Mike Warner:
You are likely to get a much better strike rate by listening to the playlist that you would like to be on, taking a quick look at when that was last updated, maybe some of the recent songs that have been added. If there's a song there that you feel is similar to what you are going to send, let them know, that's going to help them out a lot, because if it's on their playlist, no doubt, they like that track. Then as they're listening, if they agree, they're going to be grateful that you sent them a great track, and they're more likely to actually place that and more happy to speak with you.

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 why this is the best time to be an independent musician, and it's only getting better.

Michael Walker:
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 a 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 in today's music industry, and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Michael Walker:
All right. I'm excited to be here today with Mike Warner. Mike is a music industry executive with over 20 years of experience. He's the director of Artist, Label and DSP Relations at Chartmetric. If you haven't heard of Chartmetric before, it's really awesome music analytics tool, you should definitely go check it out. Mike has been featured on CNBC, South by Southwest, in the Electronic Music Conference. He wrote a book called Work Hard Playlist Hard.

Michael Walker:
Today, that would be great to geek out a little bit and talk about playlists and really how to be successful with getting on playlists for music, and specifically, what do you do? What are the right things that lead to getting on playlist in the first place? Mike, thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Mike Warner:
Thank you, Michael. I'm excited to be here, and really grateful for this opportunity. I know that we've been talking about this for some time, and like we said before, pre call, the universe worked in our favor and here we are today. Really grateful and excited to be here. Thank you.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, man. Absolutely. We were just talking about, we just did our first Costa Rica retreat with Modern Musician and I was gone. We had to reschedule back a couple of times, but it seems like in every worthwhile or every good story, there's a lot of challenges, so it doesn't work, but then it's like, it leads up to that payoff moment.

Michael Walker:
That is literally the moment that everyone here is about to witness. That's the post challenge. Not to put any pressure and anticipation on it, but it's going to be epic. Mike, I would love to hear just a little bit before we get started. For anyone here who hasn't met you before, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about how you got to this point?

Mike Warner:
Yeah, absolutely. I'll try and give you the shortest version possible and we'll see how we go. But as currently right now, today, I'm the director of artist label and DSP relations at Chartmetric. I've also written a book called Work Hard Playlist Hard.

Mike Warner:
But prior to that, I started out as a DJ, then got into music production, then went the independent route, self-releasing, doing all of the work ourselves with my project, Date Night, with two friends back in Australia. Through all of that, through doing it ourselves and learning pretty much everything that we possibly could, I started to take a lot of notes and document it, and it got to the point where I was sharing it with artists, friends, friends of friends, anyone that was interested. I realized that I enjoyed that so much more than creating music and performing.

Mike Warner:
I still really enjoy that, but for me it was, I think I'm the behind the scenes guy. I'm the guy that can tell people what they need to do to help them to get to that next step, and that feels way more rewarding for me than just getting on stage and having a crowd cheering, as much fun as that is. That's why I went down this path and released the book, Work Hard Playlist Hard and dedicate pretty much all of my spare time outside of my day job to just giving back and helping artists and just dropping little nuggets of gold as soon as I find them. I just feel like it's, why hold back, let's share it and let's help each other.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that, man. I think that that's a really important... In my mind, the way that I look at your role, so you shifted to this coaching business and helping other people with it and found this passion and found this purpose in it. In a lot of ways, I think it's similar to like a basketball player who, maybe played the game of basketball for a while, and then he became a coach and now is helping other basketball players.

Michael Walker:
It's not a secret that some of the most successful  coaches of all time, like John Wooden, for example, you can be an amazing coach without necessarily having to be like Michael Jordan. In some cases, like Michael Jordan, some of the players might actually not be good coaches. I think that the role of coach and mentor are such a valuable one. So, I really appreciate you taking that step and paying it forward and helping artists with this.

Michael Walker:
That being said, I'd love to hear a little bit about why are playlists important in the first place? Why should an artist be thinking about how to get their music on playlists?

Mike Warner:
Yeah. It's an interesting one. I almost have to put a disclaimer now because I don't want artists to think that playlists should be their marketing plan. Yeah, it's okay, it's nice to get on playlists and it can be a goal, but it shouldn't be the entire plan or the entire strategy, by any means. But when I first started writing Work Hard Playlist Hard, the first edition, playlists was massive. It was a huge buzzword and everyone was like, I want to get on playlists. I'll do whatever it takes, basically.

Mike Warner:
Now, the playlist market is so saturated, everyone is doing what they've now learned, as far as outreach and things like that. What can we do beyond just sending cold emails and sending DMs and things like that? It's been interesting because it's been really challenging, especially during the last year. I guess, not to steer away from the question of the difficulties that I see some artists face in the early stages, but I just tell artists, straight up, I go, look, you can't be still writing a track and thinking about what playlist it's going to go on. You can't have anything that is going to mess with your creative process. You need to just finish this song and then we can worry about release strategy and yes, sure, playlists and everything else like that. But you shouldn't be thinking about that in the early stages.

