Quantity is More Important Than Quality

Let me first define what I mean by quantity versus quality or quantity over quality.

I think you know, but I'll just make sure we're all on the same page.

It just means that if you're an independent artist or you're a record label that represents independent artists, I think that you should be worrying more about how many releases you put out versus how good or how not good those releases are.

That's what I mean when I say quantity over quality.

Quantity refers to how many releases and how frequent How often your label or you as an indie artist release music quality, as we discuss, is subjective.

But that just means how long do you slave over making sure this track or this album is the best it can possibly be? Simply put, being perfect versus being prolific.

That's what we're discussing.

Real quick, I want to tell you a little story and just a little experience that's happened recently.

As I mentioned, this is a topic that we've been exploring in depth and I've been doing it every day and every week with a small group of labels that I coach on a weekly basis.

They're the Labelmates VIPs and we're all obsessed with kind of cracking the code on streaming and how to make it work for a new artist or an established artist and for labels like us.

And one of the things we stumbled upon is this idea of frequency and how building a catalog over time and contributing to that catalog or feeding the beast as we sometimes refer to it.

It actually has resulted in this overall growth.

Of course, you're going to have ups in your streaming chart whenever you have a new release, but it's about raising the floor.

So that just on an average daily basis, your catalog is getting streams, whether you have a new release or not.

Now, I am going to talk a little bit about streaming and with respect to Spotify.

And one of the reasons for that is because there really isn't many platforms that give you such insights and analytics accessible on a daily basis than Spotify for artists.

And so even though I would obviously love to collect data from all of our platforms and combine them, One of the things that I am trusting in this process, as I'll explain today, is that if we see success or improvement in Spotify, we can expect to see residual increases on the other platforms, as well as on things like following on social media or vinyl sales.

And so I'm really just using this as like just one metric that will hopefully represent the whole.

So when I talk a little bit about streaming or Spotify, I am referring to to your entire growth as an artist or as a record label or the artists you represent with your label.

So my friend Corey at Inner Ocean Records, shout out to Inner Ocean, best label in the world, shared this Spotify for artists graph that showed a label that was releasing something every four weeks for an artist, every four weeks, approximately every four to six weeks, but on the low end, it was every four weeks.

And while you could see a spike every time, a new single dropped, what you did notice was that it created this upward staircase effect to the graph where the overall streams just kept going up and up and they would increase every four weeks, meaning it was this constant feeding of the machine that actually just brought up the overall streaming numbers.

And then even more interestingly, when that artist stopped releasing music altogether, it completely dropped off a cliff and so we saw this staircase effect with a new release every four weeks going up and up and up and then when they stopped releasing music it completely dropped down which was really interesting this graph we've been looking at has got a bunch of us really intrigued at what happens when an independent artist or a record label pursue quantity or more so consistency in releasing and asking the question, should an artist release something every four weeks? So let me bring you into my mindset when we were having this conversation with Corey and when he shared this graph for the very first time on the Zoom call, my very first internal response that I had going on in my brain as I'm looking at this chart is imagine my creative spirit inside of me has a manager, okay? Like a business manager.

Let me first define what I mean by quantity versus quality or quantity over quality.

I think you know, but I'll just make sure we're all on the same page.

It just means that if you're an independent artist or you're a record label that represents independent artists, I think that you should be worrying more about how many releases you put out versus how good or how not good those releases are.

That's what I mean when I say quantity over quality.

Quantity refers to how many releases and how frequent How often your label or you as an indie artist release music quality, as we discuss, is subjective.

But that just means how long do you slave over making sure this track or this album is the best it can possibly be? Simply put, being perfect versus being prolific.

That's what we're discussing.

Real quick, I want to tell you a little story and just a little experience that's happened recently.

As I mentioned, this is a topic that we've been exploring in depth and I've been doing it every day and every week with a small group of labels that I coach on a weekly basis.

They're the Labelmates VIPs and we're all obsessed with kind of cracking the code on streaming and how to make it work for a new artist or an established artist and for labels like us.

And one of the things we stumbled upon is this idea of frequency and how building a catalog over time and contributing to that catalog or feeding the beast as we sometimes refer to it.

It actually has resulted in this overall growth.

Of course, you're going to have ups in your streaming chart whenever you have a new release, but it's about raising the floor.

So that just on an average daily basis, your catalog is getting streams, whether you have a new release or not.

Now, I am going to talk a little bit about streaming and with respect to Spotify.

And one of the reasons for that is because there really isn't many platforms that give you such insights and analytics accessible on a daily basis than Spotify for artists.

And so even though I would obviously love to collect data from all of our platforms and combine them, One of the things that I am trusting in this process, as I'll explain today, is that if we see success or improvement in Spotify, we can expect to see residual increases on the other platforms, as well as on things like following on social media or vinyl sales.

And so I'm really just using this as like just one metric that will hopefully represent the whole.

So when I talk a little bit about streaming or Spotify, I am referring to to your entire growth as an artist or as a record label or the artists you represent with your label.

So my friend Corey at Inner Ocean Records, shout out to Inner Ocean, best label in the world, shared this Spotify for artists graph that showed a label that was releasing something every four weeks for an artist, every four weeks, approximately every four to six weeks, but on the low end, it was every four weeks.

And while you could see a spike every time, a new single dropped, what you did notice was that it created this upward staircase effect to the graph where the overall streams just kept going up and up and they would increase every four weeks, meaning it was this constant feeding of the machine that actually just brought up the overall streaming numbers.

And then even more interestingly, when that artist stopped releasing music altogether, it completely dropped off a cliff and so we saw this staircase effect with a new release every four weeks going up and up and up and then when they stopped releasing music it completely dropped down which was really interesting this graph we've been looking at has got a bunch of us really intrigued at what happens when an independent artist or a record label pursue quantity or more so consistency in releasing and asking the question, should an artist release something every four weeks? So let me bring you into my mindset when we were having this conversation with Corey and when he shared this graph for the very first time on the Zoom call, my very first internal response that I had going on in my brain as I'm looking at this chart is imagine my creative spirit inside of me has a manager, okay? Like a business manager.