This episode was previously published on the Profitable Musician Show.

With the different platforms to consume music, people mostly play the same music. How can you stand out? John Gold is an independent artist who developed Hypeddit out of his own need. Hypeddit is a software used to develop strategy to build your fanbase, produce lyrics, music videos and beats to provide content.

John has been a musician for a long time. He started learning piano and then later drums. Now he brings together the rhythmic elements from the drums with the piano and makes all piano house music. One of his tracks was picked up by a record label in Germany and became a little bit of a club hit and was picked up by other labels. It became easy for him to release music and he was eventually signed by Warner for a few years. They didn’t renew his contract and he was dropped from the roster.

John had always focused on making high-quality music. He was on the right track to building himself as a music artist, but that is not what the record label was looking for. The business model in the music industry has changed. Previously, artists toured and played for little money so people can hear your show then buy your music. Nowadays, your music is pretty much free. It is all about selling experiences like a show. Record labels no longer just want quality music but they also want you to have a fanbase. That is what pushed John on his journey to creating Hypeddit.

To build his fanbase, he looked at what everybody else is doing and he evaluated if it’s the right thing to do. He also put himself in the shoes of a fan. Sad truth is there are more indie artists online than fans trying to discover new music.

What John tried was go to SoundCloud and say something like, “If you engage with my music, there is instant gratification for you instead of just the music. I will send you something. I will give you a gift. I’ll offer you something special.” To his surprise, it was successful. Eventually, his challenge was that sending out the download links via DM took him an hour every night. That was back in 2014, when giving away a free song worked.

The manual DMing each night was the main reason Hypeddit was born. He started to develop this piece of software that did just that, rewarding fans with an instant download for the engagement that they would share with the music. People might have different preferences in how they want to be rewarded. This is where your idea comes in in making a better offer. You can survey your audience, ask questions on social media and test.

Pre-save is one user free download that is still valuable universally across genres. You can add value by saying to your audience something like they being able to enjoy the track four weeks before anybody else can.

You can also send to a cold audience such as on Facebook and Instagram. You can use like-sounding artists or niche genre interests for targeting. You can use a video to catch the attention of the audience.

Hypeddit is different from landing pages in a way that it has no other purpose than help music artists. You wouldn’t get a pre-save from an email client. It also uses smartlinks wherein you an artist can share a link to their music and instead of getting you directly to the song, it will land you to a page where it leads you to other streaming pages. Hypeddit also supports Zapier.

Hypeddit can be used on whatever an artist is trying to accomplish. Your goal can be maximizing pre-saves, listeners, streams or growing your email list. want to help you get to those musical goals. That is going to be the first level of discussion that people at Hypeddit wants to have. It is the same mentality and passion that has driven John to develop other training programs and things that have grown out of Hypeddit to help music artists build their campaigns to specific goals.

You can start with Hypeddit at $9/month on their pro membership. It’s from musicians to musicians.

Check out Hypeddit on their Facebook group or visit their website.

Links mentioned in this episode: