Jayson Evans:
Music artists think that the best way to promote music is by promoting music, right. And it makes sense. Okay. But the thing is that's a one dimensional mentality. And the reason why I see so many music artists get so desperately caught up on thinking, they have to like buy all these Spotify playlist placement courses and that kind of stuff is because they're looking through their music only.Truth be told that, I mean, they're a great complimentary strategy, but they should be something you focus on entirely because you get everyone onto a playlist. And if you dive into the behavior, it's not ideal. I can talk about that forever, but regardless, I don't think that's the best approach.

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. But I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician. And it's slowly 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 a sustainable income with your music. I'll 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 by my friend, Jayson Evans. So Jayson is the author of the best selling book, The 4D Songwriter: How to Dominate the New Music Industry. He's the host of IAMN, which stands for, I am Northbound Podcast for music marketing, and we had a great conversation probably a week or two ago. It's a little bit tricky to navigate sometime, we're in a totally different time zone. For him, it's a different day based being a nosy. But one thing that I really appreciate about him was we had a great conversation just about really the core principles of like authentic fan connection and doing marketing in the right way. Obviously, especially nowadays with like social media and a lot of different tools, there's a lot of, maybe you call him like vanity metrics sometimes, or a lot of services where it's really about sort of bloating things for like ego purposes and whatnot.

Michael Walker:
And one thing that really struck me about our conversation was that he's someone who really focuses in on authentic fan connection and doing things the right way. So that's what we're going to talk about today with The 4D Songwriter method. So Jayson, thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Jayson Evans:
Thank you so much for having me. It is so cool. And yes, it's been a little bit of a challenge with the time zones, but I'm really happy to be here and to be talking music marketing with you, for sure.

Michael Walker:
Ah, yeah, we made it, sweet man. So to start things off, I'd love to hear just a little bit about your story and how you got started and how you wrote The 4D Songwriter book to get started with.

Jayson Evans:
Yeah, not a problem. So it's, usually people are pretty surprised to hear that I've never actually had a real job in my life aside from working for myself. And that all started because when I was 14, a friend asked me to teach him guitar and that led to me teaching guitar for 10 years. But on that journey, I started to write my own songs and then I taught songwriting. And because of that, I started recording my own music. And from that, I took the money that I made from guitar tuition, and songwriting coaching and put it into recording equipment and then recorded my own songs just for demo purposes. And then said, "Hey, could you record us?" And that turned into me, opening a recording studio, eventually working there for 10 years. So I've always kind of been in the music industry and being in the studio all the time, I was around bands all the time. Recording full time, multiple bands a week most of the time.

Jayson Evans:
And the conversation I would hear over and over again would be, oh, more so the question would be asked to me is like, so what do we do after it comes out? You're helping us recording it, but how do we actually get it heard? And I found myself genuinely not knowing the answer because I was in a band. I just always thought, I mean the music industry changes so quickly that it was a totally different industry 10 years ago. But I remember thinking, I don't know, you've got to kind of put that in the hands of someone that knows what they're doing, be it a management team or a record label or something like that. But I'm not quite sure, I don't know how to self market stuff. And I started to notice certain bands who could build followings online and there were a couple of bands in particular that built huge followings online, but had never played a show.

Jayson Evans:
And to be honest, they were kind of like laughed at when they first did that because they were considered by the real bands to not be a real band. And then all of those bands got proven wrong because these bands that built online presences had somehow cracked the code. And this is like the transition into the digital era. So it really interested me how marketing could work for music artists. Anyway, around 2012, I went through my first real bout with mental health issues. And it was pretty much rock bottom for me at the time. And I decided to start a new music project after finishing my band of eight years, it was a big deal for me to call that to be finished. And I started recording this new album, but I figured that instead of writing with like boundaries up, I'd be open and authentic through my songwriting process, which meant diving deep into my mental health and the issues that I was facing on that journey.

Jayson Evans:
And when the album came out, I couldn't believe the response we got, we were a brand new band and we had a bigger launch than my previous band did that we were never famous, but we had an established audience and this new band outperformed my old band, even though it was brand new. And I found that because I was authentic about what I spoke about and I realized that I started to understand why people were connecting with certain artists and not with at others. And it was only a few months later that I got two separate messages from two different people on different times, completely unrelated, but both saying that my music literally saved their life because they were planning on taking theirs. But it was because of listening to my album at the last moment, it essentially changed their mind. And it just, I was like, oh my goodness, this is so much bigger than fame or that vanity metrics as you said, or anything that makes us look cool followers or whatever.

Jayson Evans:
I need to figure out why my album was able to do this because if I can help music artists understand this, then I can help make the world a way better place. And immediately became clear to me which music artists are focused on themselves and fame and fortune and which ones are actually writing to benefit the lives of their listeners. And I realized that not a lot of people in the music industry are talking about the latter, like trying to create authentic differences in people's lives and seeking quality of listener over quantity. And so I started, I was really random how I came into this online world. But people started asking me questions of like music marketing, because I started to study advertising and psychology behavioral economics and its application to the music industry, which no one else is kind of doing.

Jayson Evans:
So people would ask me questions and I'd be like, "Oh, well this is what I'm finding in my research." When I first got started, I plan to compile a small PDF that was just going to be the answers for a few people, maybe 30 pages and that in typical Jayson fashion just expanded into what eventually became my first book to The 4D Songwriter: How to Dominate the New Music Industry. And along that journey, I've realized that there are so many principles rooted in primitive human psychology, but also discovered more recently in behavioral economic studies and application to just sales and marketing and split tests and results from that can be applied to the music industry. And it all comes back down to that point of authenticity. It doesn't matter what you're studying. It comes down to the way human and humans expect certain things and desire certain things.

