AI is changing the music industry, but how can artists use it to grow their fan base? Bree Noble chats with Sidney Swift, founder of Recoup, to explore how AI data for musicians can unlock new ways to engage fans and build a thriving music career. From understanding audience insights to leveraging brand partnerships, Sidney shares game-changing strategies that put artists in control. Learn how to use AI to market your music, connect with the right listeners, and create sustainable success. Don’t miss this conversation about the future of independent artistry.

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Unlocking Fan Growth: AI Strategies For Musicians With Sidney Swift

I’m excited to be here with Sidney Swift. We’re going to be talking about his new product called Recoup, but also just all about how we can use AI to connect with fans. I’m interested in this because we talk a lot about AI these days, and we’re not talking about it around this, how we can use it to get more data, how we can use it to create a better connection with fans. I’m interested to hear his take on that and how he’s helping artists do that. Before we get into that, Sidney has an interesting background, so I want to make sure that he’s able to share that with you. Let us know what is your backstory? How did you get involved in the music industry and get to where you are now?

Sidney Swift’s Journey From Intern To Producer

I’ll give you the quick history. I started as an intern maybe many years ago in Miami, Florida. This was right around the time when Lil Wayne was signing Drake. He had just started Young Money. Nicki Minaj was getting signed, and Tyga. They were all headquartered out of a recording studio called Hit Factory in Miami. Around that same time, I started interning at as many places as I could intern in the music industry.

I got an internship at Hit Factory. Luckily, I was able to be a fly on the wall, and also clean the toilets for Lil Wayne, and had that experience. It was like the hip-hop heyday of the 2010s. Rick Ross and Khaled had a studio across the street. I was right smack in the thick of things. That’s how I got started in the industry, just interning wherever I could. I leveled up from intern to producer 3 or 4 months into my internship because Jason Derulo was coming into the studio.

I heard he was coming in. Later that day, I was talking to an engineer who was like, “I’ve been here for five years. I’m not about to spend five years to get to an engineering position.” I decided to go into the studio where Jason was going to be, put all my beats on the computer, and create a folder called Beats for Jason. I left that night, came back, and my boss was all angry. He called me into his office and was like, “Who put the beats on that computer?” I was like, “It was me. I’m about to get fired.”

Luckily, Jason’s engineer was there and was like, “That was you, man? We recorded to a bunch of your stuff. You got some cuts. Come listen.” Overnight, I went from intern to producer. That’s how I got started in songwriting and producing in the industry. Over the next ten years, I did the songwriting and producing thing, went to LA, worked with everybody from Drake to Major Lazer, just all the pop and hip-hop stuff that was going on in 2010.

I ended up, in 2017, getting a label deal with Atlantic for a virtual artist project that we were working on. I just had all of these tracks that were too weird to get placements. We decided to make a virtual artist. This was before Lil Miquela. The only other artist that was virtual was Gorillaz, and they were twenty years old. We thought it was a cool idea to get all of these weird songs out in the open.

That project did okay. It got more industry accolades than it did, like commercial accolades. What it did was, also, because it was a virtual artist, it allowed me to dive into the tech side of the industry. I took all of the advance money, and instead of buying songs and studio time, since I already had all that, I just spent it all on development costs and interesting marketing plays. From 2017 to now, I’ve just been heads-down in building out tools for musicians using innovative AI and marketing techniques, like how do we separate traditional marketing from the new age of marketing that’s happening?

Can you explain, for people who might not know, and I’m not sure that I do, what it means to be a virtual artist?

It was an artist that was completely digital. It basically wasn’t me as the artist. It was a digital artist. It was more of a created artist that we could experiment on, more of like a brand, so to speak. Think of the Gorillaz, just cartoon characters who are the artists, while the musician-makers are behind the scenes. They’re not necessarily the face of the brand.

That’s what the idea is. How do we create this virtual artist who can theoretically do a world tour in one night, and who can we experiment with using interesting marketing rollouts? The artist can never say no because it’s not a real person. It allowed us a lot of creative freedom to experiment. It was my sandbox, so to speak.

