Welcome to Episode 113 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for the episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and I'm not here with matt hose of Alive in Barcelona, but we have a very special guest, Brandon Ossont of The Maguas.

How's it going today? Brandon, great man, How you doing? Glad to hear that. I'm having a great evening so far. It's seven p.m. So it's early for an evening, but in the middle of january it's already dark. So I mean early is relative. Right? Right. Exactly. Yeah. You lose the sun at like four. So. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't understand bands who do winter towards. It's like, but by the time you get to the venue it's dark out like. Absolutely. Yeah, it loses the magic of you go into the venue during the daytime and then you come out at night and you're like, oh cool.

Now we get to go to the next city. Yeah, it's all darkness in the winter. Yeah, exactly. Although I mean, I guess maybe the darkness could do a winter tour. Yeah, there it is and they could just change it up to I believe in a thing called daylight. Exactly. Anyway, we're not here to talk about bad puns and references to uh, to thousands of british rock bands. We're here to talk about the Managua's and how you harness Spotify playlists as part of your promotional plan. But before we jump into that, can you tell us a little bit about your background, who are The Maguas and how did the band form?

Absolutely, yeah. So the Managua's from Scranton pennsylvania emo rock band we formed about, it will be our four year anniversary in May. And we actually all went to the same high school together and we all like new new of each other and the and the other members in the band, they were in like a little band group before nothing serious. But before this band formed and it started with, it was like a weekend in May. And uh, our singer eric sent like almost like a drunk text like seven or eight musicians and we all said yeah, we would do it.

And we and we met for one weekend and within like 10 minutes of the first two guys quit. So you got, you got the lineup you have today. But at that point we were really just looking to do some covers and do some bar stuff and I think within a couple of months and we realized like our first show was in july so we had a couple of months to practice and and by that time we realized, okay, like we, you know, we sound pretty tight together and then we started writing music and it just formed into this thing where we started, you know, realize, okay, original music is the thing we want to do.

And yeah, it kind of just all organically came to be this original emo band from Scranton. And, and, and it's been a wild ride since we decided to take that leap and they're super fortunate for how everything's worked out. But it's crazy to think like a drunk text led to this. Yeah. I mean, hey, every band has a story and that's yours. That's just how it goes exactly. Which when you said a weekend in May, I was like, oh, metal core band name right there and there it is.

I can't believe we missed that as we were forming. Like, yeah, rebrand Yeah. Your medal Cornell. That seems like a very Scranton thing too. I mean, I live out in the middle of nowhere and we have metal everywhere. Mm hmm. Yeah, definitely. We do too. I'm sure somewhere. I mean, obviously we had, I wouldn't consider metal, but I mean Breaking Bad was like hard rock. But then you have was emotionless and white. They're like metal ish, Right? Metal core ish. Yeah, they're yeah, they're metal core. Always forget they're from Scranton.

I hate saying that. I don't listen to them. But I really, it's really not my genre, so I don't really like pay attention very much. Um, but yeah, I always forget they're from here. It's like, oh yeah, they're frustrated cool. You know, like I'm more of like a like men's singles, tigers job, they're all from this area as well. So I found more into that around my guests, although I never found a title fight, which is weird. A lot of people will come up to us and talk about the effect title fight had on them and I'm like, that's awesome.

I could name you one title fight song, which makes me, which makes me sad and feel like such a poser. But at the same time, I don't know, you know, I just missed that coming up. I wouldn't feel bad about that. I've seen them three times opening for other bands and I don't know a single song title either. So yeah, just kind of vibe with them. Yeah, exactly. It's like, okay, they're cool. I mean they're good, but they're title fight or were are or I don't remember these days.

Where are, I don't know. But anyway, man, men, singers, Those guys are classic. That's a good band to look up to and you know, maybe opened some shows for if the opportunity presents itself, fingers crossed, fingers crossed. There's been a couple of times where it's like almost happened. We're just waiting for the day where like it finally felt like comes together, we know they know who we are, which is cool. I mean, that's like, cool enough for me. They play a hometown show every year. It always lines up that like, you know, somehow we can't do it, or or they come in with a different touring package or, you know, things change.

But one day one that, that would be really cool because we went, I mean, like I said, doing like the cover things like we used to play bars and we would cover my friend Kyle and uh I forget another song we covered by them. I like older men, zinger songs and be like, yo you guys got to know this band, they're from this area, we freaking love them. And like, I I think it was crazy to go from that to like opening for them and playing on the same stage as anything.