Jayson Evans:
And if a music artist can shape their approach to suit those inbuilt human desires, then that is going to be when they succeed. And if you look to any music artist in today's day and age, that is succeeding, I can trace down their success and actually like deconstruct it based on The 4D Songwriter method, which I'm writing new book at the moment that introduces a fifth dimension. So I will be saying the five dimensions because I can't help. I've got it built in my mind now, but I can break it down into the five dimensions. And a lot of music artists who are struggling to get their message heard in this day and age will get their music code, need to find their message and then communicate it in the correct way. And that is what I'm here to tell people to do because that is when music artist is succeeding.

Michael Walker:
Dude, that's so awesome. Well that's really cool. I think that coming from an organic approach over the course of, it sounds like 30 years really, that you've kind of developed your relationship to the music industry and also it's really interest how you mentioned that you experienced this breakthrough moment where this new project and you kind of pulled back the curtain and you just were authentic and you shared the things that you're going through, with the mental health issues. And I think that takes a ton of courage to really peel back curtain and to share that because that's not necessarily something that is easy you to share. I think to me, it sort of, it makes sense like it clicks that you having the courage to share those kind of things was really something that could resonate with other people who might have been struggling with similar things. And also just so awesome that you were able to experience the direct impact that this music made on other people's lives, who were considering taking their own lives and hearing those kinds of stories is so awesome.

Jayson Evans:
When I first released that album, I actually got told by several colleagues of mine, that it was a bad idea. They said, I shouldn't go out there and be so openly authentic because... Or they didn't say authentic, they said to be so transparent or open, I guess, not transparent, explaining that I shouldn't be so revealing too much of myself to well, because they said it presents as a weakness. But it was funny when the album came out, all of them changed their minds because it wasn't just the album coming out. I was contacted by press and news and magazines and publications trying to interview me, but they didn't really so much want to talk about the album as much as they did about the message of the album. And as in meaning the sound of the album, which a lot of music artists get obsessed with, but the message is obviously what led me to be here, because it was what mattered.

Michael Walker:
Wow. That's so interesting too. I mean, I think it seems like that fear of being fully seen or being fully recognized or it's like a paradox because all of it like deep, deep down, we want to be fully seen and fully appreciated and recognized and known. And at the exact same time we have this deep, super fear of being fully seen and recognized and known. And it's probably related to the fear of death in some way. But I can understand how there might have been people around you who are like, oh, like you don't do that. If you're seen then like you're going to die. They didn't say that, but it's sort of this like primal fear that we all sort of have of really being ourselves and being fully seen.

Michael Walker:
And so, yeah, man, I just want to again, encourage you or just honor you for having the courage to let yourself be fully seen because I think that's really rare and the fact that you did that not only you was for yourself, but it made this impact on other people that might've saved their lives really awesome. So I mean the natural where I see like the conversation going is I'm super curious, what are the 5Ds of the songwriting method. So I would love to just maybe go... I know, we only have a limited time here, but I would love to, in the time that we have just kind of to dig into your brain and to see what model that you've created for the 5Ds, and maybe you could start with the 4Ds and then you kind of bridge the gap and talk about this 5th D and why you decided that or why you are writing this new book and we can delve into that a little bit.

Jayson Evans:
For sure. Okay. So when I first came on to write The 4D Songwriter, I didn't intend for it to be The 4D Songwriter, as I said before. So when I started to realize that all these different factors and elements of a music artist could be split into multiple what I was referring to as dimensions, I started to realize the categories that they could all fall into. They all had their own different respective areas. It's a lot of music artists will think that all they have to promote as their music. And I wrote this in as a sentence in the new book, music artists think that the best way to promote music is by promoting music, right. And it makes sense. Okay. But the thing is that's a one dimensional mentality. And the reason why I see so many music artists get so desperately caught up on thinking, they have to like buy all these Spotify playlist placement courses and that kind of stuff is because they're looking through their music only.

Jayson Evans:
Truth be told that, I mean, they're a great complimentary strategy, but they should be something you focus on entirely because you get everyone onto a playlist. And if you dive into the behavior, it's not ideal. I can talk about that forever, but regardless, I don't think that's the best approach. It's a one dimensional mentality. But the first dimension of what I refer to as music centered movements is music. You have to have good music and you have to have music that authentically communicates your creative vision to the world. It doesn't have to be perfect. A lot of people will overly assess their music and remove things until it's almost like the audio equivalent of a hospital room. It's just too clean. It's too sterile, but we'll wonder why people don't connect with it.

Jayson Evans:
Some of the best music in history has blemishes left in it. Like when Sting sat down on the piano at the start of Roxanne, like that adds to the sound of it, which a lot of people aren't aware of. But if you go listen to the start of that song, you hear him sit on the piano, then laugh in the background, little things like that make us human. It's the reason why people prefer analog over digital, blah, blah, blah. So essentially you need to create music that effectively and efficiently communicates your creative vision to the world and moves your listener in the way you want to move them emotionally. Once you have that, you've got the first dimension. The second dimension of the four dimensions when I first wrote them is the personality dimension. And a lot of people think that this just means being out there and being a person in front of people.

