Michael Walker: YEAAAH! All right. Excited to be here today with my new friend, Giovanni Bottan—or Gio for short. Gio produced and toured with bands for many years, touring full-time. Then he went on to build a thriving music marketing agency, and now he helps lead Smart Noise, which is a cutting-edge tech startup revolutionizing how music connects with its audience.

I’m really excited to have him on the podcast today to talk a little bit more about how, in today’s day and age where we have the internet, AI, and technology to help us connect with our fans, we can actually use these tools to build a community. And how do we also use them to make sustainable income with our music, so you don’t have to rely on an external job or something else to pay the bills? Gio, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Giovanni Bottan: Absolutely, man. Thanks a lot. And you made me sound way cooler than I actually am, so thank you.

Michael: I don’t think so at all. I mean, I think we’re just scratching the surface. But Gio, to kick things off, for anyone meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit more about your background in terms of how you came to be working with Smart Noise?

Giovanni: Yeah. So, I mean, I’ve been making music my whole life. I was born an emo kid. I played in bands since I was 12 or something like that. I toured, slept on floors—all that kind of stuff. So, I’ve been in the music space pretty much forever.

Michael: Real quick, Gio, when you say emo kid—that was like my childhood. I’m just curious, what are some of the bands that you grew up listening to?

Giovanni: Oh, I got The Used, Funeral for a Friend, Escape the Fate, All Time Low, and on.

Michael: Nice.

Giovanni: Yeah.

Michael: Dude, one of our first tours—so I toured full-time for about 10 years as well, so I can definitely relate to the intro of your story—but one of our first breakout tours was with All Time Low. That was like a dream come true for us because we grew up listening to them as well. Sorry, continue.

Giovanni: No, I could talk about this for hours. But yeah, man, while I was doing the band thing, I started working with bands in my studio. I was doing production, mixing, mastering—all that stuff. I did that full-time for four or five years.

Then, basically, every band that came to the studio would say, “Okay, the project sounds great now, but do you have any tips on how we can get more people to listen to it?” At the beginning, I was like, “I have no idea. That’s not my job.” But because I generally like to learn about stuff, I started helping them.

Fast forward to 2020, I launched a music marketing agency. It worked with hundreds of artists—from indie artists to a few major label artists as well. A few years ago, to scratch our own itch, we launched a music tech company called Smart Noise. Think of it like HubSpot for music marketing—things like ad campaigns, fan data collection, fan data management, pre-sales, marketing, all that stuff.

Michael: Cool. I was actually just browsing the website right as you were talking about it. Smart Noise looks really cool. As someone who has experience on both the music side and the digital marketing side, and now creating a software tech company, it’s funny, dude—I feel like in some ways you’re literally describing a mirror image of my life.

I’ve been on the same path. We have a software-as-a-service platform that we’re developing right now. It’s very serendipitous timing. As someone who has experienced those different worlds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on the current state of the music industry. What do you see as some of the biggest challenges indie music artists are facing right now? Then we can have a conversation about how to help them overcome those.

Giovanni: Absolutely. So, I don't know what your point of view is on this exactly, but as someone who has been running an agency for the past four or five years, most of the artists I’ve talked to—and most people in general—I basically told them an agency is probably not the best thing to pursue right now.

I would say that artists right now are really starving for sustainability—being able to actually make a living from their music and their existing fan base, whether it’s 100 people or 15,000 people. I see that changing super fast. I’m seeing a lot of artists—because, you know, we have the agency, and we can serve artists with a higher budget to invest—but at the same time, I think, "Well, this is great," and, you know, that’s good.

But the industry I envision is one where most artists can sustain themselves with tools and resources, thriving on a lower promotional budget. That way, they can focus more on making music and monetizing the existing fan base they already have. It’s weird, man. Even from an agency standpoint, having to wait six months, one year, or more to recoup the budget. As someone who is selling the service, that’s great. But at the same time, we’re in the music industry because we love working with music and artists.

