You may be the greatest drummer in the world, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be instantly discovered.
Despite your talent and ability, there’s still a major grind involved and you have to stick to a plan to garner the best chance for success in this industry.
Social media is king these days. If you aren’t actively publishing drumming content to your social accounts, you won’t make any progress growing an audience.
If your goal is to get discovered, become a touring or session drummer, and see the world, you need to have a large online presence now and moving forward.
While some areas of the internet are extremely saturated, like YouTube, there are also many platforms that are currently being under-served with drumming content.
Today we’ll discuss three untapped strategies to help grow your following as a drummer.
1) Instagram content
Instagram is becoming more and more saturated every day with drummers, but I still believe it’s an extremely untapped platform for posting drumming content.
The main issue with starting fresh on YouTube is that the competing production value is so high.
In order to grow your channel in 2018 as a drummer, you’ll need to meticulously film and edit your videos (with multiple angles or a someone else to film you) to compete against drummers like Matt McGuire and others (and for those who want to play like Matt, check out these helpful drumming tips).
While I think you should dedicate some of your time to recording and production value, Instagram makes it simple to post a quick video and garner an audience. Many people love raw content.
Take a minute to check out The Orlando Drummer. Sure, his content is produced very well, but you can get a feel on how your content can grow, based on how he posts content.
2) Streaming on Twitch.tv
This is by far the best place to be right now. There are barely any drummers streaming live on Twitch.
It can be a little complicated to get going, considering audio quality and so forth, but if you can figure out how to stream your drumming with an efficient setup, you can grow an audience extremely fast.
One of my favorite drummers, The8BitDrummer, has grown his following to almost 200,000 on Twitch. In fact, he’s streaming right now as I’m writing this!
At this exact moment, 5:16PM PST, when I search the keyword ‘drums’ in the top bar, there are only two drummers that show up who are live. This means you can easily begin to build a following using Twitch as the competition is relatively low!
3) YouTube
Yes, this one is the most saturated, but also has the largest audience, in my opinion, for drumming audiences.
While you may not be noticed right away on this platform, you still need to create content for your channel. This can be many things:
- Original content for your YouTube channel exclusively – Creating channel-specific content will boost your social presence, as users will benefit from following all of your social accounts. If you just post the same content on all platforms, users may feel the need to only follow you on Instagram.
- Video-on-demand taken from your Twitch channel – One thing many creators are doing these days is posting videos from their live streams to YouTube as a way for people to re-watch content or see the content they may have missed when you were live.
Utilizing all three of these strategies will help you grow faster. Did you notice that I didn’t mention Facebook at all? It’s nearly impossible to grow an audience on Facebook, unless you have a gigantic advertising budget.
When you post content to Facebook, only a small percentage of your followers will see your content, unless you ‘boost’ the post for a bit of cash.
I’ve completely ruled out this network as being viable to use for new creators in 2018.
Conclusion
Did I miss anything? Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. What strategies are you using today to grow your audience? Thanks for reading! :)
