician. And so I'm super excited to connect with him today to talk about, as an artist who's starting out, what are the different options in terms of how you can grow your fan base in an authentic way, how to avoid fake bots and fake followers and do things in a way that's really grassroots and authentic. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Andy Parker:
You're welcome. I'm pleased to be here. Pleased to be here.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah, and I think I can just bottle up your voice of that accent and just listen to it as I'm falling asleep. It's fantastic. So to start out with, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story and just how you got started with Music Gateway.

Andy Parker:
Yes. I was a musician first and foremost between the ages of about 15 till I hit my 40s, tried to make it in music through the various routes, got close a couple of times but never had any kind of success. And then as you hit 40, you need to get your life in order. And so I got various jobs. I worked in music stores for a number of years, managing big music stores, places that would sell vinyls, CDs, videos, et cetera.
Then for my sins, I went into car sales for a number of years and then I came back out of that, went into a different industry and then this opportunity with Music Gateway came up where it just seemed to it seemed to be the right kind of synergy for everything that I'd done previously, because I've built teams, I've done sales, and I'm music obsessed. So it was a way to go in through the door and to just do something that feels really worthwhile. And I do music for a living nowadays, albeit not creating it. I still create my spare time is logic and me and the teams are able to help independent artists. As you say, we want to empower them to get to the next steps on the ladder.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Yeah, that's an interesting background, going from car sales as part of your journey. And honestly, there's definitely some, the traditional, I don't know, cliche that you think of as a car salesman is a bad car salesman, where it's like they're over the top and they're trying to whatever. But I've really come to respect sales as a very ... I don't know what the right word, almost sacred responsibility and benefit. You can provide so much value by being a good salesperson. It depends on what you're selling, I guess. If you truly believe in what you're selling and you're offering it in a way to the right person, then your ability to sell something to them can change their life for the better. And a lot of times we really need that, someone to hold our hand and help guide us towards making that leap of faith and that decision.
So I have a ton of respect for sales went done in the right way. And it's something that I think is a really healthy perspective to bring to musicians, because traditionally we're so anti sales or anti business, we want to be authentic with our music and might not fully recognize the benefits of sales and really kind of taking that approach to building a sustainable and thriving music career. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that perspective and what you've noticed when it comes to the artists that you're working with. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see them struggling with when it comes to growing their music career?

Andy Parker:
Well, what we are trying to do with Music Gateway, and more and more we're being more successful with it, is trying to, as you were just saying with sales, trying to take the transactional element out of it and have real live calls with these people. We're picking up the phone, they've come to their music, we're picking up the phone, speaking to them, listening, which to me is the most important thing with sales, listening to understand what it is they're trying to achieve, what budget they might have, what their goals and aspirations are. And because we offer playlisting services, we offer radio, digital marketing and press, there's a number of areas we can place an artist.
But I think one of the biggest things that independent artists get wrong is the fact that promo costs money. They think you're signed to a major label. They go, well, if I'm signed to a record label, I don't have to pay for my promotion or the advertising in a magazine, whatever it might be. And you actually have to point out that Ed Sheeran and every CD that's ever been pressed with Ed Sheeran's name on it, he's paid for. And often he's paid with a smaller percentage than he's getting off the albums with the old model of the record companies as you well know. So the first thing for musicians to realize it is they have to invest. They have to invest in their art and their craft to get them heard. You're not going to be heard unless you put the effort into it, as well as finding some finance to help your campaign in the first place. Secondly, I would say one of the biggest things we come across is independent musicians without realistic goals.
So they'll speak to our team and they'll say, I want to be featured in press and I want to be in Billboard Magazine or the main Rolling Stone. And you have to point out that it's not going to happen. The best one in the world, it's not going to happen at this point. It's about those baby steps to the next levels. So they can get a bigger follow in. Spotify's huge for independent artists, their follower accounts, things like that. So it may be the number of streams they want or they want guaranteed Spotify editorial playlists. It might be that they want to be played on Radio 1 in the UK, which is impossible if you are not a major artist. So I think a lot of the things are just realistic goals and understanding that it's not going from the first step on the ladder to the 10th step. It's about building it and growing it in everything that they're doing.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that's a really valuable perspective, I think, a good reminder. What comes to mind as you described that is this analogy I think about all the time when it comes to growth and investment and how important it is that something doesn't come from nothing. That's just the way it lands. Something doesn't come for nothing and your music career is like planting a seed and nurturing it into a tree, and that takes time, and energy, and nurturing, and investment and fertilizer and inputting it, and rarely you might have some of those cases where it's like bamboo and just shoots up really fast. But normally, what it looks like is more along the lines of the seed starts to blossom and there's a little seed, you start to see some results, but it's not like a giant tree immediately. And that can be discouraging. It's like, oh I'm just a little tree.
Well, that's progress and you can see it's growing, moving the right direction. And yeah, it's going to take that investment to get to a point where the fruit starts to start to fall. And it does kind of take that right mindset to have that longer term vision. So here's a question for you. How can someone who's listening to this know whether the investments that they're making are paying off in the right way, versus when it's time to pivot or when it's not really working out and they should try a different strategy?