Mike Warner:
It's the same with artists that say, "I'm going to write a song that's going to make me a bunch of money." I go, "If you could do that, more power to you. But the reality is that that's not going to be the case. You're going to be thinking about every single part of that song, and you're going to be thinking about dollar symbols."

Mike Warner:
If an artist is in that state of mind, I usually say, maybe you shouldn't be doing music while you are thinking like this, because you need to love what you do first and foremost, and you need to not be thinking about the money and the playlists and everything else, yet. That's probably the first thing that I see when an artist comes to me, they haven't even released music yet, and they're already thinking about that side of the business.

Michael Walker:
That is a really powerful one. Not getting distracted by the outcome and being able to just enjoy the process. It seems like that's almost like a super power, in general, being able to... But at the same time, I'm curious to how you blend those two things together? That's one thing that's always fascinated me, is like, how we can both have goals that we're moving towards, that we're passionate about, that we're looking to achieve in the future, but also at the same time, be grounded in the present moments and appreciate, and be grateful for what we have, because sometimes those things seem like a little bit at odds with each other.

Michael Walker:
What's your process for goal setting and how do you make sure that... Because on the other side too, if someone didn't have any goals, they might be like, "Well, I'm here to create music, and maybe there's lacking a real direction that they're moving in. How do people find that right balance?

Mike Warner:
Going beyond setting realistic expectations with someone, then the goals... You need to enjoy the journey, you need to enjoy the entire process. You map it out and let's say you're uploading the song today, it comes out in eight weeks from today. Great, now we've got an eight week plan that we can spread this out so that you are not burning yourself out with this track.

Mike Warner:
One thing I always tell artists is, I say that, believe it or not, the majority of the work happens before the song comes out. Once the song is out, that's when everyone starts to see it and starts to hear about it and all of that, a lot more. But the majority of the work is happening pre-release. What I always say, is I say, you need to do all these things yourself, at least initially, so you understand how it works and things like that. But if there's something that really pains you and you just don't enjoy it, and it's sucking the fun out of the process for you, once you've attempted it yourself, you might be able to find someone else to help with you.

Mike Warner:
If it's social media, get someone to help you out with getting those posts scheduled. It's not that hard to go and do a photo shoot with 10 different outfit changes and spread those out over the year and things like that. The same things with editorial playlist pitching, which I'm sure we're going to touch on today. There's a number of different ways that you can now pitch to different streaming platforms, and that needs to happen at least two weeks out. Sometimes four weeks out is best because it has more time for it to travel around, get heard by more people, potentially get programmed prior to the release.

Mike Warner:
All of these things... I've seen a lot of people that have outlined these steps and they've got their own cheat sheets, if you will, as well, that they'll pull out for each release. Some people think that certain things are more important than others, as well. It's always going to be unique to the artist. I'm not going to tell an artist, "Hey, you need to spend two weeks working on TikTok", if they're absolutely terrified of getting in front of the camera and they don't feel creative and they don't know anyone that could help them with that, and there's definitely a bunch of other things that they can be doing as well to help in the lead up to that release.

Michael Walker:
That's definitely a big one for me is trying to figure out how to get better at dancing so I can finally master TikTok. I was kidding. No, I don't think anyone would want to see me dance on TikTok. My wife is a professional dancer, I'm like the most awkward dancer ever.

Mike Warner:
I feel you on that one. Same.

Michael Walker:
That's good to know. It sounds like what you're saying is that, a big part of the process is also realizing that when the release comes out, at that point, you should have done a lot of the legwork already in terms of preparation, and reaching out to the right people. That there's some different types of cheat sheets and different things that you can help guide you in that process.

Michael Walker:
But I would love to hear a little bit about, you having experience and seeing multiple different people's cheat sheets, and like you mentioned, there's probably some people that value certain actions more than other ones and those things that are different. There's also probably some common patterns or underlying things that all of them basically say to do that. Maybe we could just do a quick, bird's eye view of the release strategy and what you'd recommend, basically for everyone, regardless of who they are, if they're going to need to release a song, let's say a couple of months from now.

Mike Warner:
Yeah, definitely. Let's just fast forward to the point where the song is mixed and mastered and it sounds great and you are ready. You upload it to your distributor or whoever you are working with will get that uploaded with a release date set. Perfect. What usually happens a few days after that is that you can log to Spotify for Artists, Amazon Music for Artists. There's a number of other platforms now as well, where you can log in and you can pitch that release in advance.

Mike Warner:
If it's an album, you pick one song from the release. If it's a single, you pitch that. You can start to populate all this information about the song. Now, the reason you want to do this as early as possible is there's a number of benefits. If we're talking Spotify specifically, the earlier you submit, the more time it has to get passed around to people within the editorial team, and there's hundreds, if not thousands of people that work in editorial around the world now, so it can take some time for your song to travel, to get heard by the right person and they place, prior to release, as well. They'll have the track queued up, ready the day it comes out, it could end up on a playlist because you gave enough lead time.