That would be incredible. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the kind of experience you would never forget, like, I hope you guys get to do that. That would be so cool. Hell yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, you can always ask them and uh I'm probably gonna butcher this pond and this is a different band or something, but you can just be like, hey, this is the real world, come on, like, let's open for you. Yeah, there it is. That's all band, Hi viz is a collection of bad band puns.

Anyway, before I make more puns, I'm gonna reel myself in here and get to the actual topic at hand, which is how you use promotion for The Maguas and before we dive into what you're doing with Spotify. Can you give us like a a top down view of all the promotion and marketing that you do for the Mongols? Like what avenues are you pursuing their? Absolutely. It's kind of crazy. So right when Covid happened, right, I'll start there, we'll take you back to 2020 March 2020. We in that january had just record what is now as you all know as one of us is lying.

Our first like full E. P. Recording studio kind of deal. And we had all those songs finished ready to go. And we also had some music videos already filmed for it which is great. So Covid happens and now we're like okay well we're not gonna be touring on this record. All of our tours that some were canceled and the band kind of took a step back and said okay we're gonna go to the internet, we're going to market ourselves, we're gonna you know, do what we can and get out there.

And at that time this is pre Apple versus facebook. Like marketing changes. So I sat through a bunch of course is there's a bunch out there. The best one I haven't said that I sat through was Todd McCarthy's band builder Academy. Todd McCarthy for those who don't know was the um he worked at Fearless Records for years and years and years signed all your favorite bands made a parade. You know, all those guys from Fearless before the changeover to what it is now. Um and he runs a class that talks about, you know, Spotify and understanding the basics of Spotify for an artist who wants to, you know, figure out the algorithm, how does like a something that's like an algorithm playlist versus the editorial playlist work?

So we went through a bunch of that stuff. I learned a lot about marketing and advertising that way. And then, you know, we decided to to go full in on that and that includes a lot of intricate steps and a lot of planning. I would say like the most important part of this entire process is the planning At the beginning of every year, I will send the band aid 20 some page document of every single step of what we plan to do for the year, including our goals, including what it is we want to hit what it is that we missed in our goals from the year before what we hit from years before and kind of recap and kind of decide okay, what worked in the process, What didn't and how do we, you know, better that moving forward so I can get into all of that.

That would be great. I figure that's a pretty, pretty like nice dive in there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact that so many bands are out there without a plan and this is something we don't talk about on the show that frequently, just because it's like, yeah, I have a plan but depending on what the band wants, what their goals are for that band, it can be so different. But I'd love to hear more about what goes into that for you. Absolutely. And what's funny is with that plan is it sometimes it will change when you when you start to gain perspective of what's important or what your band feels is important.

So, for us, you know that first year it was you know, streaming numbers, you wanted to get our stream numbers to X, Y Z. At that time there was a great course, I forget who it was from, but they spoke about Getting 20,000 streams in 28 days, your release cycle for one single. And at that time, the way you would do it is, you know, you would set up your Facebook ads and you would run your campaigns and you would, you know, promote yourself also organically. And we were able to do it and that was without any editorials, just mostly just paying to get your your name out there.

So then this year we put out a new record, Evergreen and things have changed, right? So facebook changed its privacy rules. So we lost some data sets which made it a little bit more harder to reach audiences and it was a lot more expensive to reach audiences. And also which I think a lot of people are a little underwear of or maybe they are a little bit more aware now and this one really goes out to the smaller artists out there. It's at the Spotify algorithm changed substantially.

And so did the internals of Spotify. So I'm a numbers guy, right? So I followed the stats, I follow a lot of bands and I collect a lot of their data when I watch and see trends. And one trend that happened specifically in 2021 was that smaller bands weren't landing as many editorials on Spotify and when they were they weren't hitting the numbers that they previously seen. So an example of this would be, let's talk about a band that I absolutely adore calling all captains from Canada fantastic band on equal vision, I believe now there on new damage from Canada, it's like a subsidiary I believe, of equal vision.

They are a band who are fantastic music, great streaming numbers in 2019 they hit a couple of songs, had a million streams or like 500,000 On equal vision, you know, and and fast forward to this year's record. So performing well, if you look at the data, but the difference is like you're not seeing those million streams, you're not seeing this 100,000 series, you're seeing 200,000, maybe 300,000 and that drop is across the board. I mean you look at bands like mayday parade who put a brand new awesome record this year. You know, they used to put a song in a million streams and now, you know, you look after a month or at only maybe 300,500,000 and you're like, what, what happened here?