Andy Parker:
We've got lots of artists who we call MG Artists as a music goer because they've come back to us for at least a second time. Some people are on their third, fourth release with us, which is really good. And we can see the traction. Each campaign, as long as it's being done, the gain in traction each time, we'll have that kind of waterfall strategy of if they've released a track out onto Spotify and it's doing well and it's picked up traction and the monthly followers and listeners have gone up, then to get the next track out as quickly as possible before all those kind of stats there. The main thing that a lot of people will spend like 50 bucks to get themselves 100,000 streams. And that's really the pitfalls. You've got to spend. You've got to spend good money.
Our campaigns aren't ridiculously expensive, but they're not because we get involved in every aspect and every single part of it. An intro call after the campaign signed, a midpoint call during the campaign, the networks we built with people. We are not that cheap option that people try and get. Unfortunately, a lot of independent artists will use bots because they'll just see numbers and they'll say look, I can get 100,000 streams or 10,000 streams or whatever it may be for a certain amount of money, a very small amount of money. So they think, well why should I go with a music promotion company that's charge maybe 10 times more than that for 10,000 streams potentially, or 5,000 streams? Well, the difference is you, if you've got 100,000 streams from bots, you've got no real engaged audience.

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Andy Parker:
And it's very easy to see follow accounts don't go up. It's one of the first things we do if we'll, we'll check someone's Spotify and if one of their tracks has got, I don't know, let's say 100,000 streams again, but they've got 120 monthly listeners. You know straight away that maybe unsuspectingly, but they've paid for botted streams, so it doesn't really help. It doesn't help their fan base, doesn't help their follow account. It hurts the Spotify algorithm that you want to sit in nicely. And ultimately your songs can be taken down by Spotify. And we have had a few examples where people have come to us, but they've dealt with other promotion companies where those tracks are completely taken down from Spotify.
So when do they know if it's working or not? Well, we only know with our long term artists that we are seeing traction, get more and more on each release. They're being featured in more publications and higher end publications compared to what they were. Their streams are going up, their follow accounts are going up and their pre saves and things like that for their tracks are increasing as well. So I don't think there's a point where someone thinks now's the time to just quit it, unless just their music isn't connecting with anyone. But that's very rare these days with so many genres and so many options and weird and wonderful ways that music's placed into people's ears now.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense that you need to be careful about the strategies that you're using. Especially nowadays, it seems like one of the byproducts of social media and the internet is ... I've heard it called comparison-itis. But looking at people's follower accounts especially, and feeling like our self worth is connected to our numbers of followers or number of monthly listeners or streams. And that can be challenging. It can make you feel like you're not good enough, just because you're looking at and you're comparing yourself to someone else that's millions. And that can lead to wanting to fill that gap, fill that void with fake botted followers or play counts just to artificially boost things.
It sounds like what you're saying is that the downside of doing that is that you're not really building an engaged relationship with real fans when you do that and the actual engagement is off. So you might see only a few hundred monthly listeners, but streams and most people that are in the industry can kind of see through that. And you might even, in worst case, get kicked off of Spotify and lose your songs because you're using botted streams. So how do you recommend that people can avoid choosing the wrong services? Are there any kind of telltale signs that you look for when it comes to choosing the right service that's going to be legitimate, that's going to minimize big streams?