That’s cool. If something doesn’t go well, it doesn’t damage their personal brand or anything.

The artist would never wake up in a bad mood. It was great.

That’s funny. What kind of things did you learn during that time that you are now implementing for actual artists?

We signed the deal with a major, and the majority of artists, I think, have this idea that when you sign to a major, that’s your key and your ticket in. That’s all you need and then you’re golden. The reality is that it’s so far from the truth. A lot of the major label system is, I think of it more like they’re a VC company, and they’re making a lot of bets with the hopes that 1 will pay for the 100. I learned quickly. It was funny, we launched a song on the project, and the first song we rolled out got, I think, something like 7 million streams in the first month or two, which is incredible for a new artist that didn’t have a viral record. It wasn’t like the record went viral.

It was just through engaged fans. It was because we had a unique brand. I got a call from my A&R after that release. I was like, “Are we going to fuel the fire? We’re obviously doing awesome.” He was like, “Theoretically, you’re doing incredible for an out-of-the-box new artist. Unfortunately, during the label meeting, Cardi B’s A&R was next to me on one side, and Ed Sheeran’s A&R was next to me on the other, and they both had releases. When you’re sandwiched in between them, our 7 million looks puny next to their 250 million.”

It just skews the entire data. I thought that that was an eye-opening moment. Even though the metrics are saying green, go, fuel, fire, there’s something here, something broken in the system, that isn’t allowing the growth of the artist or the fuel to be put on the fire. That’s when I made it my mission to solve that problem, not just for signed artists but for all artists who have incredible assets, IP, and identities. They just need the right teams that are focused on them and not on twenty other artists.

 

Why Major Label Deals Are Not Always Ideal

Obviously, it’s a comparison problem in this situation. For example, two people are trying to lose weight, and one person’s 300 pounds and one person’s 150 pounds, and they both lose 10 pounds. It’s very different because it’s a percentage. I do understand, but does it make sense then for artists to either not try to get a major deal, go with an indie label, or just not even have a label?

It makes sense to not even have a label. This is across all industries, not just music, but it’s more about the person than the machine. I think a lot of it has to do with who your contact at the label is. Do they have the ability to press a button to release funds? Do they have a boss who then has a boss who can release funds? If that’s the case, then you have to go through three gatekeepers before anything happens.

You become a question of, is this worth fighting to get fired over or not? Versus if you have someone at the label who has the ability to release funds, conviction, and a track record of taking risks, I think then that’s a good signal to have somebody in your corner at the label. I would consider that deal a success, and I would go play in that field, but 99% of the time, that’s not the case. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s you’re starting out at the label, not signed to the CEO.

You don’t have access to that person who can greenlight anything. In that event, you have to work your way up by just creating social moments of virality. In that case, you don’t need the label to do that. They hurt your chances of doing that because they pull you in all of these directions and give you feedback you don’t need when you can just stay focused on, “I just need to create moments and build fans.”

Plus, if you’re tied to one person, if that person leaves, and we all know that people are moving around all the time in the industry, so it seems a little scary to tie all of it to this one person that’s going to be your champion at the label. They could move, they could start another label, they could do all kinds of things. Being your own champion is the best way to go. What about the money side? As you said, labels have become VC. Is there a better way to get that money that you need to fuel the marketing of what you’re doing if you’re going alone?

I did it through songwriting and production. That was my income stream. I was lucky enough to have a successful career doing that, which supplemented my income and allowed me to experiment with the artist stuff. A lot of the suggestions for new artists would be to write great music, but don’t think that it all needs to be yours. If you can sell a song, if you can sell your production, if you can help other artists succeed, that’s a huge way to get funding. The other stuff is, I think brand partnerships and niche audience engagement. It is something that’s untapped that is traditionally saved for the major artists.

