How to Connect with Artists and Producers

How to Connect with Artists and Producers

Networking in Music Production

As a music producer and artist, it is essential that you network with other creators. It may sound cheesy and awkward to message and meet random people and try to sell yourself, but networking is about building long-term relationships that will help grow your career and talent as an artist and/or producer.

Here are some of the benefits to networking in the music industry:

Open doors to other artists/producers:

Networking can open doors to collaborations, access to your peers’ followers and fans, and building lifelong friends within the music industry. As you and your connections grow as artists access to industry executives becomes more and more easier. By keeping up with your peers, you can stay in relevance with them and grow together.

Grow your career and skills:

Meeting other talented creators will also drive your growth in music production. The mindset of surrounding yourself with success leads to success is key to never stop improving. Building a network of more successful artists and producers will change the concept of normal for you, which in effect will raise your drive.

Get answers to any question:

You’d be lying if you said there has never been a moment where you had no idea what you are doing or how to even get started. As long as you’ve built a reliable strong network, you can be confident that someone will answer those questions when they arise. And even if there’s no definite answer from your network, the simple conversation with your network can help you bounce ideas and form some initial findings.

Having an active Social Media Presence

With social media often being the maker and breaker of many people's careers, it is extremely important for an artist and producer to have an active presence on most if not all channels. You never know when a song or beat of yours can become a viral hit, whether that may come from TikTok, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Also developing your online persona can lead to fans promoting your work for you just because they support you, and other artists and producers reaching out for collaborations.

Reaching out in the DMs

This is the easiest and possibly the most effective tactic in reaching out to other creators. By directly messaging another person, you are giving them a chance to be discovered through your own network, while also exposing yourself to their fans as well. Although you can message almost anyone through social media there are a few general guidelines and steps that you should follow.

Knowing who you can message

You can't just message a famous person and expect them to want to collaborate or even read your messages. The first step to connecting and collaborating with others in music production is understanding that the relationship is based on sharing and not taking. You and the other person must benefit in some way, whether that be follower count, collaboration in a new genre, etc. Before deciding to reach out to someone you should gauge how you can help them before they can help you and putting yourself in their shoes of whether or not you would respond to someone in your situation reaching out.

Do your research on them

The next step is to do your research on them just so that your conversations can be more organic. Following them and keeping up with their uploads and past work allows you to understand where they are in their music careers. Also understanding where their goals are can help in seeing how you can help them. Looking into who your mutual connections are is also beneficial because you can reach out to these mutuals to help in an introduction.

Send them the initial DM:

Most likely the hardest part in reaching out is the first Direct Message. Knowing what to say and how forward to be is difficult, but here are a few good examples:

Hey (artist name), love what you do, would love to connect!

Hey (artist name), I think your last (song, album, EP, etc.) was (some compliment), I (sing, produce, write, etc.) and would love to collaborate!

Hey I am (your name) and I (sing, produce, write, etc.), I think we could work together on making a (genre) (beat, song, etc.)

While these examples are effective in being the first message, it is up to you to actually carry on the conversation. Using your research on them will play into the conversation as you can talk about yours and their goals, feedback on their previous work, talk about mutual connections, etc.

Keep up with them:

After successfully connecting with them or even collaborating with them, make sure to keep up their work. Doing this will help in meeting even more people because if you stay fresh on people’s minds they will bring you up in conversation when they connect with others, doing networking for you.

Make sure to check your own requests:

Lastly a lot of social media apps block people from messaging you if you aren’t already following them. Check your inboxes because there may be people trying to connect and grow with you.

Don't be like T-Pain:

Starting your own community

Forming a community is probably the best thing for an artist/producer to keep their fans and their peers constantly in the loop. Having your own dedicated community can help out with outreach as your fans will do the networking for you. Imagine messaging your fans to help you get in contact with another artist and each fan actively commenting and DMing those artists for you.

discordreddit.jpeg

Joining established communities

Although creating your own community has its major benefits, it can be time consuming and difficult to actually bring in and build. There are already established discord servers and subreddits that are specific for any type of artist. Also through these different communities, it is extremely easy to find other artists and producers looking for collaborations or just to build their network. Finding these communities is the hard part, but Reddit is a great source to get started!

Reddit Music Subreddit Wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/wiki/musicsubreddits#wiki_production

This wiki contains a plethora of subreddits for practically any niche of music communities. From these subreddits you can find other artists and producers wishing to collaborate and connect, while also finding different discord servers dedicated to the different sub genres. While browsing these subreddits, try not to limit yourself to one niche of creators, but rather diversify you scope of possible fans/peers.

In The Loop Community

The entire purpose of In The Loop is to connect growing artists and producers. We are making it easier to share and keep track of your progress and samples while also getting constructive feedback from the community. The basis of our community is to grow together and bring more interest into music production. For the time being we are relying on our discord server to connect artists and producer, while our app is in development. We will be holding competitions and adding beta testers for the app. After launch we will rely on the community within the server to improve the app and experience.

Join our Discord!

If you are looking to get feedback in every stage of your music production join our discord community here or use this link: https://discord.gg/c7Hf3HX6Hh

Some other sources to look at!

https://blog.reverbnation.com/2019/05/01/how-network-music-producer/

https://rapzilla.com/2018-02-how-should-an-artist-approach-a-producer-online-artisttip/

https://artistshortcut.com/how-to-connect-work-with-any-successful-rapper/

https://www.musicgateway.com/blog/how-to/how-to-find-a-music-producer-that-is-perfect-for-you

https://www.loopcloud.com/cloud/blog/4402-How-to-Promote-Yourself-as-a-Music-Producer

Cover photo found from: https://mlsdev.com/blog/how-to-create-social-media-app