A chat with Rory from Voodoo Bloo about the recent rise on Spotify and how they achieved this. Some good advice for other bands as their very first single MMA has gone Gold and on its way towards 30,000 streams!
“After a huge year for us, touring around Aussie and New Zealand, as well as releasing our second album, the band and I reached a point where we could grasp normalcy again, and with normalcy, comes a lot of admin. We loved every minute of what we did this year, but we realised that to make next year even bigger we needed to increase our reach even further, which in itself is a very vague concept, and one without a lot of focus or thought.
We decided in the end, something that would be cool to try, was trying to get our music onto playlists that we really loved, and to increase our follower count on Instagram. With that goal in mind, it helped us focus our efforts to increase our reach to one specific area.
Going about Spotify playlist submissions isn't exactly an easy task, but as we saw after spending a lot of downtime finding ones that were right for us, it can really help you get your music out to the right people, without having to go through the normal means of promotion for your content (posting to specific groups, your music falling on cold shoulders etc…), this also lead to a healthy amount of new followers on all our platforms at the same time, whilst trying to upload consistent content.
It really should go without saying, but if you don't care about your content, then no one will. Spend time digging for gold on socials, videos or photos that actually make you think, or at least you admire in some sort of fashion. Giving any sort of visual passion project a go will really show off who you are as people, what the band is like outside of the music, and gives the people who follow you a real chance to see a completely different side of what you do.
Building your audience is about as much focus and goal setting as possible, don't spend your time doing a one hundred things with 1% effort into each, but just focus on 3 or 4 things with at least 25% effort when working on your project, people will see the love your putting into it more, and that love will resonate.”