It's still a little ambiguous as to what exactly happened that Spotify. But I, you know, through the grapevine, you hear things about editorial is not fully updating or not being updated within certain months. Bands only landing when they used to land like five editorials, not only landing one, just a lot of, I don't want to say strange things, but a lot of differences from what it was in the past. And so I think, I don't think it was an inflation issue. Like, I don't think so. I don't think these bands had inflated numbers and now this is the truth of what their numbers are.

I just think exposure is becoming so much more difficult on the platform and I've spoken with some label heads about this. I've spoken with some other bands about this and their feelings currently is that it is a oversaturation thing and not like a significant change in Spotify. They just feel like there's so much music being put out right now because of the pandemic, everything and, you know, worker shortages to, and all that jazz, that it's, it's really kind of jamming things up a bit and you're not getting that exposure that you expected.

And so going back to the original question for us in this cycle, our minds to change from, you know, just trying to get our music out there trying to get as many people here in the cold audience and try and get them to become warmer and really focusing on the tangible things that we could do. So we moved more into getting our name out there on bigger publications, trying to land bigger shows and really focus on moving our band forward in that realm, because we realize like, our numbers are numbers and we're proud of where we are as a band on Spotify.

But we wanted to try and find the things that that we could physically hold onto and really promote ourselves with for this new year, because it's kind of like that, that argument with facebook, like you don't own that audience, right? Like you you're on facebook and a facebook were to turn off tomorrow, how would you contact that audience? Right. And so you want to find ways tangible ways to be in touch with your audience and be able to connect with your audience outside of those platforms, and that's kind of where we started moving this way, like, okay, well, if we can get people talking about us in the press and other ways like maybe we just felt that that was a better spent of our money and maybe maybe we'd be able to hit our audience better than just hoping that we'd hit an editorial that along with it.

I'm sorry, you're good. But it sounds like basically you're saying don't put all your eggs in one basket, spread it out. So that when one platform sees a big change, you're not screwed, you can say, okay, well that sucks. But we have three other platforms to rely on. We have this, this and this and we can still do that out of curiosity. Since you said you specifically mentioned ownership of your, your list basically or of your data. Do you have an email list for the band? Yeah, we do.

And we, well, we've gotten about a couple different ways, so we used to do it with a capture forms and things like that. And then that seems to have been the easiest I have seen now recently by working with some, I don't want to older bands and bands who've been doing it for a long time. They have like email lists at their merch tables like, hey man, just like you want to sign up, just drop us an email and we'll send you a coupon for merch or like whatever and people are still into that.

People still do that and I think they like that connection with the band, you know, and I think the audience, I don't think they realize the truth of why we actually need to do it. But for example, you have a new release come out right? And on Spotify, unless you're like in the beta program, you don't really have access to Mark yet, which is like a advertising platform on Spotify, where you can reach your followers directly when you put out a new song or whatever. You could rely on release radar, but typically you only reach about, you know, let's say 15 to 20% of the actual following.

So with a, you know, email blast, you could hit all of your fans at once and they'll all get that email whether or not they open it, that's up to them. But you'd hope that if they're on the email that they at least have some interests in at least opening an email from you. So it's something I think is overlooked by bands, but it's definitely super important and there's a lot of platforms now out there that really encourage it. And I think that's super important, like bands in town, we've never used it until this year and I absolutely love it.

I absolutely love the way it integrates with our calendar and with anything like we can make an announcement and it feels like the algorithm algorithm on bands in town in general is always pushing for your band, right? Like, I mean we just signed up and out of nowhere, you know, you gain like 40 new followers because somewhere around along the way, they're pushing your band somehow or another. And I love that and you can email your fans directly, you know, do all kind of stuff. Super important. Yeah, I think bands in town is a great platform and there's also another app like bands in town that does almost the same thing.

But I wanted to circle back to what you said about taking email, sign ups at the merch table because I think that's so important. And my favorite execution of this that I've ever seen was an ipad at the table where you type in your email, so you don't have, the band doesn't have to like read bad handwriting or drunk handwriting at the end of the night and put that all in and then just offer them some small thing, like a free wristband or a free sticker or something like that in exchange for signing up.

And that's like the easiest thing to do because then people get something right there, right then. It's tangible, man. I love that method. It works so well. Yeah. And don't be afraid to even say like what the purpose is for with your fans. Like, listen, if they're at the merch table and they like to tell your sets the first time seeing, and I thought you were cool. You know, just be honest, Like, listen, when we put a new song, we will send you an email, we're not going to email blast you once a week.

Like, it might be once every three months, once every six months. Like, just be honest with what your intentions are for the email. It's like for myself, I don't, I don't personally use it every time we have something happen. But especially with music releases or a new music video or something where it's like significant, where we put a lot of money into it. A lot of thought we want, we think our fan base would want to see this. That's what you should use it for the most.

