Getting your music heard requires the right combination of talent and strategy. Bree Noble chats with Benji Stein, creator of Playlist Supply and Booking Agent IO, who talks about some of the music marketing tools indie artists can use to gain better listener exposure. They dive into the process of playlist promotion, the right way to secure gigs, and why DIY strategies can put musicians in control of their careers. Benji also shares how artists can connect with playlist curators, track playlist performances, and land bookings without relying on middlemen. If you are ready to take charge of your music marketing and expand your audience, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

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Music Marketing Tools To Unlock Success With Benji Stein

I have Benji Stein here. He is the creator of PlaylistSupply and Booking-Agent.io. These are some great tools that we’re going to be able to talk about, how they can help you in your musician business. Before we get to those, I always dig into the origin story because I think it helps set the stage for what we’re going to talk about later and how and why you came up with the things that you did. How did you get into music? How did you start working in the music industry? How did that lead you to where you are today?

Journey From Music Management To Music Tech

Firstly, thank you so much, Bree, for having me. I greatly appreciate the opportunity and the time. I wanted to start by saying thank you. I can jump right into a little bit about my background and how I came to be in this position. It’s an interesting journey. I think you see a lot of music tech companies these days. They’re oftentimes started by people that come from the tech side of things. I’m a little bit of an interesting origin story in terms of me coming from the music side of things.

My journey began almost ten years ago, a very typical artist manager story, where I had a few friends that were very talented in music. They were less so talented in terms of marketing, social media, and emailing, and I believed in them. It started as something where I had a few friends that I took under my wing and decided, “I’m going to see what I can do in terms of opening doors for them.” I took on that role of manager. That slowly expanded. I did a brief stint at Roc Nation, I did a few internships at one point, and I found myself at Red Light and a few different record labels.

My experience at these labels and at these bigger music companies confirmed that this was what I wanted to do. At a certain point, I made the decision to become an indie manager. I’d signed a few acts on my own, I was working with some cool hip-hop clients, and I signed a cool indie rock band. Some of these clients started to do well. I took on this role where I was my own management company. I would manage these artists in various capacities, and I’d spend time looking for new talent to sign.

I started out as a music manager, basically. That was something that, it’s very cool being on the indie side of things, because you get to go into these label meetings, and you get to negotiate these deals. You start from the perspective of empowering the artist, finding ways to get them more access, getting them more budget, and finding ways to go to these larger players to see how you can get your clients the best side of the deal.

The story for PlaylistSupply, and later Booking-Agent.io, started with a lot of experiences with some of my larger clients. We would go to labels, and the labels would hire third-party marketing companies, or their label services teams would do marketing. They would lay out these comprehensive plans, these comprehensive marketing campaigns. Playlisting was something that was always very important. It was something that was always very crucial.

There was no real data behind it. I would always follow up. I would investigate, I would ask, “Who is the person running playlisting? Can you tell me a bit more about it? Can we get some analytics and stuff on the back end?” I was always left with a bit of an empty answer. That was something that I didn’t like, especially for my clients. I would see, sometimes, these budgets disappear into the abyss, and playlisting was a real gray area.

 

Something I did for a couple of my clients, particularly during COVID, was when bookings were canceled, touring was canceled. We were looking at ways to go harder on digital marketing. When booking, touring, and merchandising, the main ways that artists make money, got canceled, we were like, “How can we get strategic? How can we get smart? Let’s just go all in on digital.” I would tell these labels, “Instead of spending X amount of dollars on this person who’s going to run playlisting, just give it to me, and my team is going to figure out a way to do it ourselves.”

I’m going to have analytics, and I’m going to make these relationships myself. What we did internally, my management company, we had a few interns and a few assistants. They would go through Spotify, search for playlists relevant to our clients, and look in the description for an Instagram handle or contact information. We would reach out directly. We would offer them some of that backlog merchandise that wasn’t being sold at shows. We would find ways to build an organic relationship with some of these curators. This was about four years ago now.

Back then, the playlisting marketing was way less saturated. We got killer results. I was building a spreadsheet of playlist curators, some of them I knew by first name, and we could depend on them to put a release or a new album in the playlist and get marketing going on the first day of the release. I felt we got stronger results than the labels, who would pass the budget along to some middleman or some person, and we wouldn’t hear anything back. That DIY mentality, I scaled it. I was like, “This is working for me. Let me see if some of my manager friends want to try the same strategy.”

Let me see if I could automate this. I brought on a coder who could help me build a system. It started as an app that was just on my computer and my co-founder’s computer. My co-founder, Giannis, had a booking agency. They were doing a lot of similar stuff. He had a booking agency in Europe focused on electronic music. In that particular niche, playlisting is extremely important. Together, we started with this app on our computers that would gather data about the playlists and allow us to be a little bit more uniform in terms of outreach.

The overwhelming feedback we got from people in our networks was, “You’ve got to make this available to everybody.” This is something that any artist, any band, any indie manager could use. “Put it on a website. Find a way to make it accessible.” The rest is history. The platform snowballed. Since then, a lot of our early clients were people at these labels who were on label services. Some of the people at these distros and pub companies that I was working with, I told them, “Listen, you guys could do playlisting internally. Just use our app.”

They started to use the app. We got this cool trickle-down effect where some of our first users were music industry people, professionals, and opinion leaders. That allowed us to get a ton of feedback, refine the product, and grow it to what it’s become. Since then, we’ve unleashed a ton of new features, bot detection features, features that let you track the follower chart of the playlist to see if it gets any weird spikes, and features that let you target specifically playlists that show up on artists’ Spotify profiles so you can be sure they’re getting good traffic.

Booking-Agent.io, the product we released just four months ago, followed a similar philosophy. There’s a massive market of people and artists who aren’t necessarily ready for a big agency or a big agent. That’s a gray area that artist managers often fill in. We were like, “What if we take the same DIY philosophy and apply it to the next phase, booking shows, touring?” That’s my spiel on how I got here.

That’s cool. It’s always like the necessity is the mother of invention thing. That’s when great things get created because you’re trying to figure out how to solve your own problem. I love the origin story of that. I am curious, there’s a lot of features I want to talk about. First of all, if any of you guys want to look at this, we do have our own link that you can check out, ProfitableMusician.com/PlaylistSupply.

I believe there’s a discount there if you want to jump in and try it, but you can check out the features as we’re talking through them if you want, on that site. I did want to ask, first of all, there are different kinds of playlists. There’s the Spotify playlist, there are algorithmic playlists, and then there are curated playlists. How big are curated playlists nowadays? Are they still a big deal? I know they were in the beginning, but now they’ve got all these algorithmic playlists.

Understanding Different Types Of Spotify Playlists

All of the different kinds of playlists play their own role in the marketing ecosystem for an artist. I would say editorial playlists, for example, the ones that are owned by Spotify, are very prestigious. They can set trends very easily. They’re also a shot in the dark. It’s very difficult to get into those. A lot of the people that get regular placements on those are signed with major record labels that have direct connections. You can get into them, but there are no guarantees. It’s very difficult.

Editorial playlists are prestigious and can set trends easily. But they are also a shot in the dark and difficult to get into. Share on X

I’ve seen artists do submissions for new releases every couple of months and not get an editorial placement for years. Those are the top of the top. They’re also the most inaccessible to most indie artists and managers. There are also algorithmic playlists, which are playlists that, depending on how many third-party playlists your song gets added to, might get fed there. Depending on how good your release week goes, the song might get pushed into those. Algorithmic playlists are extremely strong.

It’s also hard, you have to dissect the Spotify algorithm, do a little bit of reverse engineering, which we’ve done at PlaylistSupply to make it a little bit easier but still, there are very few guarantees. There are third-party playlists, the playlists that PlaylistSupply primarily focuses on. These are user-generated playlists. Anyone, just like you or me, can go create a playlist. We can curate it ourselves, share it with our friends, share it with our network, and post it on social media. Those are the playlists where, if you make contact with the curator, all they have to do is click the add button, and they can put your song in. These are a lot more accessible.

In terms of the value that those can add to the other playlists, if you use a tool like PlaylistSupply to capitalize on third-party and user-generated playlists, those are things that can influence the algorithm. Say you release a new song on a Monday, and on that same day or in that same week, you get added to a lot of user-generated and third-party playlists. That’s an indicator to the algorithm that the song is popular.