Jayson Evans:
And it does to an extent, but it specifically can be divided into two sub elements of the dimension called your story and your motivation. Your story is everything up until this day that led you on this journey to write the music you write. And your motivation is what motivates you to write into the future. Story will tell people why they should join you on your journey and join your movement and move forward with you. But the motivation will be the vehicle that will transport them to a better future. And politicians, any form of influencer, even like cult leaders have used this to grow their audience like historical figures, people leading people into war, people just controlling people, whatever they all use this similar method as what the big music artist are doing too. If you have a great story, but no motivation, then people are going to trust you, but they won't want to jump on board or have no reason to follow you because they don't know where you're going to lead them.

Jayson Evans:
But if you have a great motivation, but no story, people won't have built enough trust with you yet to know that you could lead them to the future you want to get to. So you need those two things sort of. Then the third dimension in The 4Ds Songwriter is branding and it's everything to do with your content strategy, how you actually release things to the world. And the fourth dimension was lifestyle. And that was essentially not your lifestyle, but the lifestyle of your listeners and specifically thinking outside of your music. And it was the first time I introduced raw psychology to it's application to essentially persuasion, the psychology persuasion, sorry for your audience and the way to implement it. And it was because of this dimension that I realized I was just kind of scratching the surface. And I knew it was much deeper, which is why I started writing the new book.

Jayson Evans:
In the new book, the five dimensions are music just as I explained, personality just as I explained, I've broadened branding to be materials because it's much more than just the content you create. It's understanding the psychology of why you're creating the content and how to speak to people, aligning with things like cognitive processing fluency, which is just how easy a message is received from someone, how to speak to their internal desires. It's the way you communicate through your content. And then the lifestyle dimension has been broadened to culture. And it's about how you establish the, I jokingly refer to it as culture, the culture of your audience and how you grow that and the movement that you are, but how you communicate, how your audience operates, how to make your listeners feel expensive when they listen to your music, which is the secret of the biggest music artists.

Jayson Evans:
And then lastly, the new dimension after the other ones have been kind of a little bit reworked to be more inclusive and also provide better information is operations. And it's just about how you actually day to day conduct yourself. How money comes in, how you run for things. The back end of the business, so to speak. But if you put those five dimensions together, you have a multidimensional approach and multifaceted way of bringing people to begin their journey into what I introduced through the book as my concept of a listen path, which is the journey from a brand new listener, discovering you to eventually becoming a committed true fan. And you step them through four stages on that journey. And these dimensions will be what fuels people to move up that path to eventually commit to you long term.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast. I can tell you about a free, special offer they're doing right now, exclusively for our podcast listeners. So 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. So right now we're offering a free two week trial to our music mentor coaching program. And if you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to access to our entire music mentor content vault for free. The vault is organized into four different content pillars. The first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and the last, but not least the business.

Michael Walker:
When you sign up, you unlock our best indepth masterclass from a network of world, class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting edge strategies right now for growing your music business. On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds, where our highest level of modern musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, we're going to have our music mentor spotlight series. And that's what we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches and successful musicians to teach you what's working right now. And one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top of music mentors. So a lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast but they're live interacting with you personally.

Michael Walker:
So imagine being able to connect with them directly. On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community. And this is definitely one of my favorite parts of music mentor and maybe the most valuable is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career. So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now, sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community and sign up for the live master classes that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show. So don't miss it out, go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. Yeah, I love it. And like whenever I hear something like that, like a framework or a model I always am really excited to kind of dig into it because I feel like we all, you probably don't really relate to this, just be like with behavioral like... It sounds like psychology, whatnot that we all have our own map for reality. And reality is one thing. And it's like this thing that changes over time, but the map is not the territory, but we all have different maps. We're sort of explaining the territory. And so it sounds like you've constructed like a really cool map and a way of framework for understanding how to be successful as an artist, which is really helpful. And I think having multiple different frameworks and your tool belt that you've cross referenced between other ones is just super awesome.

Michael Walker:
So there's that, and it sounds like there's another framework for like the listener path that I'm definitely excited to dig into. Before we dig into that one, maybe we can go into just like one of the five dimensions that you feel like is the one that's maybe most relevant or the one that most people are struggling with that whoever might be listening to this right now as a musician could use like a little bit more depth with going into, what would you say is the one of the five dimensions if we only had time to go into one that you think would be most relevant to musicians right now?

Jayson Evans:
Well, it's definitely not the sexiest dimension because a lot of people want to hear that creating content and getting things out there and dominating social media and playlisting and all that kind of stuff. It's not going to be the materials dimension, the best dimension that I recommend everyone start out is the personality dimension. Have you ever seen a movie? I'm sure you have where it doesn't start at the beginning, it starts like a little bit in, and then you go back and you watch the beginning. That's essentially what it is for music artist. It's not that you start with your music, then move into the personality dimension. You've built your music. Now you need to go back to the start of the movie and watch out what caused you to write that music. It's not so much creating your motivation as it is discovering your motivation.

Jayson Evans:
What actually is the reason that you write music in the first place it's already in your music. And I talk about diving into your lyrics and summarizing what all your songs are about then creating statements that summarize all of them together. So you can say, I wrote my music for these type of people that are struggling with this specific issue. And for me personally, back in the day, it was, I'm writing my music for people who have just come out of long term relationships because that's what had happened to me. And that's what led me into my depression at that age, who are struggling with finding themselves and discovering whatever. I could say in better words, but I'm making off the top of my head. And that would allow me to then realize that's who my album was for.

