A Connection Superpower

The unexpected place you might find your secret sauce for audience growth

(Leaning into my weakness)

To build a thriving audience for your art you must seduce people into your world.

You have to discover the unique thing that compels people to listen to your songs, read your lyrics, engage with your content, and care about your news.

People don’t become your fans just because you release music.

They become fans because your lyrics hit them in the heart, or because your experience of the world mirrors theirs.

Because they see their history in your history, or because you share stories of a life they aspire to have one day.

People become fans of YOU - and the irony in discovering the secret sauce for attracting your audience is that it’s often hidden in the part of you that you think is your weakness.

My weakness: Women are not thought of as music industry experts.

When most people think of a typical music industry expert - I am not the first thing that comes to mind.

In this report, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative looked at leaders across 6 industry categories: music groups, labels, publishing, radio, streaming, and live music and found that women made up only 12.8%.

The stats were equally depressing for women managers (27%), agents (20%), A&R (27%), artists (21.7%), songwriters (12.3%), and producers (2.1%).

I thought my weakness as a coach would be that I’m a woman, and people don’t think of women as experts in music.

But here’s the surprise twist…

When I first started coaching musicians on marketing and career strategy I started with only women because they felt like a safe space to try the expert hat on. Typically any internet trolls or haters I’d encountered had been male, so presenting myself as a women’s music coach was less scary at first.

But the further I got into coaching, and the more feedback I received from clients, the message started to come through loud and clear: women musicians wanted to learn from another woman musician.

My secret sauce: Women WANT other women to be their music industry experts.

Many female musicians who had traditionally only had male marketing coaches as an option were over the moon to work with someone who understood what it was like to be a woman in the music industry. Someone who also had to balance relationships, family, and societal expectations with being a musician. To have the option of a coach who was more like them.

My superpower ended up being the very thing I’d believed would be my Achilles’ heel.

And this has proven to be true for a lot of my clients as well.

I had a client who thought being a single mother and a musician was going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome in growing her audience, but sharing her journey parenting with finding time for creativity ended up being one of the key ways her audience of other women/parents/creatives connected with her.

The perceived weakness of being a single parent ended up being her secret sauce.

Another client had resisted talking much about her sexuality because she was worried it would alienate her more conservative fans, but once we uncovered who her ideal fan was (not the conservative a-holes who might have been shitty about her queerness) she started to share her story as a young, queer woman and began to attract fans into her life who also identified with her story.

Her perceived weakness as being gay ended up being her secret sauce.

Another client suffers from PTSD and when they made the decision to lean into it instead of resisting talking about it they attracted fellow PTSD sufferers into their song world, giving those new fans a place to feel solidarity and find comfort in song lyrics written about their common experience.

Another hypothetical could be coming from a really small town. I interviewed a Nashville publicist recently and she said bands from small towns often “upgrade” themselves by saying they’re from the closest bigger city. She views this as a big mistake, explaining her belief that it’s far more interesting to be the only great band people have ever heard of from Ding Dong Texas (yes, that’s a real town) than just another band from Austin because you think being from Austin sounds better. Your perceived weakness as being from Ding Dong might end up being the key thing you can spin the story around to catch people’s attention.

Whether it’s your sexuality, your health journey, your experience of growing up in a small town, being a parent, or relocating to a new place in search of a fantastic life dream, when you identify, embrace and learn to accept what you thought was your “weakness”, you’ll not only feel happier in your daily life, but sometimes you also uncover the very thing your ideal audience needs to learn about you and connect with to become your fan.

Learn to love who you are, with all your subtleties, and share your story with your world. The only way people can decide if you’re the artist for them is by letting them in and showing them who you are. Explain what drives you to make the music you do so they have a chance to connect with it and you.

Sometimes the very thing we’ve been hiding the deepest ends up being the secret sauce for audience attraction we’d needed all along.