It’s more likely to get pushed into some of those new music playlists and organic algorithmic playlists. Editorial playlisters look at that, too. Say you submit to an editorial playlist and also get a bunch of third-party playlists through PlaylistSupply, this shows that the track has some organic traction among individual users and playlist curators.

That’s a sign that people like it. It increases your chances of getting into some of those bigger editorial playlists. It’s one of those things where you start at the bottom, and if you do your groundwork, it’s going to influence the algorithm’s intent. It’s going to influence what the editorial curators see. Those early third-party independent playlist ads can be a boost across the whole spectrum.

I can see how it would be a snowball effect for sure, building on each other. Can you submit to curated playlists before your song has been released, like in pre-release mode?

Yes, one hundred percent. That was something I did as a manager that was extremely effective. If you build relationships with some of these smaller independent curators, you can ask them and count on them to add a song on the day of release as it comes out. You can reach out to them before the release with, for example, a private SoundCloud link. There’s also a platform I’ve used called Bridge.Audio, which allows you to build a small package and share a private link or a private URL of the song before it’s been released.

Those curators can be brought into the artist’s world, learn a little bit about the song, and see if it’s a vibe for them. The song isn’t even up on Spotify yet, but as soon as it does go live, you can count on that pre-release strategy working for your marketing. One hundred percent, you can. That’s something I often recommend to people. Sometimes, people are very focused on remarketing an old song or marketing a song a few months after it came out. One of the strongest things you can do is try and get a pre-release strategy going so that those first few weeks hit the ground running.

 

That makes total sense. These curators, are they out doing a lot of promotion of their playlists? There are a lot of people out there who just have their own playlist, like “I like to listen to this when I’m working out” or whatever. These are the people that you guys are targeting. They must have a number of plays that make it clear they’re marketing that in some way.

One hundred percent. PlaylistSupply is a real-time search engine. One of the things that we pride ourselves on that differentiates us from some of those middlemen and submission platforms is that we index all of the playlists on Spotify, regardless of how big or small they are. There’s a lot of value in that because some of these playlists might have a lot of following. They might have been doing this for a few years. That playlist might be something that’s already like a business to them. They might be accepting fees in order to get those placements, and they might be running Facebook or Meta ads to the playlist to get more traction.

That’s maybe one category of the people that have the playlists that have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. I often encourage artists to reach out to the smaller playlists, where they might not have built it into a business, and they might not be promoting it. The people that follow that playlist might have followed it exclusively off of the algorithm, or they might be genuine listeners who are friends with the curator. Sometimes, you can find weird niches, playlists that are relevant. Like you said, one particular gym, one particular region, one particular college, stuff like that. There’s a very wide spectrum, and there’s a huge pull for artists who are just starting out to think, “I’m just going to reach out to the biggest ones first.”

While reaching out to the biggest ones is good, I always encourage artists to cast a wide net. While there might be a playlist that only has a few thousand followers and maybe they don’t run a ton of ads to that playlist, that’s still a playlist that might have good organic intent. It might have active listeners. The Spotify algorithm genuinely finds some of these smaller third-party playlists and will push them to the top of the search just based on activity, how often it’s changed, how many people listen to it, and how frequently.

I’ve seen firsthand that some of these smaller independent curator playlists might have better intent, better charge in the algorithm, and better listenership than some of these bigger ones that have a bunch of ads running to them. The person that listens to it clicks through quickly, and they have a pass-through listenership. You want to cast a wide net. There are playlisters that are actively promoting their playlists, that is a thing, but you don’t only want to focus on those ones.

It makes sense. It’s like anything else where, if the audience is highly curated, it’s smaller, but it’s like a devoted audience. Versus, the bigger an audience gets, the more watered down it’s going to get. It makes sense that you would go for these smaller ones. I’m curious, something that you said that I didn’t even think of is about playlists that are featured on artist profiles. You can now detect when that’s the case. Does the artist have to feature it, or does Spotify choose what’s going to be featured there?

Spotify chooses it. That’s one of the things that makes it so popular and so effective. Artists can choose, they have an artist spotlight where I think they get a choice of maybe one, or they get a few playlists or songs that they can spotlight every once in a while. Something like the Discovered On section, that’s a section that shows up on the front page of an artist profile that’s totally based on the algorithm. It’s playlists where that artist is discovered by new listeners most frequently.

You can count on the fact that those playlists are getting new listenership. They have more traction. One of the PlaylistSupply features, the organic search feature, if you’re browsing the website and you’ve signed up, you’ll see it’s a little sprout next to a magnifying glass. That feature allows you to target specifically the Discovered On playlists. That’s strong because those playlists show up on the front of the profile, chosen by Spotify’s algorithm. The algorithm chooses them based on new listenership.

If you’re someone who maybe is listening to an artist and you’ve listened through all the tracks on their front page, it might push you directly into those Discovered On playlists. Those playlists might not have the biggest follower numbers, but the algorithm has indicated that they lead to the most new listenership.

I’ve used those because if I discover an artist and I like all their stuff, I’m like, “I want to hear more artists like this artist since I didn’t know this artist before.” I choose those playlists.

You’re spot on. People go into those playlists, and sometimes that’s how they find a new favorite artist, similar to their old favorite artist. As indie artists doing marketing, that’s exactly what you want.

 

People like me love going down rabbit holes when they discover something new, that’s what this is made for. I love that. We do have to talk about bots because this has been all over the news lately, Spotify basically creating artists that aren’t real, like all that stuff. I’m sure that people create bots that drive up playlist numbers. I think you’ve built in some things to be able to check and see if that might be happening. How do you do that?

How Artists Can Avoid Fake Playlists And Bots

You’re totally right. You’re spot on. I was talking to some friends at a distribution company, and the takedowns because of bots can be very harmful to artists. Some features we released that directly apply to that are, we have a Health Checker feature, which is a proprietary one-button quality checker for playlists. If you’ve gone onto PlaylistSupply and found some playlists that you like, you can click a Health Check button, which does a reverse search and checks how many artists in that playlist have that playlist showing up in the Discovered On section or on the front of their profile.

That checks if this playlist is vetted already by the Spotify algorithm. The Spotify algorithm, and Spotify in general, tends to flag playlists that are botted and push them out of algorithmic reach. If you’re doing this Health Check, you can be assured that you’re out to playlists that give you a score. Based on that score, you can determine if it’s a quality playlist or not.

We’ve also added another feature, the Follower History Chart feature. That will literally show you how the playlist has grown over time in terms of follower numbers. If you see weird spikes, you can tell that it’s a botted playlist. Oftentimes, with botted playlists, the person might buy streams or bots for a short time, and then they dip off. Maybe they buy again, and then they dip off again. You can look at that follower chart history and see, if it’s a nice, gradual increase, that means the playlist has grown organically over time. If it’s weird ups and downs, you can be assured that this is a playlist someone might be manipulating, maybe buying streams or bots. That’s one you can avoid.

We’ve built in these two features so that artists can do their outreach and playlisting campaigns with more confidence. There are a lot of these middleman services out there where you pay to submit to playlists. You have to imagine, if they’re getting paid for your submission, then they’re incentivized to increase streams and offer you guarantees. That’s something that we try to avoid. We don’t facilitate any of the submissions. We leave it completely up to the artists to do their own research, do their own analysis, dig into the data, and then determine, “Is this a playlist I want to reach out to and build a relationship with?”

 

That’s great because not only is it wasting your time to reach out to those playlists that are botted, but it also could get you in trouble. You don’t want to be on those or even realize that you’re putting yourself in jeopardy. I think it’s good that you’ve built in that feature. I want to encourage everybody to go to ProfitableMusician.com/PlaylistSupply and check it out. As we’ve been talking about all this stuff, these tools are so useful for indie artists.

It is because we don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for a middleman who also might not do their research. You are able to do it right here with this tool. They’ve made it so affordable for indie artists. That’s why I wanted to bring Benji on, because any way that I can help you have the power of a label without paying for it and without signing your life away, that’s what this is for.

That’s also what he is doing with Booking-Agent.io, which you can also check out at ProfitableMusician.com/BookingAgent. Maybe let us know, what made you decide to do that? You mentioned it a little bit earlier, and obviously, jumping off of COVID, now we’re back into a realm where we can start booking again. What tools are you trying to enable musicians with in this new product?

Like you said about the labels, after doing my time learning and working at labels and management companies, I realized that the artists who need the most empowerment are indie artists, the people who basically have everything they need to do it themselves, especially now with the internet. PlaylistSupply was our way to help artists do their digital marketing. Every artist is ready to get into a playlist, get their streams going, and get their first few fans. Not every artist is necessarily ready to book a show. For the ones that are, it’s very tough.

Every artist is ready to get into a playlist and their streams are going to acquire their first few fans. But not everyone is necessarily ready to book a show. Share on X

That first show, that first independent tour, it’s either you do it yourself, or it doesn’t happen. Booking agents these days, especially at the bigger agencies, go beyond just taking a commission of 15%, 20%, which can be disabling to an indie artist with a small budget who is just starting out. They’re very interested in hedging their bets. They’re looking at social media numbers, past ticket sales, monthly listenership, Instagram, and TikTok. They want to see that this person has real social media traction before they take a risk on them.

As a manager, you might still be building out the social profiles and online presence of artists, but their music is fantastic. It is because of the merch they’re selling or the data you have in the analytics, that they’re ready to book a show. They’re ready to do touring. There’s this gray area where artists need to pass that bridge from not having any touring history to having touring history before they’re ready for a bigger agent.

Booking-Agent.io basically took a methodology that me and my co-founder Giannis were doing ourselves, and we would basically go through, we would manually find venues of similar artists to our clients, and we would reach out to those venues, and we would say, we saw you booked this artist. We have another act that we’re looking to place. We would just do the outreach ourselves. We’d get in contact.

Exactly what I did. I’d spend all my time in the old days in the newspaper, like calendar section and go on all the artists’ websites and look at all the places they previously played and stuff like that.

That DIY mindset got supercharged with the release of AI and the modern technology we have now. We built this tool, and it’s basically just like PlaylistSupply was a search engine for all of the Spotify playlists and data. We now have a venue talent-buyer search engine. Booking-Agent.io basically allows you to type in any artist, and you’re going to get all their past touring history, all their future touring history, and all their current tour history displayed on a nice map.

If you’re someone looking to do planning based on lead generation or looking for venues in your city, you type in that similar artist, the venues pop up on the map, and then you can click on each venue to get that talent buyer for that specific venue. We built it with AI so that we can back-check and cross-check that the talent buyer is someone who currently works there, has that position linked on their LinkedIn, or has that position marked on a job profile from various job websites. Something we encountered a lot when using some of the existing databases like Indie on the Move or Pollstar.

Even in the old days, my thing was the Indie Bible. It’s already out of date by the time they print it.

We had that exact struggle. We would reach out to these people, and they’d already been promoted, moved to a different venue, city, or job. All of those talent buyers for those venues, their data was out of date. We wanted to build a real-time search engine for venues and talent buyer contact info. That’s what Booking-Agent.io is. It’s something that any artist, indie manager, or even a small boutique booking agent can use. They can load up similar artists based on the niche, client, or genre and instantly get all the venues. They can get all the talent buyers for those venues and do their own outreach campaign without tediously hunting down each person.

We’ve got some other cool features in there. It shows the venue’s capacity, all its social media information, and even pulls up other people who work at the venue, like the production coordinators, promoters, and marketing managers. It also shows the last artist who performed there and the last ticket price. That way, you can get a real grassroots understanding of the venue, the talent buyer, and who’s performing there. Is it a good fit? All from the same place.

I was wondering, obviously, you can’t tell us how much they’re going to pay the artists and things, but there’s some venues where it’s like, you get a split of the door and some venues, it’s like they pay this much per artist and some venues, it’s like, we expect artists to pay for play for free. Is there any way to distinguish those?

There’s not any particular way to distinguish those based on venue. Something that we do is, say you search for an artist, when you’re clicking through those different venues, you’re going to see what that artist’s ticket price was. You’re going to see any information that we can find, we pull it and offer it to you as an artist using the tool. Say you’re looking up a specific artist and you click on a venue. Not only do you get the talent buyer information, the venue contact, socials, and all that, but sometimes you also see the last ticket price and the details of the last tour. That can help you determine, “This is what an artist similar to me was charging at the door.”