Andy Parker:
Yeah, definitely. It's where you are guaranteed a certain amount of streams. Now we do it slightly differently. We've built up relationships with a network of really good playlist curators across the globe, all kinds of different genres and their playlists are policed, if you like. So we are constantly looking to see if there's any strange activity in these playlists, follow accounts suddenly increase in one day after another by 10,000 or dip in the other way.
So we know that we can get around X amount of streams for a certain track, but it's not guaranteed. And we will sometimes say the lower amount we feel we can get or we can give our artists a good indicator, according to the playlist that we're going to use, about the number of streams that they can get. And hopefully we exceed their expectations because that's been working really well. So we will give an approximate amount of streams, but if you ever see guaranteed amounts of streams for any form of money, then steer way clear because it will be botted. It's the only way someone can guarantee an X amount of streams.

Michael Walker:
Interesting. Yeah, so one telltale giveaway is if there's guaranteed amounts of streams, then usually the strategy to do that is using bot traffic in order to generate those streams, versus if you're using it the proper way to do it, which is by building a relationship with these curators, then it's not guaranteed anything. But you can have approximate counts based on the network of curators`.

Andy Parker:
And the genre it may be. We'll often pass the track out first to the network and see what their response is and people will say yeah, I'll put that on my playlist list. So we can work it out to some extent.

Michael Walker:
Cool. No, that's really interesting. The whole model of playlist curators and that network is pretty interesting. So just to get it put into perspective, maybe you can share a little bit about your process for building those relationships and the legwork that you really had to put into building that network. So two things. One, if there's someone here right now who ... Yeah, I always look at it this way when it comes to investing, you need to invest something to build a successful career and you're either investing your time or your money. And if you don't have money then you should probably be investing your time and ideally investing your time in a way that's going to help you make money, then you can buy back your time.
But if someone just has a lot of time right now then and they're willing to really hustle their butts off and try to build relationships with either fans and or playlist curators in the right way, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. And then just to give a general appreciation for how you built your network of these playlist curators and what it would look like if they were going to take that energy and do it on their own, what would that look like?

Andy Parker:
I think building relationships with curators, the independent curators, is hard if you're just doing it yourself. Through your Spotify for artists, you can put your track up for editorial placement. If the track's not out yet, it's coming out in 14 to seven days time and you can get placed on those big editorial placements that a couple of weeks ago we got five of our artists on editorial placements. That's a big win for us because they're the things that people want. But I think because Music Gateway is known, it's a worldwide thing, a lot of people reach out to us, want to work with us. They realize there's opportunities there, financial opportunities for themselves.
A lot of it has come from people reaching out to us. We actually ask for, on our Music Gateway platform, we actually ask curators to reach out to us and then we will check, that's what I was saying, we will check the way their playlists are run and if they're big enough, because we don't want people with playlists who have only got 200 monthly listeners or signed up for. So some of the bigger ones we'll have conversations with and you just find it starts to snowball. But it has taken us a lot of time to find the right networks of people. But yeah, I don't think people could get on the same playlist as we get them on. Now if they try to approach these people themselves, I think that's where a party ourselves comes in.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that's super interesting. It kind of reminds me of the music licensing world and having a publisher that technically you could try to build these relationships with supervisors by yourself and you could try to reach out and connect with them, but these are people that are very busy and often will look to these publishers, which are a filter or a bridge that's more vetted that can aggregate those distributions.
So it sounds like the way that you operate is really similar to a publisher, in the sense that you save a ton of time for artists trying to reach out and build these connections with playlists independently. And because of that, it's also helped you to build a network with these playlist curators and they'll even reach out to you because they know that you have a network. And so you do provide this value in terms of connecting artists with the right playlist curators in a way that's going to save a lot of time versus trying to reach out directly to these playlist curators and it might be hard to get on their radar otherwise.