After a while, especially when it’s an artist that just has $1,000 to spend for an entire year, I start to think, "I don’t know, man. I wish there was a better way to do this." That’s why I started building Smart Noise. I’m basically trying to build the same things we were doing manually as an agency, but for like one-tenth of the cost—or even less. So, that’s kind of a rant in a way, but yeah.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. It sounds like one of the biggest issues is around monetization and reaching fans as an independent artist. Part of what led you to build this platform was wanting to create something that’s more accessible to everyone—not just for people who have the budget to work with an agency.

I’m curious, from your experience running the agency, you brought up such a good point. What other industries are there where you have to wait six months after the game to see how it pans out?

Giovanni: None, man. We are—yeah, because there is no other industry where you hire an agency, and you—well, maybe with things like SEO, where you know it’s going to take three, four, or six months to see results. But at the same time, in 90 percent of other services and businesses—whether it’s a bank or a music artist—if you want to do it seriously, you are a business.

It’s kind of insane that we still need to wait six months or more to recoup that budget. Partially, it’s because the industry is kind of broken in some ways. We’re trying to rebuild it in a better way, but yeah, that’s what I’m focusing on right now.

Michael: I’m curious. In that world where for a lot of traditional revenue streams, you have to wait a long time to recoup the investment, what have you found that’s working right now for artists? Is it still going down that path, or have you seen artists doing creative things to monetize that are getting them better results than before?

Giovanni: Yeah, so I see two things right now. One is the type of artists who, because they are posting once a day on IG or TikTok, eventually grow to a point where organically they get traffic to DSPs and get to 500,000 monthly listeners or more. Then they make a very good income off of that.

But it’s a double-edged sword, where it’s definitely achievable, but it takes a long, long time. If you’re running ads, for instance, you get results much quicker, but you buy it with money. When you do organic content, you buy your way with time. So, would you rather wait two years, or would you rather wait six months and pay for ads?

These are the two scenarios that I see right now. It’s a much bigger topic as well, but these two macros are what I see.

In terms of how artists are monetizing their audience—mostly online, because obviously there are gigs, sync licensing, and a lot of other things artists can do—one thing I’ve been doing personally and trying to help artists put in place is some sort of system where you can drive awareness, grow your socials with ads, and instead of waiting three or six months to recoup that budget with Spotify or Apple Music payouts, you have a system in place to sell stuff to your fans.

It still blows my mind how artists with 500,000 monthly listeners—or even more—don’t have merchandise or some sort of community thing, like something to sell. It’s mind-blowing to me.

On the other hand, the artists who do understand this—who realize, “Okay, I’m getting traffic to my DSPs and socials, whether it’s with organic content, ads, or influencer marketing”—can put a system in place. Instead of just waiting for the results to trickle in, they can retarget those fans with ads and show them a specific offer to join their private community.

In that private community, they can give fans access to music before it comes out, merchandise, or something like that. These artists are the ones nobody talks about. Everyone likes the viral TikTok superstar, but nobody sees the 15,000 monthly listeners artist selling $5,000 of merch every month.

And that’s, I believe, much more achievable. If you can serve a very specific type of client, know their needs, and understand what they want, you can tailor your music, style, and messaging to that niche. It’s easier to get 200 people who genuinely love what you do and are more than willing to give you $9 a month for a private community.

I’m much more focused on this type of stuff because, I mean, going viral is something you can’t control. It’s something only 1% of artists can actually achieve. It looks like every artist can go viral—and yes, you can—but you only see the headlines and the surface.

You don’t see the artists making $5,000 a month because they have 150 people in their private community and sell 50 T-shirts every month. That’s what I’m really passionate about.

Michael: Good stuff. Yeah, for some reason, as you’re describing that, in my mind, I was visualizing an iceberg. What you're saying sounds like there are things on the surface that are easier to pay attention to because they’re visible to everyone.

