Education Materials

I want you to try to think about one artist you discovered that felt like a miracle. When you first heard their tunes, it felt tailor-made to your taste. Once the ball was rolling, you were hooked - you couldn’t stop Googling their name until you thought you had read every interview, every YouTube video, and saw every photoshoot.

Got your artist? Do you remember that feeling? Cool.

Here’s a revelation for you.

YOU are that artist for many of your new fans.

Sounds wild, but it’s true. You become someone’s favorite new artist all the time.

When you went on your hungry search for all things related to that artist you love, you were in that artist’s Education phase - and they had plenty of stuff lying around from their career for you to dig into and be fascinated with.

As we pull new people in, we can be intentional about setting up content like this that allows us to feed our hungriest fans in the Education phase.

So, let’s look at a few good examples of what I call “nerdy content”. This is stuff that can be an obvious next stop for any naturally curious fan and can be something you can create, leave up, and not have to maintain often.

  1. Lyrics
    “What are the lyrics?!” is often the first question asked when someone wants to go deeper into a song. Having lyrics for all of your songs on your website is so easy to set up and can result in a lot of natural traffic from people who want to know how to sing along. It’s also a common question asked in Fan Finder comments, so having them linkable and on-hand is great.

  2. Blog
    A blog can be a simple and direct way to offer plenty of interesting info to hungry fans in a way that’s emotive and direct.

    Some blog ideas are: Ongoing studio or tour journals, poetry/prose, ‘rejected song lyrics’, anecdotes, tour or studio stories, recounting memories regarding your biggest influences, a diary of thoughts, etc!

  3. Recurring or Backlogged Content
    When it comes to the Buddy System, recurring content is the gas in the engine. It allows us to keep up momentum and have our fans’ ears perked for the next big move.

    If you have a current recurring content strategy, consider hosting it right on your website so people can dig into it in a way that you can track them.

    If you have a podcast, a YouTube video series, a “weekly one minute song” or a livestream (etc) - don’t let them live only on their respective platforms, where you can’t track users! Embed them on your website.

  4. Artist Bio
    An artist bio can seem like a standard thing, but it truly is ‘education’ personified. You can write a simple bio and that may do enough, but you can also create a sprawling article full of videos, pictures, anecdotes, and surprises that will have the fan digging in for a while.

    You can also consider updating this every so often to account for new milestones, and this can act something as a journal or ongoing non-fiction piece.

These are great ideas in and of themselves, but we want to know if they are worthwhile. Think back to the module called Engagement & How to Generate It’ - I showed you a custom audience we can create that accounts for how long a user has been on your site.

With some of these longer form pages that continue to reward users as they ingest the whole lot of it, we are intentionally creating a really good social segment here.