I mean, you're not gonna announce every single show that you're going to do on an email list because you know, you're gonna have fans all over the country eventually. Hopefully that's the point. Right? So you don't want to tell, hey, we're playing like Orlando tonight. It's like, okay, cool. But I mean like Scranton like Yeah, Well you blasted me with the same people get annoyed about this, like the craziest things. So be aware of that. Yeah, absolutely. And if your mailing list software lets you put in locations of the zip codes or at the very least states do that.

Your life will be so much easier. Life advice. Yeah. Well, one other question that I had from everything you're saying here is you mentioned now two different courses. How many courses have you taken to further your progress with the band? My craziest course that I took was through a company called toned and I don't know if you're familiar with them, but toned down is like a advertising firm, they do a lot of different things, but they kind of make advertising easier through facebook if you're not familiar with the platform.

That's kind of how I learned facebook ads with true tone done. But we took a, I took a course with them and it was actually a case study because we were able to kind of, I mean, I really excelled in that course and were able to take our following by like 2000 new followers on Spotify in a month or something, which is like ridiculous. Yeah, it was a really, really cool, like I was running some wild ads. Um but I did toned and I did uh the Spotify playlist challenge with Joey Sturgis that was like early on in the band's time and Tyler smith, that was a really fun one.

It's kind of just like a, like a band exchange. It's like 400 bands, like, okay for my band, I follow your band. It's like, you know, it's like old school marketing and that kind of deal. But it worked, it was a lot of fun and that was like early on. And then we did, like I said, band dealer academy and um, so I'd say about four or five courses by, by the end of 2020 I've gone through a lot and now I actually rely a lot on with all these changes.

I go to youtube a lot and I'll look at um Andrew Southworth has a great Youtube channel. He he'll walk through because he's an artist who so he'll walk through his past year and say these are the ads I run, this is how I set it up, this is how much money I spent. This is what worked for me. And I think for a lot of people starting out like he's a great resource because he's doing it. And it's funny because what he does is very similar to what I do and we often end up in each other's related artists because I think it's like just hilarious like oh look at us.

Um Another great this is probably my top resource currently is simple S. I. M. P. L. Yeah. Yeah and and the website is like what is to keep it simple? He is a fantastic resource. He's a he's a real real person, he's very genuine and he's not like a gatekeeper. He will if you have a question he will try and help you as best as he can. This is a very confusing topic for a lot of bands, a lot of people. And he has been like the light in the dark for so many people including including our band.

I mean I remember when he first started doing like a Patreon and I was like an early supporter of his Patreon because I was just so in love with his philosophy of like just helping other people. Um And he's still about that. He has his own record label. Now, he works for Sony. You know, like he's gone pretty far in the past couple of years. He's got a great Tiktok too. So if you guys are on Tiktok, check him out. That's a huge, huge resource for a lot of people and a lot of it's free.

So go after it. Yeah, like a year and a half ago, it was like, who's Anthony pacheco? That's like, everyone knows Anthony pacheco, like the dude just skyrocketed. And what I should mention real quick is all of the stuff that's been mentioned so far will be in our show notes at Bandhive dot rocks slash 113. That's the number 1 13. So you can head over there to find all these links, You don't have to listen and write them down. Just go to band, have that rock slash 1 13. And uh, you can just like, command click on everything and open everything in a new tab and go sign up for it. Yeah.

Excellent, Perfect. Got to make it easy Anyway. Well, first of all, thank you so much for like, just the info dump of all the resources that you use for the band and what you've been doing the past couple of years now. I want to jump into the Spotify playlists that you run yourself. So you've got three major ones. I looked at your Spotify and has like 600 playlists or something. I don't know how you manage that many playlists. I have like two and I can't keep up with them.

But the three biggest ones are pop punk influences, emo, anthem, rock and underground mixtape. Um which have almost 8000 listeners. Just over 4000 listeners and just under 4000 listeners. So those are like really good third party playlists, like that's a good size. How do you harness the power of those playlists to boost the mandalas? Yeah. You know, I so a year ago it was I was really, really invested in these playlists and and I would post every week, Every week I would make a post about the updates, I tag all the bands.

I do all these different things. Um and it was a really great way for me to get to know the scene currently that I am in and get to know a lot of artists that are writing amazing music that aren't really being appreciated fully yet. And then facebook change to like that new version. And it made it so hard for me to like not keep up with the place because I still updated weekly. But to make those kind of posts like, tagging became such a pain, like I couldn't even like you tag one band and then like next thing like you to try and take the next band can't find next and you're like, oh my God, this is such a headache.