Andy Parker:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny you mentioned the sync and the music licensing because Music Gateway started off as a kind of sync model. We have got placements with all kinds of things from Netflix to Universal. We've got some good things and music supervisors like working with us. So it's mainly on our online Music Gateway, so not part of the music promotions as such. Opportunities will be pitched that our guys have. They've got the relationships with music supervisors. Music supervisors will reach out, say we want a '70s pop type sound for this thing coming up, and we'll put those opportunities on our platform.
So members that are subscribers, they can actually actively pitch to those opportunities and we've had a lot of success in that area. And the reason again that the music supervisors like working with a company like ourselves is because it's easy clearance on the tracks, because the rights holders are normally one person. So if they hear a great piece of music that they know will fit, they know pretty much that it can get cleared straight away. It's not going to be bogged down for months and months on end through various legalities. So yeah, we're doing well in the sync space as well.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. That's awesome. I didn't realize that there was a sync component to it, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense too. Be curious to hear your take on, I think a lot of times independent artists feel like they are missing out or they might not fully appreciate the benefits of being a fully independent artist. And one of the things you just mentioned is how if you have 100% ownership of your rights and it's so easy for you to be able to take your assets and be able to provide service with it like that. So I'd love to hear your take on the pros and cons of being an independent artist versus signing to a record label.

Andy Parker:
Well, I think the old model was you would be advanced X amount of pounds. What they didn't tell you was you had to pay that X amount of pounds back by the percentage of your cut from CD sales. So the record company could have broken even years ago, but you are still paying off your advance. The management side of it, they're taking their 15, 20%. You owe a lot of people, you're spitting it out to loads of different people and you are not left with much. Whereas like you just said, Michael, the independent artists, they can maintain 100% if that's what they want at this point in their career. Obviously if they get to a point where a manager's going to come in and it's a really good manager or there is a label opportunity, then they're going to have to give slices of that pie away.
But at this point in their career, they don't need to give anything away. The other thing we do is artist development. We work with a group of artist development managers who have worked with some of the big names out there from Elton John, Metallica, Emeli Sandé, Biffy Clyro, and some of them are still involved in working with these people. So we will set up sessions, so it will be online, but it will be like an hour with an artist and an artist manager and they might pay for three sessions and it might just be about branding or whatever it might be, but they can get this advice from seasoned professionals.
Again, it's a one off payment, they're not giving away 20% of anything to get advice from people who have managed some big artists. They're getting it there and then that's it. They're still maintaining 100%. So I think at this kind of level, the artists that we see, there's no reason to give any percentage away. Everything we provide for artists, we try and make it so they retain everything, all their rights. We don't take any of an artist's rights at any point in the journey, whatever service they may be using.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. That's super cool. And yeah, it definitely seems like there's a movement happening towards valuing consulting and coaching and it is amazing that you can pay for advice or pay for consulting or coaching and not give up 20% of your rights, but be able to access 30 plus years of wisdom and experience. Pretty dang special.

Andy Parker:
It's really valuable. Those kind of services, really is.

Michael Walker:
Cool. So what are some of the other biggest mistakes that you see artists making when it comes to ... Let's maybe talk a little bit about, so you mentioned that there is this phase at the beginning where you need to be able to invest and be willing to be patient as the seed blossoms and grows into the tree. So what did it look like in terms of bridging the gap and when does it become sustainable in and of itself so they can continue to invest and focus more time on the music?