It’s obvious to say, Beyoncé’s out of 70 million fans on Instagram, a percentage of them are dog lovers. We can get a brand partnership with Chewy.com pretty easily. Their brand strength is obvious. I think there’s a huge opportunity for smaller artists to do the same thing now, just with more niche communities and brands with the power of AI. That’s where I’m most focused on. I think the biggest opportunity for up-and-coming artists is you can now identify. Let’s say, you have 1,000 fans on Instagram. You can now identify of those 1,000 fans what percentage are into skateboarding in Asia.

There's a huge opportunity for smaller artists to be able to do get funding now with more niche communities and brands using the power of AI. Share on X

Let’s say 50 of them are in Asia skateboarding. It’s easy to then identify small mom-and-pop skateboarding shops in Asia that want to partner with micro-influencers, à la you’re an artist, and start to build out a relationship with them in order to grow your 50 skateboarding fans to 100, to 200, to 300. I think that’s a huge opportunity. Micro-niche fan growth and targeted fan growth with the help of brands and micro-communities.

That’s interesting. It’s very true. In the past, it has been hard to dig into that, to know that much detail about the people that follow you. That’s super interesting. I have about 14,400 on Instagram. I’d be interested to know what the top ten things are. Are you looking at data point congregation? Is that how you figure out what the things are that you would go after for that artist?

How AI Helps Artists Build Niche Audiences

The way that we do it with Recoup is, let’s just take your audience, for example. I can put in your social data, and the AI analyzes your artist, your social brand. It goes into every one of your followers’ accounts and pulls all of their data. It can see, this person posts about dogs. The last three posts about dogs, they have a dog emoji in their bio, so they probably love pets. They can put them in the pet lovers segment in New York. Now you have an idea of, “Cool, I have a uniquely bubbling fan base of pet lovers in New York. How do I leverage my brand to go there and grow within that community?”

It’s as simple as going onto pet lovers in New York on Reddit and starting to talk to that community. It’s just inserting yourself where your fans already are. What I’ve found is that a fan converts into a listener, an artist, or, in your case, a podcast listener, from a passive listener to an active listener, ten times quicker if they know that you also align with other belief systems or identities in their head.

 

You’re speaking my language. This is what I call connection points. It’s identities, beliefs, and core values, the things that, like you said, are going to be like, “I know this person, I recognize this person, I feel comfortable, I feel safe.”

How can artists and brands, podcasters like yourself, identify where those opportunities exist within your following? How can you grow that and cultivate that in order to then leverage it, by either growing more fans in that niche or saying to a brand, “Ten percent of my audience as anime fans. Let’s do a collaboration between this anime company and my audience?”

Let’s just say there’s 10% of my audience that loves dogs. I’m not a dog lover. I probably wouldn’t choose that. It’s because I would want to be able to get behind that thing and be passionate about it. Let’s say there’s also 10% that love cats, and I love cats, then I might want to choose that to focus on.

I think it all depends on, from a release strategy, what your next campaigns are. Even if you don’t love dogs, I’m sure you can find a way to tie in dogs on a media tour or something or bring somebody from that world onto your podcast to talk to activate all those fans. It’s just being empowered with the data that allows you to strategize so much better than not having that data.

I can imagine data sounds super golden. It’s golden for the people that want to promote their thing as well. They can then reach those people directly and have access to a group of people that they wouldn’t normally have access to. That’s cool. It’s not unethical. It’s very much, this is the data, we can just process it so much faster. I just remember back in 2017 or 2015, when all this stuff was coming out about Facebook and how they were gathering all this data, and it was such a big deal. I feel like now, with AI, people are like, that would be like shrug now.

I think there are two trains of thought with AI. There’s the current state of AI and what it’s capable of doing. This other train of thought, which gets into the more unethical fun conversation of where this thing is going. When we talk about what can things do, how can artists and creators use AI now to help them grow their fan base and get paid? It’s basically using AI that, otherwise, they would need to hire a team of people for, which usually is outside of their budget.

It replaces the need for you to hire an assistant to go through every one of your Facebook followers’ pages and then write on a spreadsheet, like, “This person likes dogs, this person posts about football, or even just the old-school way of doing a survey of your audience. I think that there’s a huge opportunity for artists. I think that AI now has a bad rap. A lot of the industry is shying away from it, when in reality, the artists and creators that lean into the AI tools that exist are going to have such a huge advantage over everybody who’s not using it.