Jayson Evans:
So then I only should be interested in finding those people. So many music artists are aiming for the masses and trying to get mass exposure, but the general population won't care about your movement. It's about one specific section of the audience, or sorry of the population will care immensely. And those are the people you can change the lives of. There's no point getting tons of new fans and if they're going to forget about you in two weeks time, because they don't really connect with what you do. Yet, if you get someone that connects with your message, now you don't have to push your music in face all the time. You can get a message in front of their face. I'll tell you a great example of this. There was an artist that I used as like a bit of a research case study.

Jayson Evans:
And we found that his motivation after diving into specifically what he's all about, he found that he wanted to show people through his music that even though you've been through, he was in the mental health space as well, and I should just say, as a side note, it doesn't have to be such an emotionally charged reason. You have a negative emotion that drives people even if they go to clubs and listen to dance music, they're trying to find escapism. So you got to find what your listeners are really looking for and then market that toward them. Because I did that with the DJ, we changed his marketing message to escapism and his stats went up. It was crazy. You're just going to find on what your listener wants. But with this artist I'm talking about Mark, he actually, he was in the mental health space and he had a message that wanted to show people, like you want to show people so that no matter what you've been through you aren't damaged by your past essentially.

Jayson Evans:
And we started workshopping different messages and we ended up coming up with the line, being damaged is beautiful and that's all it was. And he was trying for ages to promote his music just by itself. And no one really cared because to be honest, if you do that, you're just one of a million trillion music artists out there. Why is your music so special? And it's such a harsh truth to hear, but no one cares about you unless they already care about you. So how do you get them to care about you in order to check out your music? It's so easy for music artists to say, oh, it's just three minutes or four minutes of their time, why can't they listen to my music? But obviously what you're asking them to do is too big of an us. So how do you make that us smaller, where you attract them and their own natural curiosity by speaking to their internal conversation.

Jayson Evans:
So that's getting probably a little bit in depth, but essentially what we did was that we changed Mark's strategy from instead of just being like, listen to my new song, we just put up a single picture. He put it on Instagram ads and Facebook ads. It was just a picture of him with the words being damaged is beautiful written across his face and his body. It looked really [inaudible 00:23:03] covered it, but the ad didn't tell anyone to do anything, had no CTA, the call to action. It didn't try to tell anyone to go check anything out. It just was that, that's all it was. And any marketer will say, that's a terrible ad because you have nothing to drive. There's no offer. There's nothing to drive the audience to, but you're not trying to drive people. You're trying to stoke curiosity because curiosity breeds anticipation, which creates positive feedback lives. And people seek out a way to solve that by themselves.

Jayson Evans:
So curiosity will drive people to the move toward action. So we ran this ad and we found that his original ads that were just trying to get people to click through to his music and listen on Spotify, barely anyone did. He put in front of a lot of people and the conversion rate was so small at getting people to like actually listen to his tracks. However, when we ran the ad of him, just standing there with the words being damaged is beautiful and targeted at people that likely have shown some form of interest in or an alignment with mental health related, they're probably people going through mental health issues. We found that people were not only and remember every single conversion they do is impressive considering that no one would do even one, which was going to Spotify to listen to his music before. People were not only clicking through on his ad to go to his Instagram profile, they were then clicking follow and not only clicking follow, they then stay on his page and like several posts.

Jayson Evans:
So they check more things out. And then not only that would click the Spotify link in his bio without even being asked to and would go to his Spotify and listen to multiple songs. Like by comparison and that's like seven or eight conversions compared to different ones, compared to one that he couldn't get before. And if that doesn't prove that message forward marketing or what I call motivation forward marketing, isn't more efficient than trying to slam new music in people's faces then I don't know what is. But he wasn't a big artist. He just found the message that spoke to his core audience and it built enough curiosity, it generated enough to move them forward to where they wanted to be, which is to follow him and go, I feel this way. He's writing music for people like me. I have a headache and he's providing this solution to that headache, the headache tablet, I need to find more information out.

Jayson Evans:
This is different to every other music artist. Yet, if you just promoted his music, maybe those same people saw that out and were like, I have no reason to care about this guy. The personality to mention is absolutely the most essential because it is the absolute nucleus of your creative journey. It's what you try to bring to life in your music. You're now just bringing it to life through words and through other ways. And as soon as you unlock that, you unlock so many other ways to grab your attention of highly compatible listeners that stand the best chance of becoming true fans and helping them on their journey to get started. Music, once they have that initial reason is what they done check out next. But if you're trying to push music first, you're going to struggle.

Michael Walker:
That's so interesting. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is that, especially nowadays where it's so easy to distribute your music and get it out and to record yourself, there's so much music that it's in order to stand out really at this point, the music you're going to be better served by figuring out a sharp point, a sharp edge to cut through the threshold of attention. And one of the best ways to do that is by really clarifying and refining what is your core message that identifies with the fans and helping them to identify themselves. That's really interesting too. How did you put it exactly. So I write music for blank who are struggling with blank or what was that?

