Streaming services like Spotify are stepping in to help musicians during these hard times. It’s super easy now to add & promote your livestream event on Spotify. Let’s set it up!
Since the start of the COVID-19-pandemic, a lot of bands and artists have moved from the live stage to live streaming. While it’s not the same experience as a live show, a live stream makes up for some of the loss of contact between artists and fans. It’s a great way to keep fans engaged, make up some of your losses (if you sell tickets) and give people something to look forward to during these dark days. And with still no perspective for concerts in 2012, there’s a good chance it will be the only way to play live for some time to come.
Promoting a livestream, however, is a different task than promoting your live event. There are no promotors involved, no local media to contact. But music services are stepping in to help artists to get their livestream in front of fans. Let’s take a look at how you can promote your livestream on Spotify.
1. Set up your livestream
Setting up a livestream is very easy and you have many platforms to choose from. It can be as simple as taking your phone, opening Instagram, choosing ‘live’ and voilá… you are visible for the whole wide world.
If you want to do it more professionally, you can host a livestream on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook or even your own website. When deciding on a platform, think about which one is best suited for you and your audience. On which platform do you have the most followers? Where would people most likely be able to find you easily?
Another thing to decide on is whether the livestream will be free, or if people need to buy a ‘ticket’. Think about what you want to accomplish with your live stream. Do you simply want to promote your band and keep your fans engaged? Or do you badly need money to keep the band alive? If you don’t want to sell tickets, you could also ask for donations during your stream.
2. Add your livestream event on Songkick
After deciding on a platform for your livestream, take a minute to choose about a good date and time. I’d advise you to plan you event about two weeks in the future. If you plan it closer to today, chances are your fans already have plans for that day or time. Plan it much later in the future, and chances are people already forgot about your livestream by the time you go live.
Chosen a date and time? Great! Let’s officially announce your stream on Songkick. This is needed to later show your live stream on Spotify. Simply log in to the Songkick tourbox app and add it as a new event, just like you would do with any regular ‘live’ event. Be sure to include a link to the place where you’ll go live!
3. Show your livestream on Spotify
It can take a little while for Spotify to detect your event on Songkick and to start displaying it. As soon as Spotify has processed the event, it will be displayed to users under their ‘events’ tab.
Even better, you can add the event to the top of your Spotify artist profile as ‘artists’s pick’. Simply log in to Spotify for artists, select ‘profile’ in the top navigation bar, and set your artist’s pick on the right side. If you have multiple events or live streams planned, you can choose a specific event to feature on your profile. You can also add a custom message to display together with the link to the event.
Now anyone who visits your Spotify profile will immediately see the announcement for your livestream!
Don’t have a Spotify artist profile yet? To create an artist profile, you must first upload your music to Spotify. Luckily this is super easy, just create an account and add your tracks! After uploading, an artist profile will be created for you automatically.
4. E-mail your Spotify followers
With a Spotify for Artists account, you can see a lot of statistics and metrics. Things like follower count, country, age and playlist placements can give you a good idea of who your listeners and followers are. Unfortunately there’s no way to reach these followers directly via e-mail to promote your livestream. Well, until now!
When you set up your livestream to show up on Spotify like we’ve discussed above, Spotify will automatically send an e-mail to your followers. These e-mails include your artist name and date/time of the live stream, as well as a link to the Songkick event page. On this page, people can find the direct link to your livestream on YouTube or any other platform.
There’s no way to customise these Spotify livestream notifications, but it’s still a very valuable tool to promote your livestream on Spotify and increase your reach.
(By the way, your followers also receive an e-mail when you release new music.)
5. Stream!
And now the only thing you have to do is wait for your event date.. and put on an awesome show!
While it’s not the same as a live concert, live-streaming has some advantages too. You are not limited by venue capacity, so you can have thousands, tens of thousands of fans who can all see your livestream, from anywhere in the world. You could even build a regular streaming schedule or do a virtual ‘tour’ with a different platform every month.
If you sell tickets, it might even create a new solid income stream for you. For example, K-pop group BTW has made over $20 million selling tickets to a single live-stream show.
Let’s hope this pandemic ends soon and we’ll all be able to go to concerts and festivals again. Until then, we hope these tips help you set up and promote your livestream, and give you some insight in how platforms like Spotify can help. Good luck with your livestream endeavours!