And I used to love that. Like I used to love to be able to do that kind of shout out. But things changed with facebook and it just really became such a like tedious thing. I could like it would take me an hour to make a post and I can't do this anymore. Like I'm just wasting time. So now I've turned right into just like, you know, making the updates and telling bands and I've added them and there is a huge overhaul that's actually taking place with these playlists and I'll get into that a little bit.

But the way I like I said it started off as just being waste like highlight bands that I enjoyed that I'm aware of. And I meet these bands through facebook groups such as um it used to be called, Gosh, what was it called? I think you have pop punk networking group. Yes. The networking group. And now it's it's like alternative alternative networking group. But that was where it all began for me. And that's where I met some amazing bands and from there, I kind of like would take my own knowledge of the scene and the bands that I was really enjoying.

So there was at the time for me, I was really falling into, you know like the youth fountain and the congo captains and the and the goalkeeper and chief state. And so I would like get those bands add them on and I would do like tears almost. Like here's a band I just discovered and here's these bands that like are kind of popping off right now and I do like, you know, you're hot mulligans, your May day parades and all that stuff. I do that every week or bi weekly for the pop punk one, and then on the other weeks I would do email and underground and it just kind of started to pop off from there and I used to take submissions and listen all the time, these submissions and I still do submissions, but now I do it a little differently because it's, I used to go from getting like, you know, 10 2030 submissions a week to like 203 100 submissions a week.

Yeah, it's brutal. I've been fortunate enough to get some really awesome submissions from like, I think my favorite one was from a day to remember a good charlotte. Those were like, like, wow, look at this. And uh I got to speak with jake, the drummer from Mayday Parade. Um he had a solo project and we featured him on the playlist. I got to speak with him and he's like, my idol. So that was like a huge, you know, wow moment for me and it really popped off and I kind of took the past couple of months away from the posting side of it and there was a reason for that.

I kind of wanted to re brand in a way these playlists and find a way for me to take it to the next level, if that makes sense. And this is kind of like, it's kind of a relief. I've been teasing it for like a year. I'm going to be moving it into this whole, I'm sure you're familiar with like higher up publicity and, or just silly. Um, he has a great Tiktok channel. He does playlists and news and all that stuff and I've, he has a podcast as well and he's a phenomenal person.

I've worked with him, a lot of, a lot of different projects. He's kind of inspired me to take the place a bit further and I'm going to be kind of moving into the Tiktok realm with the playlists as well as bringing back the post and the highlight features, but it's going to be a little bit more like, specially curated, it's gonna be a little bit more weekly refreshed. I think, I think the one you're gonna see Pop Up the most public influences. I think that one's going to be kind of the special one where people come to every week and like, okay, here's, here's the newest news and pop punk, what tours are coming up, what news is happening and when I'm talking about tours and news and new songs, I'm talking like from top to bottom.

I'm talking the May day parades the real friends all the way down to like the mog was the calling out captain. So the newest bands that, that happens to speak with me that week. I'm not gonna be able to get everybody every week, but my hope is to kind of trying to light on all the things, you know, like there's this wonderful band called Glimmers. They just announced that they're gonna be playing a show with like the Home Team and I think this Wild Life, maybe it's the bandits on tour and they're opening for them.

Like that would be a highlight that I would have for that week. And my hope is to kind of grow those playlists using that Wild Wild West algorithm of Tiktok while also promoting them on my end using social media, using the tactics that I've already used to get to where it is to kind of take it to that next step and continue to highlight like I said that the amazing bands I've been meeting and speaking with it is a lot of work on the back end. But I'm, that's why I've been taking so long to really prepare for it and kind of be like ready to hit the ground running and said, okay, we're ready now.

You know, we have all of our, all of our ducks in a row and now we're just going to launch and see where it takes us. I think that's going to be coming up within the next couple of weeks. I think our hard deadline is february 1st, but it might even drop two weeks before that because I am kind of like ready, I'm itching to go, I'm just collecting the last minute things and then, and then you're going to see a big push for that and I hope that it comes across your, your screen sometimes soon. Awesome.

I'm gonna have to are you already on Tiktok? I am on my personal page and the magazine's page, that one is not. So I'm not sure yet where we're going to launch it from where the band and I spoke about and there's a lot of debate about whether we want to launch it as its own entity or or do it as we have been since we started the place, which was through the magma, like the magma has always been where the updates came through, Right? So you go on social media and you see the magazine posted a new playlist update and then we have you on our story and we give a lot of shots because back then you had to have a certain amount of followers to link things, you know what I mean?