So things like your follower count or your monthly listeners—these are things that almost act like social symbols. But what's underneath the surface in a lot of cases is significantly different. One example is an artist who actually has a business where they’re making offers to true fans. They're building real depth, like having a root system on a tree or a thick foundation underneath the iceberg.

Whereas, some of these flashy things, like a 500,000 monthly listeners count, if they don’t have an offer they’re making, they might be making substantially less than someone with 5,000 or 10,000 monthly listeners who actually has true fans they’re connected with.

Giovanni: Yeah, there are so many artists. I think there’s one example I can’t remember the name of right now, but it was a big artist with 1.2 million monthly listeners who wasn’t able to sell five tickets. I understand how important that is. Obviously, I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about Spotify numbers because they do matter. But at the same time, if that’s the only thing you’re focusing on—especially when you understand how the unit economics work behind it and how revenue is actually driven by different mediums like DSPs, merch, and tickets—I don’t see how you shouldn’t consider adding these things into the equation.

You can still post once a day, still do everything you’re doing, but why not have one offer? “Hey, join my private community for $9 a month and get access to XY.” This is literally something that would allow you to keep investing every month, not seeing any return, at least breaking even, and not spending anything out of pocket. Your existing fan base could be paying for your music growth.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, the next question I have is around the logistics of these types of campaigns. One thing you mentioned earlier was how you can get wherever you want to go by either investing the time or the money.

You can keep posting every day on social media, and eventually, if you’re consistent and your quality gets better, you hit that point where you get a return, but you're investing time versus investing money in ads and getting a faster return.

I’m curious, what does the next step look like in terms of the campaigns you've run to get people off platforms like Meta, TikTok, or YouTube and actually have them join your platform, email list, or community? What does the actual signup process look like in your experience?

Giovanni: Okay, so there’s this one campaign I’ve run for five hours now, and this is actually something I’ve done to understand exactly what works, so we can build it as a feature for Smart Noise next year. That’s actually super exciting. But the model that’s been working—and I think you’re aware of this—is the free plus shipping model. Do you know how that works?

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, Facebook is great. I’d love to hear what you found from your experience with that campaign. There are different kinds of free plus shipping offers, like CDs and other things.

Giovanni: I’ve done this exact same thing on purpose for five different patterns because I wanted to say, "Okay, what if I do the exact same thing? How replicable can it be?" So all that was, was basically, you got a CD for free. But the thing that makes the whole difference here is it’s not completely free. People can choose to pay zero, but they can also choose to pay whatever they want—5, 2, 7, 10, 50, whatever. And then before they either pay zero, five, or ten, they can also add another item before they place the order. So I think like a t-shirt or a separate CD, you know, and that is something they actually pay for—5 to 25-ish.

Then, on the thank-you page is some sort of main, bigger offer. "Thank you so much for supporting my band, my project, or whatever. We would like to offer you an exclusive bundle that’s a t-shirt, vinyl, hoodie—whatever that might be—for $55." That’s sort of the different pieces. I also tried with two different offers after the main ones for two upsells. And that’s kind of the thing—I wouldn’t go with more than two because then it looks very exhausting for people, getting offer after offer.

But that’s been working pretty well, and that’s what has allowed all these five bands to essentially break even and profit in anywhere between three and six days. They also had email sequences going out, so when people buy this offer, after three or four days, they get sent other offers, whether it’s, “Hey, we’re on tour, and I noticed you’re in the same city,” or, “Hey, we just released this new t-shirt. Because you bought this five days ago, here’s a 30% coupon.”

This entire process has been working pretty well. But at the same time, there are a lot of artists who don’t have merch, don’t have a CD, don’t have a t-shirt. What I saw working pretty well, too—which is something I started testing two weeks ago—is a very simple paywall, like a landing page, where you don’t have merch, you don’t have anything, but you say, “Hey, I’m releasing a new song in three weeks. You can pay what you want right now, whether it’s 1, 5, or 10, and you get to listen to it before it comes out. You also get access to my private group, and you also have a 10% coupon if you want to get something from my merch store.”