Jayson Evans:
Exactly. Yes, that's it. Yeah. So you say, you look at your music and go, if I had to summarize this song up into one single sentence, you would say, I wrote this song for this group of people who are struggling with this type of issue. And if you want to do it for a full release, you do that for every song, then start to cross out ones, if they're the same and then group similar ones and start to create smaller group statements. Like I wrote these songs for this group of people. So if, I mean, this is difficult to do, think of examples off the top of my head, but say you've got heartbroken people and lonely romantics, you might summarize them with a single word that summarizes both of them. Who are struggling with losing their loved one or moving on, and then it's like relationship issues or something like that, to summarize it a bit more.

Jayson Evans:
And then you do that and they of start to create it. It's it takes a little bit of time, but then you end up doing that for multiple groups and it might get tricky depending on how broad your songwriting, what you write about in your lyrics is, but usually for most music artists, because it all comes back to one shared commonality, if that's the right way to say it, which is you, you are always writing because it all comes back to you. So you've got to find out what the common sentence is that you have. And then once you do that, you're able to then know exactly how to speak to people. I mean, here's another one too. There's a good little framework or template I would use for promoting stuff is all you have to do is when you promote your music out there, if you want to promote music, which if you've got an audience who's already curious is great because you've got people ready to listen.

Jayson Evans:
You don't just go, here's my song. You say, "Have you ever felt like this? Yeah, me too. That's why I wrote this song because I really wanted to help you, blah, blah, blah." So that's all you have to do. Not in those exact words, but even if you say something like, so the other day I was feeling... And then use words that you know that your listeners will relate to and go, you've already said in that single sentence, have you felt like this? And I have too. So you don't have to use it in two separate sentences. But just use that as a standard template if you want, have you ever felt like you never can fit in the world and everything's too difficult? Yeah, I've once felt that way too. Here's a little story about why I felt that way. And that's why I wrote this brand new song.

Jayson Evans:
Because I really wanted to help you feel better in whatever better looks like to them. And you can use that over and over again when you release and your listeners who can resonate with your message, they don't just see the first time because think about how someone's scrolling through their feed, just new content, random video advertisement. And they see your post, if it's listen to my latest song, it might be difficult for them to do that because not every... Back in the day, I mean, I'm getting older now, but if you sent someone a song, they're sitting at a desktop computer, they probably could listen to it. Now people are on their phones. They're out in public. They probably can't listen to their music as easily. But if you hit them with the message first and they see something saying, "Have you ever felt like this?"

Jayson Evans:
And they're like, "Yeah, I have." And without diving into the psychology, that allows them to feel connected to the sentence through [inaudible 00:28:58] process in fluency. And they would be like, "Well, now I'm involved in reading this." And it's caught their attention. So they go, well, yeah, I have. And it's like, you have to, well, we like each other. And studies have shown that we are attracted to those that are similar to us and you go, "I've written this song because I really want you to feel..." And whatever better and a more ideal future looks like to them. And they're like, "Oh, well, I've got to check this out now." So then they'll make time to listen to your music. Even if they're not able to do it, then genuinely, they might not be able to listen to it. They might save it.

Jayson Evans:
They might set a reminder but then, I've got to check this out when I can. And they will, because now they're driven to find out if they can connect with you on that level. And the idea of fans chasing music artists is something that all music artists dream of. But we haven't really seen since when music was far less saturated where people were like, "I want new music." And supply versus demand, it's totally lopsided these days, but it's message first. And if people go on social media to find connection, that's it. Negative emotional drivers are the reason behind everything. And the reason people go on social media to multiple different reasons, Facebook Messanger might be because they want to feel connected to loved ones. Instagram is because they don't want to miss out. TikTok is because they, again, they don't want to miss out on trends.

Jayson Evans:
There's always a negative emotion driving people. If you can find what that emotion is, which is usually seeking connection, you just have to provide it in abundance in your content, which a lot of other people aren't doing and it will be like, at a non conscious level, they will be like, "I feel so drawn. This is like... It's scratching the itch that I had inside me. This is exactly the content that I want to feel when I open the app." Not just see people think they want to be entertained, but they need to find connections. So if you provide to their needs, that's how you're going to actually find people that latch onto you, which is what every music artist ideally really wants.

Michael Walker:
That's so interesting. Yeah. I loved your perspective on really matching this like behavioral psychology and what you've learned in terms of like marketing psychology as well, and matching that with the messaging for musicians, which I think sometimes it's challenging, wondering how do I connect this music to some of these kind of common principles. I think that makes a ton of sense. And in terms of like really narrowing in on an audience and identifying the right person who the music is for, I think that's just brilliant, like that framework that you have. I wrote this song for blank, this group of people who are struggling with blank. If you can figure out a good, fill in the blanks for that, for a specific song, and then you can specifically target the people or that group of people who are struggling with blank, it just makes so much sense.

Michael Walker:
And I think that with the way that social media algorithms are working basically is moving more and more towards personalization and more towards sharing content that identifies based on who we are. And so I just, I think it makes a lot of sense. And it's also the way that I think a lot of us do listen to songs or listen to music when we get really into a song like a breakup song, maybe it's because we just went through a breakup, right. And we're struggling with X, Y, and Z. And so I think it makes sense that if you have the intentionality and the clarity, to be able to look at your song and really identify like who is this the best fit for, who's going to resonate most with this and how do I speak clearly to that person so that they can read that and say, "Oh, that's me. Oh, that's me."

