“If you were surprised by the ‘Top’ songs in your Spotify Wrapped, it might be because the difference between your top 5 and top 100 streamed songs is just a tiny number of plays”: Get more streams in 2025
A marketing expert breaks down some solid gold data to help you get more people listening to your music than ever before.
First published in 2010, Byron Sharp’s seminal book, How Brands Grow has become a marketeer’s bible. In it, Sharp used empirical research conducted at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science to challenge widely held industry beliefs about marketing effectiveness. In this article, Mark Knight, the founder of Major Labl Artist Club considers how Sharp’s principles of brand growth could equally be applied to band and artist growth and questions why the music industry has been so slow to adopt his learnings…
Byron Sharp had several key findings about how brands generally grow. These are:
1. Don’t waste time trying to grow loyalty in isolation as it doesn’t drive growth
2. Grow the number of people that buy your brand and loyalty will come as a result
3. Increasing market penetration is crucial; most buyers are light users
4. Targeting is overrated! Reach as many people in the most cost-effective way possible
5. Brands grow by increasing both their physical and mental availability
Social media is full of so-called music marketing experts trying to sell courses to new and emerging audiences with the promise of developing super fans through email marketing. But rather than being led with romantic notions of 70s fan clubs, how about we look at the empirical evidence of marketing effectiveness?
This is the first myth that Sharp’s research bursts. His Double Jeopardy Law states that smaller brands (artists, in our context) not only attract fewer customers but also experience lower loyalty.
Quite simply, if you are promoting a new artist, focus your time and money on acquiring new customers, not trying to retain fans that won’t be loyal. You’ll never fix the leaking bucket!
Byron Sharp’s law of ‘Buyer Moderation’ finds a natural tendency for extreme consumer behaviour (both high and low) to regress toward the mean over time. Just because they are a super fan this year, doesn’t mean they will be a super fan next year.
Sharp’s data concludes that as a small brand (artist), it’s far easier to get someone new to buy your product once than to get the same person to buy it twice. This is because smaller brands (artists) have fewer loyal buyers (listeners) and are more likely to split their purchases (streams) among competitors.
Spotify data shows users listen to 30 to 100 times more individual tracks than artists each year. People are spreading their listening across a wider range of songs and artists. If you’ve ever been surprised by the ‘Top’ songs in your Spotify Wrapped, it might be because the difference between your top 5 and top 100 streamed songs is just a tiny number of plays.
Read the full article in Music Radar.