Mike Warner:
The other one is, if it's a new original song you've never released before, and you've submitted at least one week prior, in this case, much more than that, it will go into release radar for all of your followers. If you have 500 followers, it's going into release radar for 500 people. That's another way that you can potentially reach those followers and let them know you've got a new track out.

Mike Warner:
With Amazon, they have some interesting features on their editorial submission form they just added in Amazon Music for Artists, where you can tag mood, genre, things like that. But you can also say, "Here's three artists that sound just like me, or just like this track." What you're doing is you're basically saying, hey, related artists gets messed up from time to time. Here's who I actually sound like. So, let's try to deliver my music to fans of these artists as well, and let's see how it goes with them.

Mike Warner:
That's been really interesting to see. Another thing that hopefully no one ever has to do this, but if you are listening and you drop the new track a few days ago, Amazon Music for Artists will let you pitch for editorial playlists considerate up to two weeks after the song has been released as well. You can pitch before it comes out, but you can also pitch up to two weeks after it's being released now.

Mike Warner:
Anyone that maybe wasn't aware of this, and you've just released that song, log into Amazon Music for Artists, you may still have an opportunity to pitch. Beyond playlists, Amazon Music also have radio programming and they have endless listening and things like that. So, there's other places that your music may get delivered to listeners beyond just ending up on a playlist.

Mike Warner:
For anyone that hasn't really paid attention to this radio within most of these streaming platforms is delivering significant numbers of listeners, especially in the last year, I've noticed it's just increased like crazy. I think a lot of people, maybe we weren't in our cars as much listening to radio, so we were just putting it on a station. We knew what we wanted to listen to, but we didn't know a specific artist or a track. That's really been a big focus as well that I've seen lately beyond playlists. I feel like I keep saying beyond playlists, but it all comes back to playlists.

Michael Walker:
Beyond playlists, that's a nice name for a course or something, beyond playlists. Cool, man. One follow up question, it sounds like you're leading up to the release and you have this window of opportunity where you want to make sure that you are reaching out to the editorial playlist for Spotify, for Apple Music and for Amazon, Amazon for Artists.

Michael Walker:
Even with Amazon for Artists, you actually have a week or two after to respond, which is really cool. Any tips for people when they're doing that initial submission process to improve their odds of getting selected for those editorials?

Mike Warner:
Yeah, absolutely. One thing you need to keep in mind, for anyone that's been job searching recently, SEO is massive. It's getting to the point now where humans can't possibly catch up with everything that is coming through. So, they're looking for keywords. It's safe to assume that this is also happening with editorial teams, they need help shortlisting what they should listen to because there's only so many hours in the day and there's 70,000 songs per day getting delivered in the US alone right now.

Mike Warner:
But I should mention not everyone is filling out the submission forms. Keep that in mind. Yes, it still has to be something that you can read. It can't just be a bunch of keywords thrown into the description, but try to include those words, try to include those feelings, emotions, moods, genres, maybe similar artists. What's the theme of the music as well? Things like that, that's going to really help.

Mike Warner:
One thing I actually did with a few of my releases, I wrote a book, yes, but as far as crafting something that is going to hook people when talking about a song, I'm not the best with words, in that case. What I actually did was I went to the songwriter and I said, "Look, you wrote the lyrics, you know what these mean better than anyone. How would you feel about writing just a few sentences about the track?"

Mike Warner:
Within minutes, I got something that, to me, it was like poetry. I was like, this is perfect. This makes me want to listen, even though I've heard this song 100 times. I would say, definitely don't hesitate to reach out to the person that actually wrote the lyrics, if it's not yourself. Beyond that, get someone who's really good with words and who has probably never heard the song before, because it's not out yet, and just play it to them and just say, "Look, here's a pen and paper, just write down what you feel, what you think when you hear this." You might be able to get a really good first impression from someone else as well.

Mike Warner:
But yeah, this sounds crazy that we even need to mention this, but punctuation, spelling, grammar, all of that, extremely important because someone is still looking at this and reading it eventually, and that can make a big difference. If it looks like it was rushed and it looks like mid-sentence, you just stopped and hit the Submit button, that's going to show. Keep that in mind as well.

Mike Warner:
Whatever words you type, there's no reason why you can't copy and paste this in your submissions for all of the other platforms as well. It's going to be worthwhile. It may even be strong enough that you'll use it in social media posts as well to let people know about the track and describe it before they press the Play button and listen.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Awesome. That's super valuable. One follow up question, when it comes to... You mentioned that part of the process is, you do it in a natural way, but finding out what are the keywords that represent your music and represent similar artists that might help you to, again, get it in front of the right people. Are there any tools or would you recommend any tools specifically that make it really easy to just find the right words to describe the mood of the music or the keywords or things like that for specific artists?

Mike Warner:
Not tools that I've tested enough that I feel confident sharing, but I should mention that in these forms now, you can actually start typing part of a word and it will help you. If you type piano or you type soul or you type children's or whatever it is, you're going to be able to see all of the genre, mood options that are available to choose from.

Mike Warner:
I know that there's some people that have gone as far as actually grabbing that entire list and putting it into a document and just studying it like crazy, which honestly, it's not a bad idea, because there's some people that feel that they have a really niche genre of music and a lot of these genres are now being represented and they are available when you fill out these forms.

Mike Warner:
If there's not as many people as you releasing music within that genre, you should definitely be filling out that form and tagging that, because that person may not have as many songs in that genre that they're listening to. There might be a good opportunity that they can get to yours and they can listen and they find a home for it.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast so I can tell you about a free, special offer that we're doing right now, exclusively for our podcast listeners. If you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast. Or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you.

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Michael Walker:
That's super interesting. I think there's a lot of power and just words, in general, how we communicate. Just like the way that languages, certain languages that have words for certain things and other languages don't have the words, literally, they just don't even observe the thing in their lives because they don't have a word to describe it.

Michael Walker:
I think the idea that you just shared with actually listing all the words and studying, going through and circling all the ones that describe you or your music would probably be really illuminating for you too, just to be like, oh yeah, I am chill or I am blank, blank, blank. Even just having a database or having a list of those for your music could be really helpful to come back to, and to be able to do some stuff with the algorithms to make sure that you're reaching the right people with your songs.

Mike Warner:
Yeah, absolutely. The other thing with this is we're talking about keywords in written form, but a lot of these services now are going into the world of voice and voice requests, and it's getting to the point now, where a lot of people are requesting music playlists, stations using their voice. I always say, keep that in mind as well, that there's words that we may say that we may not necessarily type.

Mike Warner:
I would challenge anyone, or maybe encourage is a better word, anyone to just go up to someone and say, "Tell me the words that come to mind when you hear of this." Because they're going to say words that they wouldn't necessarily write on a piece of paper as well, and that could be helpful too.

Mike Warner:
The other thing that I should mention is, in this timeline that we are leading up to the release, voice is extremely important. As I just mentioned, it's getting to the point now where Amazon, Apple and a number of other platforms have voice only plans, which means that you can access Amazon or Apple Music, but you can only access using your voice.

Mike Warner:
If you can't request that artist or that album or that song, because you don't know how to pronounce it correctly, you're actually missing out on people that can't listen to your music on those voice specific subscriptions. What you can do now is when you distribute your music, however you distribute it, you can also work with that person and say, we want to make sure the correct pronunciation is delivered with our music. Here is how it is said. Here is a breakdown by syllable.

Mike Warner:
That can get delivered to all of these platforms. So, all of these voice assistants know when people say this exact name, that they're referring to this artist. That's going to help you a lot because now you're not just having to tell people, "Hey, when you get home, go and log into your favorite music streaming app and type our name out. Here's how you spell it. Then scroll down, maybe we're number five in the list, and it'll be a picture of us drinking coffee. Tap on that, and then click, Play and follow."

Mike Warner:
Now, you can simply say, "Hey, everyone, want to make sure you hear our music. Simply say, "Alexa, follow Date Night on Amazon Music."" Done, it's as easy as that. Just by making sure that you've got that pronunciation delivered as well, you've made it easier for people to follow you, and you've also made your music available to people on those voice only subscriptions as well.

Michael Walker:
Wow. That's super cool. I didn't know that there's a way to submit the correct pronunciation for that. Where did you say is the place to do that, to make sure that they have the right pronunciation for your music?

Mike Warner:
Let's say you're 100% independent, you're working with one of the independent distributors. Usually, just contacting them. Some of them now have a form where you can actually submit it as well, the same way that you would add lyrics to your music and lyrics, I should mention, is another big thing that you want to get in prior to the release.

Mike Warner:
There's a number of benefits. Yes, the lyrics will show when your song is playing, in many of these streaming platforms. Spotify have lyrics back now, finally as well. Then when people are listening on the app, on their phone, on their TV, on their Echo show device in their house, for example, the lyrics can also play in time with the music, kind of like a karaoke feature. But what I really like about this is that people can speak or sing part of the lyrics to your song. They may not know the song title or the artist, but they can say, "Hey, Alexa, play the song that goes... " And then they speak or sing part of the lyrics and they'll get your song that way, which is another way that once again, you can reach them.