So like we were using the power of the jaguars to kind of get their voice out there and I think, I'm not sure where that's gonna go. I don't know, I'm not sure if we're gonna run it through the jaguars or not, but if I do launch a different channel, you, I will make everyone aware of it for sure. Yeah. So I'm just gonna throw out there. You're at the McG was on all social media platforms. So that'll be in the show notes and this episode comes out on january 25th.

So if you know by then that it's going to be a different account, just let me know and I'll put the updated account information in the show notes. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, I'm super excited. I think, you know, Spotify place, I'll get into more of the, the growth side of that when, when, when we get to the next segment. I think it's really open a lot of opportunities for bands and it's, it's, it's definitely a lot of work. There's a lot of like late nights, like wait till midnight till this song comes out and then you're like curating at like one in the morning.

But if you really have a passion for like, supporting other bands and, and it can't just be about, like, your band, you know what I mean? Like, it was that was one thing I think, where we kind of tried to separate ourselves. Yeah, we still have our songs in there and yes, sometimes we have a strong at the top because, you know, we're still trying for ourselves as well and that's important. But for me, it became a lot about like, I want this band on the cover, I want to talk to this band, I want, you know, it's kind of like getting your foot in the door to just network and that's such an important aspect of the music industry is speaking with other bands and networking and other bands and making friends.

And that was kind of our avenue of doing it. And I'm I'm super proud of how far it's come in and I have a feeling this new, this new avenue is going to open a lot of doors for us and a lot of other bands too. So I'm super excited. I think it's great. First of all that you highlight, you know, you're not doing it just for yourself. You're also highlighting other bands that you actually care about. You enjoy their music and that's why you're sharing them.

And I think that's one of the most important things, it's like in the music industry, people recognize authenticity if you go out there and you're just talking about yourself all the time, no one's gonna care. But if you're highlighting other people in the scene and helping people like you mentioned with Anthony pacheco and simple, that goes a long way because people pick up on that and say, oh, like look, you know, yeah, they have some products and services. They're asking for money, but a lot of the content is free, this is great.

Like let's share this and that word spreads, it's all about giving back to the community and there's a great book. I don't know if you've read it, but if you haven't, it sounds like it would be right up your alley. It's called the Go Giver. Are you familiar with that? Okay. I would definitely recommend it. It's like 100 10 pages, maybe 100 and 15, something like that. And it's a great story just about how helping other people out is going to be really useful to you and obviously you're already doing that.

But just like understanding the framework behind it. I think it's so important to, like we mentioned it on the podcast all the time. It's such a good book. Oh yeah, I'm gonna have to get into, it sounds right up my alley. So yeah, and it's like $12 on Amazon. Oh, great. It's like a dollar per 10 pages. But yeah, anyway, great book. And uh, you know, you, you mentioned the next segment and I had on here. How big of a role to the playlist to play in your overall promotion strategy.

But I think we already kind of covered that with all the other stuff that you're talking about about facebook ads and the mailing list and you know, they are one part of the many eggs in the basket that you have. So I'm gonna go and jump onto the next thing, which is what kind of tools do you use to manage the playlist because obviously like you're getting so many submissions. There's no way you can just handle that all on facebook messenger or something like that. It used to be google, like google sheets.

I used to do, like, I used to have like to submit, you would go on google and you would send me, you would add the song link and your band name, and I would have them do, I used to do even ask them to pitch it to me just to practice their pitches and at one point it just became too much data, I guess for me, I was like, okay, this doesn't matter to me. Like, I just want to hear the song, you know, like, so for myself now, I kind of I still use the google sheets, but it's just like submit your song link or message me.

I do that too. I have used tools in the passage, there's this website called Daily Playlist, which is a playlist website that's free to use. They are moving a little bit more into that, like, what's the one that you like, pay for? Like yes submit hub. So they have a feature like that now that they've incorporated, but that's only if you want more submissions, like, it's still free 25 submissions for free, but that's the website that I've used because I can integrate it onto my own website and have people just like submit to the playlist without having to like fill out a whole google form and do all that stuff, so it's a little bit easier for me to track and kind of like, it takes me right to your Spotify page.

You know, I can go and like follow your band, I do that a lot to like when people used to submit, I used to go to the band page and follow them, just give, just give them follow. Like, even if I didn't like the song, if I didn't add it, which is rarely ever the case, I would always go and follow them and just kind of give them the support that they feel like they need, especially in the early phases of a band. So daily places one that that that that that I used and it's it's a great resource and they're definitely making a lot of changes there to make it more, you know, they're trying to make it more band centric and give people opportunities and now they have like, a battle of the band kind of thing every day, were like, it's two songs against each other and you can vote which one you like more.