Michael Walker:
Then if you can make someone go, "Oh, that's me." Then it's so hard for them not to just click and listen to it because it's going to be so personally, like it's going to speak to them and all of us are on this path of self discovery and looking for things that you can kind of shine a light on that. So I think it's really, really interesting, a cool framework. So let's dive into the... We talked a little bit about the listener path, right? So was it like four or five steps that you see as sort of the transformational process for a new listener that turns into a more engaged fan and builds more of authentic connection with the artist. What does that path look like?

Jayson Evans:
Essentially, yeah, the idea of the listen path came to me because I started to notice the marketing world and businesses have a lot of really handy marketing funnels that are very easy to use for audience segmentation and understanding. People who know marketing will see a listen path and some people say, "Oh, so it's like an AIDA funnel kind of thing. I'm like not really because it's a little bit different. It's built for the music industry and it's not built... A lot of marketing funnels will talk about it's to build conversions. And when people hear the idea of sales funnels, they think, oh the free offer, then the higher offer, blah, blah, I guess that's more of a value ladder, but converting people down the funnel is what you're trying to get people to the value ladder lines, with the whatever, semantics. But essentially the listen part itself, it measures straight up users connection with you as an artist.

Jayson Evans:
If you think of your favorite artist in the world, that you would travel interstate to go see if they were performing. The ones that you feel like have changed your life for the better are the ones you love, that you are likely a cult listener of those artists, the truest of true fans. And the way to get to that final stage is through connection. The other three stages, which are the first three stages of the listen path are built on being exposed to content that builds familiarity and builds curiosity. So to take it back to the beginning, you're a brand new cold listener who has never been exposed to an artist before, which is the first stage of listen path, cold. And you stumble across a piece content. Let's say, if they do it the right way, like I'm talking about earlier that you see a message that you go, oh, I connect with that.

Jayson Evans:
That's exactly who I am. You're now curious. You've now transitioned from the cold stage to the curious stage. And that's where you actually start to perform actions. Cold audiences do not perform actions and you can't force anyone to do anything. The harder you try Newton's third law. You'll be met with opposite resistance. So that's why people will go, oh, no matter how hard I try, people won't do anything. It's like, that's the whole point. That's how it all works. You can't force people, but you can get people to perform actions if you are able to convince them that what you're asking them to do was their decision almost. That they're like, well, I'm choosing to do this even though you want them to do what you want to do? And that's essentially persuasion. People have used that unethically, but I'm only ever talking about ethical persuasion.

Jayson Evans:
And you get them curious and curiosity is what drives action. There's been tons of studies that have shown this. Like when they hooked up the electrodes to the nuclear [inaudible 00:35:10] in rats brains and gave them a button that they pressed it and they get stimulated and they ended up... They did it with humans and they ended up having to restrain people because people wouldn't give their buttons back, super unethical. It's crazy. But that goes to show like when the nuclear [inaudible 00:35:22] is lit up, we get crazy amounts of reward and feedback loops success. Not so much that, but like people just become so satisfied with pressing that button. And they thought it was the type part of the brain that is delivered like in rats too, it's like when they press the button, they thought it was because it was when the reward came.

Jayson Evans:
But it wasn't when the reward came, they found out that it actually lights up in anticipation of a reward, which is why people who win on poker machines like slot machines, aren't actually, on a neurologic level, aren't as satisfied when they win as they are when they see the real spinning. It's crazy. But it's because the anticipation is so much more of a driver. So when you're in the curious stage, you will perform actions. And when your listeners get to that stage, you just have to capture their attention and fill them with curiosity. You get into that curious stage, they will start to perform actions. And that's when they're checking out things about you. You might find an artist to go back to that example and go, that sounds interesting. I want to see more. I like that. What else have they got? Oh, that's pretty cool, blah, blah. But eventually after enough exposure, remember you are doing all the action. If you set up correctly, your listeners will do the actions for you. You won't be saying, "Please everyone, go check this out, please click this."

Jayson Evans:
They'll just do it because you've built the message correctly and you just keep fueling them with stuff that makes them curious, not through tacky click bait, by the way, through authentic messaging. And because click bait, if there's no good reward on the other side or the anticipation will feel like it was worth nothing. But if there's a little bit of a reward, the anticipation is always worth seeking more of like slot machines. Even if they win a few cents, they'll stay around. Weird, it sounds like I'm talking about ethical persuasion and talking about how to manipulate people. Slot machines, but there's been studies that have proven it. There is a separation in my argument, but then people will start...

Michael Walker:
Well, just out of curiosity. I mean, because I feel like that's a really interesting conversation point that would be great to address and I'm sure that you have like an interesting perspective on it is in this field of persuasion, right. Which is, I think most people we think that we have more agency probably than we do, we're so to interconnected with everything else. And that's the reason that marketing and advertising exists is because we can literally be like directly influenced by these ads. But when we talk about ethical persuasion versus unethical persuasion and all the things that we're talking about right now, where do you think the line is drawn and how can we make sure that we're using these tools and in a way that's best like a win-win for everyone.

Jayson Evans:
Yeah. Well, it's such an interesting discussion. I used to think that the line for me personally was that if it's persuasion, it's ethical, if it's coercion, it's unethical. You can't force people to do things. But then I saw someone say, if you know for sure that what you're trying to get someone to do is in their best interests and it will help them, is coercion really that big of a deal. And I'm like, this is like talking to a bat men villain because you know that it's not the right thing, but they kind of making a point, you know what I mean? If it is genuinely in their best interest, like Jack Bower on 24, he'll go against the government to do the right thing, to save people. So I'm like, damn that is so crazy. So the line is much more blurred than I originally thought.