And that’s also working very well because you don’t need merch, you don’t need pretty much anything, and that’s very easy to set up. That usually works better with warm audiences. So if you already have an existing fan base, that works pretty well.

The free plus shipping CD offer works both for warm audiences—your existing fan base—but also for cold audiences because, out of the five bands I mentioned, about 8% of their sales came from cold audiences. So people who’d never heard of them before.

Depending on whether you have physical stuff—t-shirts, CDs—and the size of your fan base, you can choose whether you want to do the free plus shipping offer or just a very simple offer. The second one, actually, is the one we’re eventually going to build on Smart Noise as well. So then, not only can you run ads and get pre-saves and collect emails, but now you can see, "Okay, from these 500 pieces that are gone, how many fans actually bought stuff from me?"

Then I know that I can invest more into getting people on my email list and on my platform because I know they’re going to buy from me. These types of offers work.

Again, long spiel, but yeah.

Michael: Awesome. I love this stuff. Yeah, I’ve been geeking out on ads and funnels for the past seven years, so I love talking about this and breaking down the unit economics, like you talked about. Just to make sure I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like the campaign you’re running is a free plus shipping offer. Generally, are you running just straight cold traffic to the page where people can check out, or do you generally have them go through an opt-in process first? What have you seen getting the best results?

Giovanni: So, it's funny because, like, even for Smart Noise and these businesses in general, they have a very complex funnel. The sort of sales funnel for Smart Noise with the free trial is super complicated. There are a lot of, like, for the average artist, it would be very hard to replicate, but for music, I don’t know, man, what I've tried is a simple page with all the info on there. You know, it was very nicely designed. I’ll give you that, but it was just, "Hey, this is what you're gonna get. It's free. You can choose to pay something. Here's a video to basically show you how we look like and what our music is." Here's a few bullet points of what you get in the actual package, whether it's a CD plus a signed card from the band or whatever. A few comments from people who have commented, like, "I love your guys' music," or "I saw you guys last week in New York, and it was amazing." These sorts of social proof elements. But then, that was pretty much it. I like the checkout order bump, and that’s it. And that was converting— I can't remember the stats, I could actually check right now—but it was converting anywhere between 10 and 25% from cold. I might be wrong, I’m actually checking that out right now, and it obviously varies from band to band. But now, I actually want to double-check. So, okay, this is what the first band that we did it for stats-wise—All time... takes a while to load, but I think we can continue because it's taking forever. I use Thrivecart for that, and it's taking forever. Oh, please, 17%.

Michael: It was a test. It was a test. Do you recognize the song that was playing there?

Giovanni: All Time Low.

Michael: It's close. I should have done All Time Low... a little bit of Fallout Boy in there.

Giovanni: Right. Fuck. That's...

Michael: We're going down.

Giovanni: I don't know why I said All Time Low. I'm so embarrassed now.

Michael: An easy, easy thing to say. Yeah. I mean, they're definitely in a similar space in my brain.

Giovanni: But it was 17%, by the way. The average funnel.

Michael: That's amazing. Wow. So, I mean, what was the, like, how much were they earning on average per checkout?

Giovanni: I don’t know how they paid. I mean, I can literally share my screen right now, so I can show you, but, um... how do I do that? So, share screen, entire screen. You can see here—$42 million revenue. It's because one guy, for some reason, was able to pay this gigantic amount, and it didn’t go through, but for some reason, it went through PayPal. I don’t know why. I have no clue. I reached out to their support, and they were like, "We have no idea." But basically, you know, it’s 620 customers, a 70% conversion rate. I don’t know what the average is because this guy screwed up the whole number. But what I remember is that between this funnel and the Shopify store, they made, I think it was $30,000 gross in a few months. And they were spending about... this started pretty low at like $10 a day, and then eventually, they were spending like $50 or $75, but they were never spending more than that.

