For most musicians, social media is the primary marketing tool used to promote themselves and their music. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter are great for putting out content and building a following. A 2016 research about fan-artist relationships on social media concluded that the participation and interaction from fans allow musicians to bring fans into their world of music, thereby increasing fan loyalty and eventually revenue. However, with organic traffic continuously decreasing on these platforms, it’s getting much harder to consistently reach your loyal fans and monetize them eventually. While finding new fans on social media is important, it's just as important to keep your existing ones engaged and loyal.
Why you need an email list as a musician
For starters, with email you can reach 100% of your audience, anytime you want. It should be used complementary to social media. Most successful artists use social media to post content, build their following, and even create a sense of community. However, it is a well-known fact that not every follower will see your posts.

For this reason, it might go unnoticed by some of your closest fans when you post a hugely important announcement. These close fans probably would have loved to hear about this announcement, but the algorithm didn’t put it on their feeds. This problem can be solved by funneling your closest fans into your email list.

Research on the organic reach of 3600 Instagram posts found the average reach to be as low as 0.9%.

Average open rates for emails from artists are 26.27%, according to MailChimp.

There is of course a big difference between following someone on Instagram and joining an artist’s email list. But this is a nice distinction to have since your email list will then only consists of fans that are actually engaged with you.

For this reason, email is a great medium to use for musicians to keep in touch with their close fans, make important announcements, and let them know about any new music, products, services, tour dates, or anything else you've got going on.

How to grow your email list as a musician

1. Give out early access

You can use your social media accounts to incentivize your followers to sign up for your email list. Usually, they expect to get something in return for signing up with their email address. You can use social media to drive traffic to your sign-up page, where they can unlock gated content in exchange.

Fangage is the perfect web solution to post your gated content on and let fans unlock it by signing up with their email address or phone number. Some ideas for early access that fans can unlock with their data are:

Early access to merchandise drops
Early access to new releases
Early access to NFT drops
Early access to ticket sales

2. Give something away for free

One of the best ways to get people to sign up for your email list is to offer them something for free, like unreleased songs, videos, or an ebook. You can also offer discounts on your products or services in exchange for your fans’ data.

Remember that one clothing brand that’s still sending you emails just because you wanted that 10% discount on your first order? You should from other music brands, but also get inspired by other industries when thinking of how to create an email list as a musician.

3. Use a pop-up on your website

Add an email capture widget to your website so that visitors can sign up for your list without having to leave your site. There are a lot of website pop-up services that offer easy-to-use email capture widgets that you can add to your website in just a few minutes.

Head over to the link if you want to see the rest of the steps and read about our Tips for creating great email content!
Hope everyone enjoyed that read!