Andy Parker:
I think that's one of the biggest things for an independent artist. It is that understanding how much you've got to spend of your own money in the first place. And really the only time you're not going to be spending your own money is when you get that investment from someone being, that be an investment from a label or a development tool with a label, or it might just be an investor who believes in you. But right up until that, and obviously you're still going to be paying that money back over time, but you might have some bigger budgets to work with for that next stage of your career. We've had a couple of artists who have been picked up by management and labels off the back of the work that we've done with them. There's so many artists out there. That's probably another thing to mention is that with Spotify, I think it's something like 40,000 songs every day, or at least on Spotify.
So for your noise to be heard, as such, you've got to stick your head above the parapet somehow. You've got to stand out from the noise there. There's different ways to do that, but I think you've just got to make sure everything you do is of a certain quality or you've got to a story to tell, a great story with not so great music or amazing music with not such a great story. They'll both do. But I think it's just important to know that until you get to that stage or until you're selling out shows and you're selling your merchandise at shows, if you're serious about making it, whatever that means nowadays in music, whatever it means to you, however you define making it, in these first stages you've got to invest. You really have, because otherwise you won't be heard above all the other noise.

Michael Walker:
Totally. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a hard pill to swallow sometimes, especially for artists who may not have a budget, or may not have really resources, or come from humble beginnings or means. And yeah, I think that one thing to take away that you're saying isn't necessarily that you can't be successful unless you have money or unless you come from resources. There are ways to invest without having money to start out with, but it does mean that you're going to be investing a lot more of your time.
Maybe it would be helpful to figure out other ways you can raise money. You can fundraise money, either from family members or from finding an investor that really believes in you, or you could do something crazy like what my band did with tour hacking and actually walk up to fans waiting in lines for shows and sell CDs or people face to face, do door to door sales essentially. But there's always a way, there's always a way, but it doesn't come just by itself. You do need to invest either your time or money.

Andy Parker:
We are aware that there are some artists out there who are fantastic artists who for whatever reason don't have budgets. We've had a couple of artists who have, because we get a lot of music every day, a lot of music, we hear a lot. And we've had a couple of artists who have blown our minds and then when we've spoken to them, they haven't got much budget, but we will want to work with them and we will do whatever we can to work with them because it is good for us. If we are seeing an artist as well who eventually does get to that next level and is signed up or is successful beyond what your independent artist is at this point, then that's good for us. It's good for them to say it was Music Gateway who helped me on my journey and invested in me. The other thing we'll do is a couple of times a year we'll run competitions where we'll give away free music promotion. So that gives those artists that chance to get invest mass rather than the other way around.

Michael Walker:
That's awesome. That's so great that you do that. Yeah, no, for our band, we first started out we definitely didn't have any budget to work with and it was because of acts of kindness or acts of service, like what you talked about, that we were able to get our head start. I remember we were playing a bunch of Battle of the Bands and we won. There was one Battle of the Bands that was like $12,000 in rewards and that was huge for us back then. I remember getting our first trailer by approaching local businesses in the small town of Vermillion, South Dakota, which is like 2000 people lived there. And there's these local businesses that we approached and we offered to bring them on as a sponsor and put a sticker of their logo on our band's trailer.
We paid the $2,500 trailer by getting fundraising from local businesses and getting their stickers in the trailer, which arguably, I may or may not have returned their investment. But so cool that you guys are able to give back and service artists by doing contests and having giveaways and helping out artists no matter where they're at.
So, hey man, it's been awesome connecting to you today and thank you for taking the time to share your experience and wisdom around specifically how to invest in the right way. Because the last thing you want is to invest in a fake bot service that could get you taken down of all your platforms and then that's worst case scenario and best case scenarios that you'd be messing up the algorithm and screwing up your numbers. So super valuable. And for anyone who's listening to this right now who would like to connect more or learn more about what you offer at Music Gateway, what's the best step for them to take to learn?

Andy Parker:
Just literally just go on the website, which is musicgateway.com one word. So yeah, that's it. Everything's on there, links to all the things we've talked about, lots of frequently asked questions as well. We do loads of blogs on there. We're full of great advice. We've got free tools on there where you don't need to be a member to use free mastering, things like that. So yeah, just musicgateway.com, jump on there and you'll find everything in the one place.

Michael Walker:
All right, beautiful. Well, like always we'll put the link in the show notes for easy access and thanks again for taking the time. It's been a lot of fun talking with you today.

Andy Parker:
And yourself. Thanks a lot. Thanks, man.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us, that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music careers to the next level. It's time to be a modern musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.