Maybe I have a ballpark of what I should be charging. You can even see some information about the past artists there. Maybe now I can reach out to them, and you can reach out and say, “Maybe this person was an opener.” When I’m pitching to that venue, I know what slot I might be reaching out for and what slot I might be fitting into. We try to gather all that information so that when you’re composing that email, that outreach to the talent buyer, you can be as informed as possible. There are all kinds of different splits. There are all kinds of different ways.

What I recommend is that, especially for artists just starting out, obviously, any exposure that you’re going to get doing a live show is going to be good exposure. Work with the talent buyer. Work with the bands who might currently be performing there. Go on to Booking-Agent.io, click on the venue, find the talent buyer, and then also check their Instagram to see who performed there last week. Maybe reach out to that band as well as the talent buyer as a way to bridge another connection and maybe be an opener, stuff like that.

Artists who are starting out can always good exposure by doing live shows. Share on X

It’s always good to connect with other groups because you could gig swap, and you can also even ask them, “How was your experience there? Is it worth going to?” That kind of thing. Developing relationships with other musicians is good. I was curious, I didn’t perform at traditional venues. I performed in very off-the-beaten-path places, everything from coffee houses to churches to nonprofit galas to farmers markets. Is anything like that going to show up on there, or are these all very traditional venues?

Finding The Right Venues For Indie Musicians

It pulls all the data based on the similar artist search. That’s one of the reasons we built the similar artist search as the primary searching function, sometimes people might type in a city or a genre, and you’re going to get such scattered results. Say someone types in a band that’s done a bunch of coffee shops or a bunch of small bars and pubs. It is because it grabs all the past tour history, all of those are also going to get populated. If you’re doing your research as an indie artist, manager, or band, and you’re finding, “Here are 5 or 10 acts that are very similar to me, they have the same demographic, they have the same audience information,” and then you search for those, you’re going to get venues that fit you more than perfectly.

You’re going to be able to skip that step of thinking, “All that’s coming up is arenas.” If you do the background research and find people that are a perfect fit for you, your segment, and your niche, then when you do that search, you’re going to get anything, anywhere that they performed at, which grabs everything, pubs, bars, small venues, festivals. It comes down to doing a little bit of research before jumping into the tool. The tool itself grabs any venue information it can find.

It’s being honest with yourself. I can’t compare myself to Sarah McLachlan. I need to choose an indie artist that’s on my level that I’m looking up to. I’d like to think I was on her level, but I’m not going to ever get into those venues. You’ve got to look. I think that’s where I see artists struggle. They think they can’t find someone similar to them, who’s on their level, because they don’t know those people yet. They probably need to do some more searches on social media to find those people first.

You’re totally right. You might have to shatter this idea that you’re totally unique and that no one else has done it before. A lot of artists have that mentality.

They do. Everyone thinks they’re the snowflake, and no one can understand them, and no one can pigeonhole them.

One of the best things you can do to build your brand and understand your marketing is to find those 5 to 10 people who did exactly what you want to do and research their trajectory. Booking-Agent.io lets you see, “This is where their tour was in 2023. This is where their tour was in 2024. Maybe I’m going to start at the first venue they started at.” It allows you to see that more accessibly. You’re right, you have to shamelessly say, “I’m not unique entirely. There are other people who did it before me, and I’m going to respect their marketing.”

How far back does it go? Like you said, that was a good point you made. Maybe they’re two levels ahead of me now, but two years ago, they were on my level. Can I look back that far?

Yes, 100%. It goes back, I think, the last 3 to 5 years. Obviously, beyond that, you might not want to be reaching out to venues that someone was performing at a long time ago.

Might not exist anymore anyway if somebody fell off after COVID.

A lot of the venues we verify based on the contact information and the other details being up to date. If some of that information isn’t up to date, and we can’t verify that the venue is still current, then it might get pushed out of the list. We’re actively adding more filtering and more features for artists to be able to filter by things like city or by only new tours. I think it’ll only go back just a few years, because those are going to be the venues where the data is still most relevant.

