How to hire a content team around your artist brand

Content is an absolutely essential part of being an artist. Whether you are active on social media or not, we all know it’s true. Whether it’s shots for your press profile, behind the scenes studio tours, live streams, or simply interactions with fans, content is something that everybody needs in order to maintain a successful career in the modern age. That said, not every producer wants to spend hours every day producing it. Therefore, in this article, we’re going to discuss how, and why, you should hire a content team focused around your artistic brand within the music industry.

The majority of producers aren’t producing enough content for their ambitions. It’s that simple. They claim that they want to be the next music industry visionary – yet aren’t communicating their message & music on the most powerful communication tool. Imagine people thinking your artistic brand is synonymous with success. That’s the future. Martin Luther King – he had content: his message. So did DJ Khaled and many others. Instead of being romanticized about how the content is broadcasted, all you have to do is put your artist brand where there is attention. 

For example, you could be creating videos, photos, gifs, infographics, articles, vlogs etc. Or alternatively, you could be hiring people to do it for you. If your artist brand is big enough, there’s a strong probability that people will do it for free/minimum wage. You’ve got to sacrifice either time or money – pick one. Essentially, you need to create one piece of content yourself, and your team creates 20 pieces of content around that. For example, let’s say you release a new song. You could potentially start off by getting a team member to film you in the studio for a vlog, behind the scenes YouTube video, and music production tips in a video format. They would then edit & upload the videos to your social media fan pages. Of course, it would require absolutely minimal effort from you. Next, you could get them to use still shots from those photos, and upload it as quotes on Instagram, story previews, and other forms of visual content. 

The behind the scenes tutorial that your videographer recorded could easily be turned into a podcast series by transcribing the audio file and using a service such as Anchor.fm to upload it directly to iTunes. Then, use the Instagram story swipe ups feature to directly promote each episode to your audience. After all, podcasts are a great form of passive consumption that can be listened to literally anywhere.

Once you have videos, photo, and a podcast sorted, you could potentially get somebody to transcribe the production tutorial into a blog article. During this, a team member would literally write down everything you say and modify it to become a great piece of written content that can be shared across your social media profiles.

Many producers complain that they don’t want to create content for Snapchat – despite it still being in the top 10 charts within the App Store. In order to minimize the content creation time on the platform, you can simply download your Instagram story and crosspost it to Snapchat. Then it’s a case of promoting your Snapchat account via other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook & Twitter in order to maximize your follower count. As a producer, you want to make sure you aren’t vulnerable to a platform’s algorithm – and so you obviously want to diversify the number of platforms you are on.

Let’s create a scenario in which you do an interview with a large EDM blog which is published to their website. First of all, the article link is a piece of content that you can easily republish to all your social media profiles. Next, one of your content team could easily create a voiceover for it, and transform it into a podcast episode. Next, the audio file could have some visual content layered on top to create Instagram stories & Facebook video content. The aim of this strategy is to have a piece of pillar content, and then lots of smaller pieces of content surrounding it.

Another platform worthy of a mention is undauntedly Linkedin. Although many consider it to be for the business elite, it has a lot of weight for those wanting to make it in the music industry. For example, you could add all the people who work at your favourite record to your network, and then create insightful content which would allow them to develop an interest in your artistic brand. Sticking with the previous example of an EDM blog, you could get a content writer to create a Linkedin article about how to get featured on blogs as a music producer, or the daily mindset of a music producer. Essentially, you want to create evergreen content that is appealing to both music producers & industry professionals.

Finally, creating content for IGTV is another great outlet to broadcast your content. Exclusively in vertical video format, you can crop your landscape content into a portrait format. Or alternatively, it’s pretty easy to rotate your video content into a vertical content form (providing your audience is happy to rotate their phones). 

Content is absolutely essential to the success and credibility of your artist brand in 2021. Without it, you aren’t anywhere near as relevant as you potentially could be. Your ability to create new content doesn’t have to be your responsibility. With the ability to employ an artist team (potentially at zero cost), it’s very easy to create a strong social media presence with minimal effort.