It’s the same thing as when social media came out, and half of the world rolled their eyes and was like, this is a fad. The people that got on it and started building then were years ahead of everybody else ten years later. It’s the same thing with AI, how you find the tools that you’re comfortable with. I know there’s a huge debate over music creation and things like that. I have my thoughts on that. The more important question is to find out how you can leverage AI in any of your workflows and not fight it. Instead of spending your energy fighting against the genie that’s already out of the bottle, just be accepting of what it is and say, “How do I use it to do what I’m doing faster?”

AI And Songwriting: Incorporating AI To The Creative Process

I am curious about your opinions on using it in relation to songwriting. How do you feel like the right way is to incorporate AI into that workflow?

I have a very unique opinion on this because I was working on a virtual artist project, and it’s also because I come from the production world. I’m an early adopter of all tools, and so I’m all for AI and figuring out however you can use it to optimize. When it comes to creative tooling, I think it’s incredible. I personally think it’s incredible. What historically would have taken me 12 hours and 5 people in a studio, coordination, and studio time and all of that stuff, I can now get done in 2 minutes with an AI tool.

That’s not to say that the end result of that two minutes is the final, and I would take that and then put it on radio. However, leveraging the tool for what it is, where it’s taking you from, it’s just saving you time and effort. I think what’s most interesting about AI in the creative process is the scalability of things.

The way I see this is, once your music hits a certain quality level, and you’ve got to put in your 10,000 hours, whatever you want to call it, to get the music to a quality level. Once you get there, then it just becomes a numbers game. How many songs are you putting out? How many pitches are you doing? How many submissions are you doing? It’s how many shots on net. Power laws then kick in.

Traditionally, before AI, I could make 1,000 beats a year. Of the 1,000 beats, 10% of them would get written to. Of that 100, 10% of them would be good. Of them, one would get cut and become a hit. That’s traditionally what happens. What AI does now, all of a sudden, is it turns the 1,000 tracks that I was capable of doing into 1 million tracks. My shots on net scale crazy. That just means that I can have more ideas. I can send more things out to artists. I can put more stuff on the internet. I can see what sticks. My time is less spent on things that don’t matter. I can spend more time on things that do because I’m shooting more shots.

Do you think this is a perspective that is more specific to the hip-hop or electronica genres or genres like that versus singer-songwriter-type genres where everybody feels like this song is part of my soul, and it’s my baby, and I’m birthing it? They don’t tend to release hundreds of songs a year.

I don’t think it should be limited to genre. I think that AI should be looked at as a tool, and as a creative, your job is to use all the tools you have available in your arsenal to make the best art possible and connect with the most fans as possible. However you end up using that AI tool, even if it’s as a co-producer where you are writing the lyrics and it’s helping you do the production, or vice versa, if you’re not a singer and you’re making the beats and you’re having it help you, it’s just how do you leverage it as a tool to make your creativity 10X?

How AI Is Changing The Definition Of An Artist

I think it then changes the idea of what an artist is. In the past, an artist is the person that writes the songs. I know it didn’t used to be this way before the ’70s. Most people didn’t write their own songs, but now the artist is the person who writes, performs, and records the songs. Nowadays, the artist could be a lyric writer.

The artist could be a performer. It’s funny. I think about this a lot, which is a deeper subject on the future of music as a whole. I think about when technology disrupts genres a lot. When you think about when the guitar got plugged into an amp, rock music was created. When the turntable was used to sample, hip-hop was created.

Before those technologies and those tools were used in that way for music, nobody could have predicted the genre of rap in 1960. If I would have asked you, “What does music sound like in 2000?” you could have never said Kendrick Lamar. It never would have gone there. It is because technology didn’t exist to create music to be able to put that into the cultural phenomenon.