Mike Warner:
But you could also have someone who says, "I'm looking for a song that has the lyrics, we're getting married today, or something like that." It's almost SEO with vocals, lyrics. Yes, people can also type part of those lyrics into their music streaming platform as well, so they can actually find your song by typing part of the lyrics. As many people are aware with TikTok, you get five seconds of a song stuck in your head. If somebody didn't use the original audio, it can be really hard to find out what that is. You can just punch in those lyrics and you'll be able to find that.

Michael Walker:
Super smart. We talked a lot about editorial playlists and how to improve your chances of getting on those. What are your thoughts around other types of playlists, and what's the strategy for just playlisting in general, aside from the editorial playlist?

Mike Warner:
Yeah, sure. A lot of people would refer to it as third party playlists or independent playlists/curators. For anyone that's not clear, these are not curated by people that work at Spotify or Apple or Amazon, these are people that have an account, they're a listener and they've created the playlist and they've made it public and anyone can follow it and listen.

Mike Warner:
Sometimes brands will go and do this as well, of course, and record labels, et cetera. There is still value in a lot of these playlists, but I want people to be aware that it is very, very saturated right now. It's not like it was five years ago or maybe more, where someone creates a playlist, you find it, you send them an email, they're happy to hear from you. They reply instantly. Now, it's getting to the point where there's people that are getting hundreds of emails every day, DMs, things like that from artists, just listen to my music, listen to my music.

Mike Warner:
There's definitely nothing wrong with doing this and it can help. But my advice to artists that are going to go down that route is to spend more time researching and crafting individual outreach, as opposed to just doing a bulk mail out to everyone. The reason is, in my experience doing this, you can usually only get one shot and then you might end up going to someone's other folder.

Mike Warner:
If you send a song that doesn't work within their playlists, they're probably not going to listen to anything else you send. If you send an email and they're clearly BCC'd with 100 other people, or even worse, they're on CC and not BCC, and they can see everyone else you've sent it to, they're going to realize that, it's not personalized whatsoever.

Mike Warner:
I always say, instead of sending 100 emails per day or anything crazy like that, if you've got the time, send five or 10, and you are likely to get a much better strike rate by listening to the playlist that you would like to be on, taking a quick look at when that was last updated, maybe some of the recent songs that have been added.

Mike Warner:
If there's a song there that you feel is similar to what you are going to send, let them know, that's going to help them out a lot, because if it's on their playlist, no doubt, they like that track. Then as they're listening, if they agree, they're going to be grateful that you sent them a great track, and they're more likely to actually place that and more happy to speak with you.

Mike Warner:
I know I've seen artists that have gone as far as sending an email out to... I'm going to give some not so good examples and then some good ones, but I've seen artists that have sent emails out, obviously, as I mentioned, to maybe 50, 100 recipients, all in the same email. That's a terrible idea because everyone else is seeing each other's email addresses, someone hits reply all, and everyone gets it. Not a good experience for anyone.

Mike Warner:
I've seen artists that have attached large WAV files over 100 megabytes in size to an email, which not everyone has unlimited data. I've seen artists that include pages and pages of information and multiple links. By all means, in the future, that may be requested, but right now, you're just trying to get that one song to them.

Mike Warner:
Some good examples I've seen is very short emails, very to the point, without quoting it word for word as such, along the lines of, "Hey, name, I've been listening to your playlist on whatever platform, and as a result, I found a song that I really like. I've actually released a similar song that just came out this week, and I'd love to share that with you for consideration. If you have a formal submission process, please let me know as I would be happy to follow it."

Mike Warner:
What I find by doing that is that it's very, and this is something that's important. The shorter the email or the message, the more likely, and the quicker someone will reply. I'm guilty of this. If I get a really long email from someone, I push it to the side because I feel like I need to give them a reply that's just as long. Whereas if I get a short email and it's a question, or it's just a link, I'm like, okay, I may as well just do this right now and reply, and then I can archive this email or whatever I need to do.

Mike Warner:
That is going to be much more appreciated. If that person is interested, they will write back and say, "Hey, could you send me a little more info about yourself? Do you have a presser, a one sheet? Do you have a short bio, anything like that?" I'm sure you've got that ready.

Mike Warner:
Other outreach I've seen, which has worked really well is, as an artist, maybe you curate your own playlist. Maybe you've started the playlist, let's say on Spotify, and you've included a bunch of music from other artists that you look up to, that create similar music, let them know that you've added them to your playlist. That way you are reaching out to them initially with great news, you are just telling them, "Hey, just want to let you know, big fan of your music. I curate this playlist and I've added your song to it. Here's a link, if you want to check it out." I don't guarantee, but you're going to see a much more positive response and a much better response rate by doing that, as long as it's actually a good fit for their song on your playlist, and they can see that your playlist is well curated, you're likely to get an email back with a thank you. They may even share your playlist on social media. They may even follow you as a result.