Jayson Evans:
But if you know that what you're doing, you can always stay in the ethical way by using, I mean, a lot of stuff, I talk about dive into different biases that we have and how to use them to your advantage. So yes, it's manipulation, but a lot of people consider manipulation to be like a negative thing. And everything is manipulation. Like conversation is manipulation, because you're trying to get them to understand your side, but the word has been used. If someone is called a manipulator, it's usually the negative reasons. But manipulation is changing thoughts and emotion.

Michael Walker:
Well, we're manipulating our mouths right now to make these words come out of our mouths.

Jayson Evans:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's just controlled action, I guess, to look into it, I guess, but anyway, controlling the action probably. But yeah, like you can definitely stay in the ethical persuasion area by just making sure that what you are doing is never really forcing people to do something because I don't really believe even with the point that I brought up earlier, that changed my perspective a bit. I don't think anyone can truly know what they're doing is in someone's absolute best interest. You don't know exactly. Even if you are married to someone or living with them or even they're in your family, you don't know them like you know yourself. So you can't ever tell them that you know them better than they know themselves. That's unfair. So you should always be thinking that it's like, you need to lay the breadcrumbs, but it's up to them to follow it.

Jayson Evans:
And you have to make sure the breadcrumbs you lay are what they're interested in eating in the first place. You know what I mean? You have to know your audience to know that there's no point in putting meatballs down if your audience is vegan, like metaphorically speaking. Then you find what attracts them and lead them to where they want to be. But at any time, I mean, there should be... You know, if you ever step into unethical persuasions, a lot of the research I do is into like, my fascination behind how cults can take this principle and end up using it to destroy people's lives and seeing what they do and stuff where they do they are like deprogramming of people is just insane. If you're at that point where you're telling people to disassociate from their families and that type of thing, then obviously you know that you're doing the wrong thing.

Jayson Evans:
But as long as you're just a music artist, who's saying to people I've been through this, if you've been through it too, then you can follow me. They will build that curiosity in the listen path and start to understand why they're in the right place. And they will naturally want to seek more. And if you laid out the right way, people will always assume that there's better stuff around the corner. The grass is always greener. That's why we keep striving for more things. So you don't have to only intentionally release snippets, give good stuff on the front end because people are going to naturally assume there's... If they find more out about you, they'll get more good stuff. So hit them with the best stuff. So they build the most curiosity and build the most connection because if enough exposure of great content that resonates with their internal conversation, they'll move to the third stage of listen path, which is converted.

Jayson Evans:
And that's when they've become a fan of your music. They've made that decision internally. Like I am a fan of that artist. I really like them. And that's where you will have won them over. They might not stay around long term. You have to get them to cult for that. But as I said, cult transition can only occur through personal connection, curiosity and that type of stuff, it's all great and messaging in that. But the artists that you usually feel the most connected with is because they were able to affect you on an incredibly personal level. You said something really interesting before where you said that we all have our favorite songs because we might have been going through a breakup or something. And we listened to that song a million times and built a personal connection with it. That's why we are such fans of that song was because we built that personal connection.

Jayson Evans:
Now the problem with that for the music artist is that they don't know that you did that and they didn't intend for you... I mean, they had hoped you did that, but they didn't build the framework to influence you to be in the position is when you needed it for that song to be in your life. We stumbled across these songs by chance or because of other external factors and the stars aligned for us. But I imagine how great it would be as a music artist, if the stars didn't have to align for a person to find your song, like to hear the exact right message and the exact right way or the exact right time, you engineer these scenarios so that when you know, people are kind of going through that, you put your song in front of them and you are able to build these crazy cult listeners with much more efficiency.

Jayson Evans:
And because the internet is so targeted and yes, although the Apple tracking changes of like all the destroyed Facebook ads and they're one of the best ways to target behavior based tendency of users, the internet is very good now with algorithms and stuff of putting content in front of the eyes of those that need it based on the other behavior they've gone through, which is where you want people to be. If people aren't aware of their issue yet, you have to educate them more what the issue is. And then that you are the solution to that, which is Eugene Schwartz's awareness scale. But if people are already looking at other similar things online about it, the algorithm will go, well, do you want to see this as well? And they're the ones that are like, "Yeah, I'm aware that I'm going through this and I'm aware that I could benefit from that." And that's what's going to get you eventually to that cult stage. And that's where people stay around for far longer, but that's the highest level of fandom, everyone wants those.

Michael Walker:
It's super interesting. And yeah, I kind of come back to like the ethical and unethical. It sounds like what you're saying is that, it's all the honest truth is that none of us really knows for certain like what's... None of us have a future, like a crystal ball where we know what's going to happen. So all you can do is really do the best that you can. And what is ethical versus unethical is... We're always manipulating no matter what. But it's about really, where are we manipulating towards? And what's the focus? Is our intention to help bring other people up and to help them to move into a better state. And that includes all of us, including ourselves, or is it our intention to mislead someone and to take self advantage at the expense of other people? Do we feel like if someone else succeeds, there's less for me and therefore I want other people not to succeed, right. Or are we using the manipulation or persuasion in a way that's to really benefit them and create more abundance for everyone.