Um and if you like win that day, you get, you get left on the home page for a day, it's kind of like, you know, like, just to get more people to hear you, which I think is a really cool feature and again, this is a free free website, like anyone can use it. Super, super cool. I definitely recommend it for bands just looking to submit. I, I won't say I've had the greatest in terms of my own band, like submitting my, our songs to playlists on there.

I haven't had the greatest like turnaround times or anything like that. But if you know someone like myself, like I'm weekly, like in terms of curating like, so that's for me, that's someone who likes to update playlist like that. It's nice for me because I can go on, look at the submissions, get through my personal submissions because I'll get some stuff from like pr companies and bands just hitting me up in my messenger and kind of be able to siphon through the rest of them and say, okay, like this is where I'm at.

But that's really it. I mean a lot of it is just me, kind of, you know, if someone sends me a song, I don't have a chance to listen to it. It's typical that I will add like 99% of the songs that I said to me, it just depends on what playlists that they land. Right For a while. I had broken it down to like, you know, my medical bands and like my heavier rock bands, like on the email playlist and pop punk is mostly pop punk underground was like the in between like the indie people or whoever and then I kind of expanded even a little bit further and those playlists aren't as big, but I have one called Beatdown Mondays which was actually curated for awhile buyer singer and that was like heavy, heavy music that I just, I'm not really into that genre, but my singer is, and so when I get submissions like that, I sent him over to him.

It's like, hey, if you want to add this to the players, like go ahead. I also have like my own personal playlist called like Late Nights in my Car, which is like indie music. Um, it falls, it has a lot of different bands on there from like acoustic hot Mulligan to like Nova Moira Bonnie blair, you know, acoustic real Friends. Like it's got everything in between harry styles, but like people will send me some indie stuff and I'm like, this is sick, I'm gonna listen to this on my own.

But those two specifically, I don't really promote that much. And they still, they still grow a little bit. I think I have a little bit of a following in terms of like curation people just really like to see what I'm listening to, I guess because they've talked to me and like, like sending their bands to me and seeing what it is that, you know, because there's bands out to that research curator and I think that's important and I think that gets to my biggest advice points so far is before you submit to any playlist, check out the playlist and see if it's right for you.

A lot of people will just submit to submit to any playlist. It's important to actually listen to the playlist and be like, okay, maybe I should submit to underground this at a pop punk. You know, like, you know what I mean? Because like, you know, I'll have people who will submit to all three of my playlist and it's like the same song. Like, well, these are three completely different playlists, you know, so, but that was 11 word advice. My second word of advice for that is check the last time that the place was updated.

If you can start to realize that I'm very vocal about like, oh, I'll either update weekly or bi weekly and I'll let people know this will be updated again in two weeks. And you'll see that on the playlist. The only time where that changes the holidays because the music industry shuts down for like three weeks during the holidays. So I kind of just like chill and spend time with my family. But check and see and you can see this on the website on Spotify that the web browser, it'll tell you last updated six days ago, two weeks ago, four weeks ago.

And if it's passed a month, your likelihood of really like landing on that playlist or getting a response to that curator is probably gonna be slim. So try and find the ones that are being updated constantly and support those securities to and support those artists on those playlists? That's that's super important for growing your own band and growing, you know, helping girls playlist that you want to support. Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to say, like, what you were saying about listen to the playlist first, that is one of my biggest pet peeves bands who say, oh, check this out.

It'll be a great fit. It's like, this is death metal. I have an indie rock playlist. What? And just to put it in perspective, like, I used to do radio, I have an email that is in no way connected with radio or any real music industry stuff. It's like my personal email. And somehow a bunch of french publicists have decided they should send me their french E. D. M. Tracks. And I was like, what? How, why? So, it's like, I don't even do radio anymore, and I never did E. D. M. It makes no sense.

So I 100% agree with that struggle. Yeah. And the other stuff is great too. Like, those are all great points. But I just I resonate with that one on like, a core level. And you can probably tell I'm like, piste off. I'm like, those people, Oh, anyway, man, I wanted to keep going down this, this path of talking about the playlists. How have the results been so far for promoting the mag was from those playlists, because, you know, Spotify has all the great stats where you can see how many plays you're getting from each playlist.