Mike Warner:
Then you can and be sure that the next time you reach out to them, if you go, "Hey, just letting you know, I've actually released a new song now as well, and I just wanted to share a link with you to take a listen." That could lead to you ending up on their playlist as well. I have seen a lot of this with artists, they could all be with the same record label, or they could all be within the same city or whatever it is, where each of them will have their own playlist, and whenever someone releases something that's a good fit, they all put it in there and support each other.

Mike Warner:
That is a really good way to do it and to get someone's attention by coming to them with good news and telling them that you've done something for them, as opposed to asking them to do something for you. That was some examples of some not so good outreach and a good ways to do outreach as well. The only other one I would say is that for every artist, you should definitely curate a playlist yourself first, before you start reaching out to anyone else, because when people find your music, like myself, as a music lover, when I hear something, I like, I go directly to that artist's profile. If they don't have an album released yet, I'll see if they've got a playlist with all of their catalog, their discography, and I'll press play, and I'll just let it roll and see if there's any other music from them I like. That one stream could turn into a stream of every track in your catalog as well. Not only that, but if I like what I'm hearing, I'll probably follow that, in the same way that I'll follow your profile.

Michael Walker:
That's so good, man. There's some mic drop moments in there, Mike Warner, mic drops, there we go. The idea to curate your own playlist and to reach out to similar artists that are on your size, maybe they're slightly bigger, people that you might want to go on tour with and using it as a way to connect with them is actually giving them the good news that you added them to the playlist. That's brilliant, dude. Really, really cool idea.

Michael Walker:
Then, the idea that other artists having their own playlists and then being able to cross promote each other, like bees cross pollinating through that way, super awesome. It sounds like the reach out process to be a good human, it's like the same reach out process for everything is like don't spam people, you actually pay attention, care about personalization, making sure that you're not just sending the same message to 100 different people, but you're actually focusing on trying to make it as valuable for them as possible, keeping it short and sweet. Maybe having a quick question, awesome.

Michael Walker:
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts around, I know there are a lot of different platforms now that are helping to curate playlist owners and trying to facilitate the connection between artists and those playlist owners. Are there any in particular that you'd recommend, or what are your thoughts around the curators of the curators?

Mike Warner:
That's a good way of putting it. There's a number of different ones out there. I guess if we want to talk about one of the originals that's still around today, SubmitHub. Back in the day, SubmitHub was more blog focused than anything else. You want to get on Hype Machine, you want to go up the charts on Hype Machine. You could find Hype Machine blogs on SubmitHub.

Mike Warner:
That's still relevant now, by the way. A lot of curators in the editorial teams, at the streaming platforms still look at blogs, still look at Hype Machine, still go on SoundCloud and listen to pre-release links. They're still trying to find music, the same way that we are now, as well. But SubmitHub will essentially give the curators a score and say, here's how many followers they have. They have a Spotify playlist list. They have a blog, they have a YouTube channel. Some of them you can submit and there's no cost, and some of them, you may spend a few dollars to get them to listen within, I believe, it's 48 hours. If they don't listen, you get some of that money back.

Mike Warner:
One thing I would say is, if you're a little sensitive to feedback, just be careful because you have to remember that some people are listening for 30 seconds and they have no connection to you personally, so they're just going to tell you something straight, and it may not always be helpful or constructive or positive. But if you're okay with that, then it is a really good starting point.

Mike Warner:
Outside of that, there's a number of other platforms. I haven't really experimented with them enough to feel comfortable mentioning them, but there are platforms that do different things. There are ones like SubmitHub, which will say, "We're going to help you find curators and we're going to help connect you with them." Surely, there's some cost involved and things like that. Then there's ones that say, you pay us a set amount of money and we have a network of curators and we're going to put it in front of them, and the incentive for them to listen is they get paid to listen and to give feedback, and the incentive for you is that you are reaching curators that don't want to be reached by email or direct message. They want to get paid for their time by listening to your music and giving feedback, regardless of if they added or not.

Mike Warner:
What I've just mentioned is generally okay. But I do just want to touch on the ones that are not as okay. Basically, if you ever have anyone that guarantees you a number of streams or guarantees playlist placements and things like that, especially if they've never even heard your song, be very careful. What is happening is that there's a number of different ways, and this changes all the time.

Mike Warner:
You may have somebody reach out to you and tell you that for a certain amount of money, you're going to get a certain amount of streams or you're going to get on a certain amount of playlists, guaranteed. Another thing is you might end up on a playlist that you never reached out to someone and you look in the description and they say, "Hey, email us here." You email them, and they say, "Yes, we put you on that playlist for two days so you would notice. If you would like to stay on there, you need to pay us."

Mike Warner:
The other thing that can happen is that, there's people out there that will just say X number of streams for X amount of dollars. It's very, very, very likely that they have control over where those streams are coming from, which means it could be a bunch of old iPhones strapped up to the wall, playing music on loop all day, every day.