I think of it very similarly with AI tools. I think about my two-year-old son, as he grows up, how he’s going to be using the tools, and then how he’s going to be sharing his creations with his friends. How is that going to sound? What are they going to care about? What does it mean to be an artist when you can make an incredible song and share it with your friends, and you don’t need to know music or know how to sing? Things get crazy real quick in the creation and distribution.

Honestly, you don’t need to know how to do anything. You could get the AI to write you some good lyrics. “I just want to write a song about this.” You could get it to write your melody. That’s what I think freaks me out a little bit. It’s like, you don’t need to have any skill in order to say, “Now I’m an artist.”

I look at it a lot like the creator, the last ten years of the media industry, and how you could have said the same thing for influencers, who now have the power of a media platform on YouTube or` more powerful, because of their podcasts, than the legacy media. When legacy media would turn around and be like, “But they don’t even have any skill. They didn’t even go to journalism school. They shouldn’t be able to have an opinion on any of this.” 

The reality is that they do because they leveraged technology and created stuff that people loved. I think it’s the exact same way now, where as long as you leverage the tools and you create things that people love, you then become what once was. My grandma can go type in a Suno song and make a song. If she figures out a distribution channel for that, she is now an artist.

That freaks me out a little bit, but this is a conversation between a Gen X-er and, what are you? A Millennial? Young Millennial? Early Gen Z? We have different perspectives because of our experience. I’m so trying to be open to it because I want to hold on to certain beliefs. You’re right. I am trying to be open to what you’re saying because the examples you give from the past absolutely make sense, and they are good analogies. I’m working on it.

Just try it. Go make some records. See what happens. I think there’s this whole argument of what is right and what is wrong with music and how it should be. I think the real question, and it gets way more interesting, is the question of, in ten years, when everything is AI-generated and you don’t know the difference, what matters?

When it no longer becomes a question of, “Is this right?” and it becomes a question of “This is it. It’s happening.” It’s almost like now, you can fight all day about YouTubers and influencers having the ability to connect with people, but all they’re doing is making videos. They don’t have any talent. It’s the way it is. It’s like, what do we do with that new reality? I think that’s the most interesting question, from an artist’s perspective, from a media perspective, what are you doing now to prepare for the future world?

In ten years, the music industry and entertainment industry as a whole are going to be a lot different than they are now. What’s not going to change is that people are still going to want to connect with other humans at certain levels. They’re going to want to listen to live music. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. There are some things that are never going to change, so maybe double down on that stuff. I know people will always value live music. How do I get good at performing live if I’m an artist?

 

I tell artists that I work with that for sure. You can’t. They can’t reproduce that. If you’re good at it, then double down on it for sure. I agree. I have become so much more open to this, and I know I need to. Even just from the media perspective, I run a podcast called Women of Substance, and I’m choosing music to play on that to feature. I’m constantly now like, “How do I know this artist is even female?” Probably, I don’t. They could have used a female voice. This could be entirely generated by AI. I just need to be like, “That’s okay.” If they send me this song, it’s performed by a female, and it’s a good song, I’m going to play it.

It then scratches the question of, what do you mean by Women of Substance? Is it the person singing, or is it the creator behind it?

That’s always been a hard one. I’ve always said the artist needs to be female. The person singing needs to be female. The person performing it needs to be female. Maybe the songwriter was female, and then they decided to make this thing. You have to draw the line somewhere to create a container that makes sense. I love all this philosophical conversation, but I would love to hear what your tools can do for artists. How can they use them if they were to use your tools?

Recoup: Helping Artists Through AI

Recoup does the fan data scraping well. You can go onto the platform, just put in your artist info, get all of your fan data, break it into segments, and then understand from those segments where the opportunities lie. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with all of your artist data and a lot more context on the music industry. It’s less general, like, “What should I do for my rollout?” As ChatGPT would say, “Here’s a seven-day content calendar where you should do Instagram reels.”

Instead, this has access to your fans, and it understands who you are as an artist. It will say more things like, “Your last release did X, and your fans like Y. Similar-performing artists are Z. Here are some interesting content ideas that you can do or brand partnership ideas.” It’ll also draft brand partnership emails that you can then take and send out. For example, “A lot of your fans are pet lovers. Here is a small mom-and-pop pet store that exists in the location where you’re about to go on tour. I’ll write you an email pitch so you can send it to them to see if you can partner with them.” Little things like that to help you grow.