Michael: Okay, cool. And I mean, if you had to estimate... I’m just doing some mental math right now, but if we had like a 17% conversion rate, and does that include like people... So, they were able to do it completely free or did they choose their own price? Like, there wasn’t a fixed cost?

Giovanni: Yeah, so this one purchase messed up the whole numbers. But if I remember correctly, at least 50 percent of people were paying nothing, just covering shipping. The other 50 percent were paying $5 and getting the order bump and upsell, paying even more. I remember two people specifically—they paid $100.

So, basically, the math ended up breaking even by day three or four, and all the extra sales came from the Shopify store because they were running email sequences. What I think people don’t consider is that, even if you just break even, you are literally buying fans for free. If you went to any VC fund and said, "Hey, my business acquires customers at breakeven on day one," you could raise millions in one week. This is powerful not just because of the sales, but because now you have customers who have already paid you.

Let’s say you’re a band from the U.S. running ads only in the U.S. and you get to a thousand customers. You have a thousand people who already gave you money. How likely are they to buy tickets when you’re on tour versus someone just casually listening to your stuff on Apple Music? That’s incredibly powerful.

Michael: Absolutely. Every person you're acquiring is someone who has put in their payment info and made a purchase. It’s not just a casual listener. It's an actual buyer.

Giovanni: Exactly.

Michael: If you're earning $5 per purchase, that means you’re getting $2.55 per visitor. If you sent them to Spotify, you'd probably get a fraction of a penny. It’s over 500 times more profitable to send them to this page than to Spotify. And you can always send them to Spotify after.

Giovanni: Exactly. These aren't people just buying stuff and leaving. The difference between someone who gives you their email for a free ebook and someone who pays $9 for it is huge.

Michael: Absolutely. I’ve heard that each customer is worth roughly 10 times as much as a prospect. There’s a 10X economic difference between someone who’s made a purchase and someone who’s never bought anything.

Giovanni: And there’s so much you can do when you have people on your list, especially those who bought from you. I’ve seen comments from artists saying that nobody reads emails anymore. But if you search online, you'll find tons of articles saying that email is still the most profitable marketing channel.

Michael: It’s not close. The last time I checked, email had a 17X return compared to social media.

Giovanni: Yeah, so if you’re getting a 17X return, I think people are definitely opening emails.

Michael: They are. And it depends on things like how good your emails are and whether you’re reaching buyers. But the idea that email doesn’t work is silly. Everyone I know who’s killing it right now is doing it through emails.

Giovanni: Yeah. I’m trying to make artists understand that, but it’s a painful process.

Michael: Because it’s not as flashy. Social media numbers look better, but the email list is where real revenue is generated for so many artists.

Giovanni: Exactly. So if you're an artist listening to this, please, please.

Michael: A hundred percent. Gio, it's been fun connecting and geeking out about digital marketing, ads, funnels, and emails. Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m also curious about your platform. If someone wants to explore Smart Noise, can you share a little about how they can get started?

Giovanni: Yeah, absolutely. Smart Noise helps artists and record labels simplify marketing and generate revenue faster. We built a comprehensive solution for running campaigns that are optimized for conversions, collecting emails, getting monthly listeners, and selling tickets. It’s designed to save you time so you can focus on the music. We provide playbooks and campaign templates that connect to your Facebook account.

We also have a feature called Lockdown pre-saves, where fans save all future releases, not just the next one, and you can track their engagement. You can see if they’re opening emails, visiting pages, and buying tickets. We also have automated marketing, CRM, custom domains, and more.

We’re excited about launching monetization soon. We offer a free 14-day trial with full access to features, and if your audience is interested, we can offer a free month to give them more time to explore.

Michael: Fantastic. I’ll include the links in the show notes. It sounds like a great platform for helping artists connect with fans and monetize, rather than just sending people to Spotify. I appreciate you sharing this and being a musician yourself who understands the digital marketing side. I feel like we’re living similar lives in some ways. Thanks for being on the episode.

Giovanni: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Michael: YEAAAH!