Mike Warner:
Now, a lot of artists say, "Well, what's the problem with that? It's just inflating my numbers to make me look better like I maybe would've done on social media." Yes, there are people that will buy followers on Instagram or Twitter or places like that. There's no real punishment for that, because you're not making money when you post on those platforms, the punishment would be that those followers will just get removed if they're not real followers.

Mike Warner:
With music streaming, you're making money from those streams. They don't want to pay that if it's not a real person listening, and they don't know how to find that person to punish them. The really sad part is that the artists who may not be aware of this are the ones that will get punished. I've used this example before, and it's kind of terrible, but think back to school where one kid in the class did something wrong and the teacher doesn't know who it was. So, they punished the entire class.

Mike Warner:
Imagine that it's like that, and there's some CD person that is taking money for streams, and there's a room full of artists. The artists are going to get punished and that person is just going to go and start up business under a different name the next day.

Mike Warner:
All we can do is, instead of trying to name them, when they keep changing is just educate artists and just say, "Look, I understand you want to invest your money into your growth, but there's so many other better, safer ways that you can do this, that won't lead to absolute worst case your music gets removed from these streaming platforms, and you may even be on a list now where you can't re-release music on streaming platforms as your artist name anymore, your distributor may even drop you and say, "We can't work with you anymore because of this.""

Mike Warner:
Any growth that you had, any numbers that you saw will disappear and then it will just drop all the way back down, and you are back at where you started, but you're even worse now because you can't re-release what you had out before, and you basically have to start again with a new name. Definitely avoid that. Some people refer to it as payola, some say, playola. Whatever it is, if you are paying for something that's guaranteed, I would be very, very careful.

Mike Warner:
I always encourage artists, I say, go on to blogs, go onto Reddit, ask other artists, just say, "Did you work with someone to help you to get on those playlists? What was the experience like?" That's really going to help. If you go on a blog and you type in the name of one of these services, you're going to see a lot of people talking about their experiences, and you're going to work out very quickly, if it's actually legit or not.

Michael Walker:
Super good advice. Absolutely. Have you ever read the book, The Speeches by Dr. Seuss?

Mike Warner:
I have not.

Michael Walker:
Do you remember that book? I probably read it when I was like three or four years old. My parents read it to me, and now we have our three year old son who we've been reading it to most nights. Long story short, the premise of the book is that there's these two kinds of speeches, some of them have stars on their bellies and because they have stars, they're like, "We're the best kind of stitch on the beaches." They have their own little clique and all the ones without stars are like, "Oh man, I wish we had stars."

Michael Walker:
Then one day, there's this Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who's like the sales man, he pops up, he's like, "Anyone want stars on your bellies? Just pay me $10 and I'll get you stars." They go through this machine, they get stars on their bellies, and then they're like, "Hey, we have stars now too." Then the ones that had stars at first are like, "Man, now they have stars, how do we know who's who?"

Michael Walker:
Then Sylvester McMonkey McBean comes, he's like, "Well, you'll pay me $10, and I'll take off your stars on your bells, because they're no longer in style. You don't want stars." They go back and forth and eventually all their money is gone. The salesman leaves and they realize the stars didn't really mean anything.

Michael Walker:
It was a beautiful, beautiful story, but such a good correlation to what you're talking about right now, too, I think when it comes to things like paying for streams or paying for fake followers or likes, where it's like you're paying to put the star in your belly. The stars they don't necessarily represent... If they don't have any real substance, then it's just a star, it's just like something up on your belly, it's not the most important thing.

Michael Walker:
That's really, really good advice. It sounds like even, especially with streaming, you want to be super, super careful with it, because now it's not just something where those followers might get removed, but also it's illegal and you could face other ramifications based on doing that.

Mike Warner:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Awesome.

Mike Warner:
I should mention that you won't go to jail for it or anything like that, but the punishment for many artists would be far worse. You have to start again. What's really heartbreaking, is there have been some artists that have just said, "No, that was it for me." That's heartbreaking to hear that they're no longer pursuing music because of that experience, especially when they weren't aware of what they were participating in.

Michael Walker:
That is heartbreaking. How about before we wrap up, one last question I would have for you in regards to playlist, one thing that you mentioned earlier was the tagline, beyond playlists. We talked a little bit about the pros of playlists and the opportunity there and how to do it in the right way. But also I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about "beyond playlists" and how these fit holistically into a bigger picture music career. What are some of the other things that someone might want to be paying attention to that are getting aligned with the playlist that they're getting that, in order to get the most out of the playlist opportunities that they should also be doing this?

Mike Warner:
Wow. I realize-

Michael Walker:
It's kind of a big question. It's a big question to end things with.

Mike Warner:
No, that's great. I can't believe I didn't even realize this when I was saying beyond playlists, but I recently did a workshop that's up on YouTube and LinkedIn that's called Beyond Playlists. I guess the title changed that many times, it slipped my mind. But basically it's all about all of the tools that the major streaming platforms provide to artists that I don't believe artists are aware of and should be, and should be using.