The next phase, which I’m excited about, though it gets a little bit more into the dystopian side of the world, is that we’re releasing an Instagram agent for community management next month. It will help you like comments, respond to comments, engage with your fans, build fan communities, and basically be your social media manager on your team on autopilot. You can just sit back, and it’ll grow your Instagram for you. The next stage of that is basically recreating agents that can be your record label in your pocket.

If you were to sign to a label, you would get a project manager, a brand manager, a community manager, and a social media manager. You would have all of these people working for you. Our goal is to basically take those people and give artists the power of having that team, but for a fraction of the cost and without having to sign their life away to a major.

An AI agent’s virtual record label, basically, a team. I wanted to go back to the thing that it does do. I love the idea about sending emails with pitches and things. Does it provide charts and data that you can give to these people that you’re pitching to show? It is because you can’t just say like, “I know that this many people are dog lovers.” They’re going to want to see the data behind it.

It’ll scrape everything. It gives you a report that you have, which you can then take to the brand or partnership.

This is powerful. I had Justin Moore on here talking about his Sponsor Magnet book and how musicians can make some more money by getting sponsors. This is a great tool to help you do that.

The Power Of AI In Music Sponsorships

It is an incredible tool. As I said, a lot of musicians, especially coming up, don’t realize they need a team of people that understand that world to help do it. Usually, musicians don’t have the resources to do that or the infrastructure or systems set up in place to understand the opportunities and sponsorships available.

I think it’s slowly starting to change, where musicians are now thinking of themselves more like small businesses and then using tools and systems like small businesses would, helping them get on that path more than the traditional route of, “I’m just going to go sign a record label and let them figure it out for me.”

Musicians are now thinking of themselves more as like small businesses and then using tools and systems like small businesses would. Share on X

I think I started this show years ago and positions and thought processes about the way that they do their career have changed so much over those years. They understand now, most of them, that they are entrepreneurs and they’re running their own business. It makes sense for them to do that. Adopting a set of tools is what you do as a small business to be able to, without having a big team, have more reach and all that. It makes a lot of sense. Is there any last thing you want to tell musicians to make them understand the power of AI and not be afraid of the future?

I would just say, try it. Jump on Recoup. We do free trials. You can use the platform and get value from it. I would test all the tools. I think there’s a huge value in being the person in the circle or amongst your friend group who has tried everything and knows a little bit more about that stuff than everybody because that just means you’re going to be ahead of your circle and your peers. That gives you an upper hand when it comes to releases and what you’re able to do with making a living doing what you love. It’s already so hard, so use all the tools that you can at your disposal.

It’s not going away. We need to understand it. We need to embrace it. Thank you so much for entertaining all of my philosophical thoughts about AI. We’re all in progress here, I think.

What I can do, too, is, on the side, I’ll set up your account, and we can scrape your data, and I can walk you through the whole thing.

That’d be cool. Maybe I could come on the show and do a solo episode, go through my data and show people how cool it is to see what it gives you. I would love to know what my audience looks like on the backend. That’s going to be super interesting. Awesome. Thank you so much, Sidney. This has been interesting, enlightening, and mind-opening for the future. I love your thoughts about what the future of music is going to look like. We do need to think about that. We need to have that in mind. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you did.

Thank you, Bree.

 

Important Links

• Recoup
• Chewy
• Turning Passion Into Profit: How To Become A Sponsorship Magnet With Justin Moore – Past Episode
• Sponsor Magnet

 

About Sidney Swift

Sidney Swift, a music producer turned tech innovator, has worked with icons like Beyoncé and Lil Wayne. Now, as the founder of Recoup, he’s using AI to help artists and labels grow by turning fan data into deeper connections and new revenue. Sidney’s mission is simple: revolutionize the music industry with creativity and cutting-edge technology.