Makes sense. I think that’s plenty for people to find what they need. What’s great about people who are developing tools, and you’re still releasing, you’re doing new things, is that you can get feedback from the artists who are using it. “What feature do you think we need to build next? What do you feel like would be the best thing for us to focus on? What do you feel like might be missing here?” I literally reached out to someone whose tool I was using, and I’m like, “I would love it if you could do this.” They’re like, “I’ve had another person ask about that. Let me see.” Literally two weeks later, they’re like, “Now we do this.” I’m like, “Really? That’s awesome.” It’s a great opportunity for artists.

Like I said, I’m not someone who came from the tech side of things and then went into the music tech world. I came from the music side. I intimately relate with indie artists and indie managers, and we’re active. I’m jumping on calls all the time with new users, listening to feedback. With PlaylistSupply and Booking-Agent.io, all of our features and all of our roadmap are completely informed by the feedback we get from artists and users. That stuff is super important to us in just making tools that are effective and work for artists.

That’s cool. Do you have opportunities for them to try it out as far as you’re not pigeonholing yourself into a long-term commitment, if you want to just try it out for a bit, or you’re planning a tour and you want to use it for a while?

The way both tools work is they’re both monthly subscriptions. During that subscription, you basically get unlimited access to the tool. We actively encourage users, and artists can sign up, devote a bunch of time to research. Both tools have exporting features, you can even export all those venue contacts to a spreadsheet, export those playlists to a spreadsheet. You can build out your database, build out those features, and then you might only need it for 1, 2, or 3 months. You have enough data to work your campaign, and you can come back in a few months.

We’re super open. If anyone wants to try it out, shoot us a DM on Instagram, reach out to us by email, or contact us on basically any of our social platforms. Our whole team is hopping on calls, doing screen-sharing demos. If you’re someone that wants to try out a first month, we’ve got some discounts available, we’ve got some codes available. Our goal is to empower indie artists and make this as accessible as possible, especially at this early phase where we’re breaking new ground and getting feedback. I encourage anyone who hears this and wants to give it a try, just reach out to us directly, and we’ll make it happen.

That’s so cool. You guys, go to the links that I gave you. I’ll put them in the show notes. It’s basically ProfitableMusician.com/PlaylistSupply and ProfitableMusician.com/BookingAgent. It’s so great that they’re willing to get on a call because I know some people that I work with might be intimidated by the technology or not know how to get the most out of the searching and filtering. They’ll get on a call, talk with you, and run you through a search. They’ve shown me the back end before, it’s much easier than you might think. I recommend you contact them, go to those links, and try it out. Why not? What do you have to lose?

Thank you. We’re super happy to screen share, run some searches, and make this accessible.

Awesome. Is there anything else you’d like to tell everybody? We’ve given them the links, and you’ve made yourself available. Any last words you want to let our readers know?

The Power Of DIY Marketing For Musicians

I just think, before you ever consider signing up with a label or signing up with a manager, always give it your best shot to do it yourself first. Artists are going into a world these days where almost everything can be done with a DIY mentality. The internet is just a wealth of research. There’s so much out there in terms of data and software tools. It’s exciting to see what’s going to come of indie artists and their ability to boost their own careers, be their own managers, and be their own booking agents in the next few years. I’m just excited to be a part of it and share this with everybody. Thank you again, Bree. I appreciate your time and the opportunity.

I am also very excited to be a part of this. It’s definitely a brave new world with the internet on our side as indie artists. Thank you for developing the tools that are going to help us. Thanks so much for sharing everything with us. I appreciate you offering all of this information and creating these tools to help indie artists.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• PlaylistSupply
• Booking-Agent.io
• Roc Nation
• Red Light
• SoundCloud
• Bridge.Audio
• Indie on the Move
• Pollstar

 

About Benji Stein

Driven by the motto ‘lead by example’, Benji is an aesthetic-focused, forward-thinking founder in the fields of music and technology.

Benji has proven his expertise in pioneering data-driven innovation, comprehensive brand strategy, creative direction, business admin, and identifying niche market trends.

With a background rooted in ‘creative hacker’ ethos, him and his team seek solutions through groundbreaking technology and creative design aiming towards the future of music-tech and data democratization.