Mike Warner:
Yes, obviously, playlist is one of the goals, but beyond that, it's things such as the Twitch integration with Amazon Music, you can go live within both apps together. When you go live on Twitch, it goes live to your artist profile on Amazon Music. Spotify have their concert integrations as well with Songkick and Spotify allow you to sell merch through Merchbar, and now you can link your Shopify account.

Mike Warner:
I definitely encourage artists, if you have a logo, if you have any kind of artwork that you've ever created, upload it because you can get it on a t-shirt without even having to buy any stock, it can be print and ship on demand. There's a lot of social sharing options. Apple Music have what's called milestones where they create social media graphics that you can post, that you can use to announce a new release. Maybe you've got a large number of Shazaam's in a specific country, or you reached a new milestone, as far as listeners, they'll create that for you with the graphic, and they'll even give you the text so you can copy and paste that and they'll even give you a link. They've done all the work for you to share at that on social media.

Mike Warner:
Another thing I did just want to touch on very quickly, because we were doing the whole pre-release cycle is pre-adds and pre-saves. There's a number of ways that you can do this. Yes, there are third party products that will do it for you, where people will go to a form, they'll put in their email address, they'll sign in with their streaming account.

Mike Warner:
On the day that, that album or single is released, it will be saved into their library, and they'll also follow you on that streaming platform. That's cool. I would say, don't run a competition or do something that would encourage everyone to just go and fill out that form and do it. You only want true fans that actually listen to your music and your style of music. Otherwise, you're likely to mess up all the algorithms.

Mike Warner:
The other thing that I wanted to mention is, I've had people say to me, "Apple Music don't have pre-adds." I go, "Well, actually they do, and they support it in-platform." But the way that it works is let's say you've got an album coming out. You've put it up with your distributor. You would then contact your distributor and say, "I've got this album that's coming out on this date. I would like to set X number of tracks as instant grat tracks or instant gratification tracks."

Mike Warner:
What this does is two things. If we're talking Apple, it will make those tracks available prior to the album coming out, which means that people will go to your artist page in Apple Music, and it will say new album coming out on this date, add to your library now. They can go to that album, and some of the songs won't be grayed out and they can listen to them immediately, while they're waiting for your album to drop.

Mike Warner:
The other side of that is in iTunes and yes, iTunes does still exist. There's a setting to turn it back on in Apple Music. In iTunes, if people pre-order the album, they will get those tracks available instantly as instant downloads, and then they'll still get the full album on release day as well. That's a great way to actually encourage people to pre-add your album in Apple Music, and they will get a notification as soon as that album goes live, because they've added that to their library in Apple Music.

Mike Warner:
One extra thing I've seen with that is I've seen some artists go as far as saying new albums coming out in six months from now. Every three to four weeks, we're going to drop a new track from the album so that all of our fans get a notification that a new song is available on this album to listen to now.

Mike Warner:
It just keeps building up the hype to that album and you are dropping each track individually as well. That does work with Spotify too. If you have an album that's coming out and you have a few songs that you've released previously, when you deliver that to your distributor, include the existing ISRC that was attached to those songs, grab the link to that album on Spotify. Anyone that follows that link will see the album. Some tracks will be grayed out, but the rest of them will be available to stream immediately and people can click Save, so they don't even need to do one of those pre-add or pre-save forms from one of those products, if they don't want to.

Mike Warner:
That was kind of long-winded, but I just wanted to get that out there as well, because I've had a lot of questions about that recently.

Michael Walker:
That's super helpful. That's definitely a question that I was wondering about out too is just how to package the single releases in combination with an album release. That's really cool. It sounds like you can actually plan the full EP or full album release, but actually have individual songs from there that you're either releasing separately or if you did it on Spotify, you can take the pre-released ones, you can add them to it, so that there's that hybrid rollout, so you can build up momentum to the full release.

Michael Walker:
Cool, man. Well, hey, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you coming on here. Australian accent, there's something to that, that's just very comforting about hearing your accent. I could have this conversation for four or five hours, probably. But for anyone that's listening or watching this right now, who would like to learn more, connect more with what you're doing, where's best place for them to go to, to check out more of your stuff?

Mike Warner:
Yeah, sure. In terms of social media, I'm most active on LinkedIn and a lot of people find that interesting. But if you see me on there, you'll understand why. I think it's a really good place for creators right now. You can find me at linkedin.com/in/askmikewarner. Outside of that, everything that I'm doing in the book and workshops and hopefully in-person events soon and things like that, conferences, you can find out all of that at workhardplaylisthard.com.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Like always we'll throw all the links on the show notes to make it as easy as possible. But thanks again, man. It's been a lot of fun.

Mike Warner:
Thank you, Michael. Really appreciate this.

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 the 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. 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 their music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now and I'll look forward to seeing you on the next episode.