Jayson Evans:
That initially comes from what drives you in the very beginning. So much so that in my new book, that is the opening sentence of the book. I say, "Imagine that there are two sold out venues and you have the chance to perform at one of them. One is an 18,000 capacity stadium and the other is a room with a thousand people in it. Which one do you choose?" Most music artists will choose the stadium, which is fine, because you probably should aim for the bigger audience. But what if I told you that the people in the stadium don't really care about you and will likely forget about you in a week or so? While the people in the smaller room are people a thousand people whose lives you've changed for the better, who have developed an unbreakable connection with you, which one do you choose now?

Jayson Evans:
And I put that question at the start of my book, because I say, most music artists will change their answer. But if you don't and you genuinely care more about the stadium, like I use in a footnote, one guy did say to me, "You know what? To be honest, I just choose the stadium because it's a better Instagram story." I found that funny. But it didn't serve him that well because he ended up quit music a few months later. But it goes to show what motivates you, if your motivation from the beginning to use the word in a different way, not the motivation I was referring to before. But if what motivates you is personal desire, then you're never going to be able to build this in the right way. And you probably will step into maybe not deliberate, unethical persuasion.

Jayson Evans:
But if it is a means to the end of you satisfying your selfish desire, you probably, we will end up doing that. But yeah, it's important that you find from the beginning that you care more about changing people's lives for the better. And then I say, you can work on filling your stadium, but with the right people this time, and it's not about people, some people think I'm talking about only caring about small audiences, a lot of music artists do only care about, they would love it if they played in front of hundred people, each show, but all 100 cared about them. Not everyone wants to perform to huge arenas or whatever, but even if you want to, you can do it. You just have to build your audience the right way. And that's why the world's biggest artists are able to fill stadiums with people who are obsessed with them.

Jayson Evans:
It's because they've connected with them on a personal level. A great example of that is Taylor Swift. She's done so much personal connection with people. Like, even things like performing a people's engagements parties completely unpaid, I assume. And haven't listened parties for her album in her own house, even if you aren't directly invited seeing that video allows you to build that connection with Taylor Swift because you know, she's that type of artist. It's the reason whyPost Malone blew up. He was so personal and was going on Twitch streams and just hanging out with people and just building real connection with people. And that's why people jump behind him is because at the end of the day, music is just a weapon of choice where humans at the other end of it and people want human connection. That's all we want.

Jayson Evans:
You don't need to, with your messaging too. As you said, you got to lead people to a better future. If you talk about mental health, the goal is to not just bring people into dwell on their mental health problems. You've got to take them to a better future because that's what people want. Even people in the nineties who love Nirvana because it was just so grunge and depressing, they still are at the end of the day, even though they made out, all they wanted to do is wear their mental health at the time, might not have been aware of it, but they were using as like a badge of honor, like this is who I am. It was a cathartic experience that made them feel better to be able to do that. So people always want to feel better. So you have to be able to take them there or else it won't work for you either.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that's a really good point too, because I feel like one of the benefits of music so often is around that kind of cathartic experience where even just... And for example, when you wrote that album, that really resonated with people, that was authentic and vulnerable and exposed some of these things that you had been going through it wasn't like you came out and you just pretended like everything is awesome, everything is great, right. But you really kind of shown a light on some of the stuff that, and the other example you mentioned is that broken or they say like messiness is beautiful or something along those lines.

Jayson Evans:
Being damaged is just beautiful. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Being damaged is beautiful. And I think that there is like a... Even without necessarily having a message of like, by the end of the song, by the end of the sad song, all of a sudden they're like, and everything turned out awesome.

Jayson Evans:
Exactly.

Michael Walker:
Just like being willing to shine light and to express that and to release it. There's a cathartic experience that comes with that, right. And it is a better state, it's they're feeling better because they're able to express that. Awesome man. Well, Hey dude, I love conversations like this, like geek out on this stuff. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here and to share these frameworks and for anyone who's listening or watching this right now, who wants to dig deeper and check out maybe The 4D Songwriter and also being in touch about this new book, what's the best place for them to go to learn more.

Jayson Evans:
Yeah, sure. So you can follow me on Instagram. I admittedly am not that active online because I am so busy working on stuff. But you can follow me DM me on Instagram. If you want to reach out, hit me up, I'll send you a bunch of stuff. It's Jayson John Evans, but it's J-A-Y-S O-N John Evans, but you can also find me at Iamnorthbound.com. I put up my best content there each week. That's where I dive into. If you like more of the psychology stuff every week, I'm putting up episodes in there where I give the results of the research I'm doing, while I'm working on my book, I find a bunch of stuff and I'll put it up there first and chat about it and dive into it in depth. That's pretty much it Iamnorthbound.com. And on Instagram, if you need anything or you want chat or anything like that, or if you've got questions, I'm happy to help people.

Jayson Evans:
I'm not a person who's like, I'll only do it if I get paid. So send me a DM on Instagram or an email at Jayson, J-A-Y-S-O-N@listenpages.com and Listen Page is essentially just the software that we're looking at building that it uses the listen path, but we're currently moving it to another thing. So you won't find much at listenpages.com or anything at all, but you can email me, but yeah. Or a DM on Instagram or something, hit me up with whatever questions you got. And I'll be happy to send you a voice note or something back, and I'll give you a bit of help with as much as I can do.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. Yeah, man. So like always we'll throw all the notes, in the show notes so we can get into that deeper.

Jayson Evans:
Yeah, cool.

Michael Walker:
And awesome. It's been a lot of fun. I appreciate you. I appreciate you sharing and looking forward to checking out the book that's coming out.

Jayson Evans:
For sure. Thank you so much for having me.

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