How's that campaign going? Yeah, it's been kind of wild. Like we get Broken down when the song isn't like the top 10, right? You might see anywhere between like 3000 to 300 extremes from pop punk, places alone. And it varies of course, because, you know, every month to month. Currently, the, the, what's the word? Like the advertisement or the spread of It has been kind of like, we've taken different approaches to kind of see what works with, like we've gone to Tiktok, we've got two reels, we've gone to, you know, running ads and kind of saying, okay, like what works a little bit better, But it's really, it's definitely helped us grow.

It's helped us gain a lot of new listeners to. So when we, when we run one way to spin it, right, from an advertising perspective, is like, okay, I can run an ad saying, listen to my band, right? And you can like, okay, sure, maybe I'll check it out. Maybe I won't. Or I can run an ad about playlist. Like, hey, do you like pop punk music and you can feature X, Y. Z. Band in the advertisement and say if you like bands like Hot Mulligan Mayday Parade, check out this playlist.

And you could do some sort of music feature, you can even have your band's music playing. If your band, it sounds like pop punk and you're doing a pop punk playlist. Put your band as the advertisement sound, but run focus the add on the actual playlist itself and people will check it out. And if your band is at the number one spot or the number five spot, if you get someone who get who comes in and sees, oh, there's my favorite band, Neck deep and number two, um, I don't know who this band is, that number one or number three.

Let me let me listen to a little bit like there's people out there that want to discover that kind of stuff and they want to, they want to have their finger on the pulse and discover new bands too. But also they have to have something familiar to them to kind of make that click right. And so when we were like full fledged doing that kind of approach, I mean, our followers went up on both the playlists and our own bands, our listeners, when people were sharing our music a lot.

And yeah, it's mind boggling once you really get into it. And if you can figure it out how important it is of a tool. And I'm not saying every band needs to do this, I'm not saying like this will make or break your band, but if you're someone like me who likes to really discover new music and support other people and dedicate a good chunk of time to that. This is this is a great way to kind of get your foot in the door and help your band out and help other bands out to.

Yeah, I mean, 300 plays. Like there's so many bands who would literally kill for 300 plays and that's like on the lower range, if they get 3000, there's so many bands where like, they get 1000 plays in their first month total. It's just like, okay, I mean, hey, good for you, but you can do more with that. So that's huge for you to be able to give that opportunity to other artists that you're putting on there. And then when you have new music to do that for yourself to like, that's huge.

That's amazing. And so you started growing this playlist about two years ago, is that right? Yeah, Yeah, crazy enough. It was actually, I remember one of the first updates dropped, we were on tour with a band called Senate requests were playing in Atlantic city. And I remember like, sitting in the hotel room, like, doing my first post about it or whatever and being like, we'll see how this goes. Like, I forget what bands I featured and like, then I saw some great feedback from it. I kept going, I kept going, I kept going and I was like, oh wow, this is actually kind of becoming a thing now.

And then all of a sudden became the playlist guy. and that was, you know, that's gonna be your stage shirt from now on. Yeah, plain black shirt, white letters. The playlist guy. Yeah, submit your, submit your songs to on the back of the link to the submission site. Exactly, Exactly, exactly. Oh man, Well, hey, this has been super helpful, thank you so much for sharing all this information. All of the links, like I said, we'll be over at and I've got rocks slash 113, so you can go click there.

We might have set a record for mentions. Our previous record was 2 50. We did an episode talking my co host tonight about our top 10 favorite albums each and then we had like 15 bonuses each, and then we were talking about songs and producers. So we got 2 to 50 real easy, but I think this might come close. Yeah, we'll see what the final count is. But anyway, before we wrap this up, where should people go to learn more about the Managua's and your playlists? Absolutely, uh, definitely check out the mag was on, on all social media.

It's just at the Managua's and that's M A G U A. S. Managua's, which they'll be, it'll be linked to, you know, it um for myself, if you have any questions about play listing or even just like promoting your band and I offer, you know, I'm not like a charge for consultation. If you have, if you have questions, I will give you to the best of my knowledge, what I can do to help you and just feel free to reach out to me. I'm on instagram on facebook, it's just at Brandon Ossont, you'll find me, I'm pretty friendly guy, so I'm just like, yeah, whatever you need.

I was just speaking with the band from California or whatever they were asking for advice on how to push your next single, and I was like, okay, well, here's what we do, you know, what's your budget, what are you looking to do? And like, is your band, is this band for hobby, is that your life goal? You know, like, and let's see if we can hit those marks. You know, I'm all about hitting those milestones and supporting bands and you want to be featuring a place, just hit me up.

Either hit me in my DMS or um, you could submit on the Managua's official website, which is the Maggots dot com. There's a tab playlist. You go there, you just drop your song link into it and I take care of the rest in the future and a couple of weeks, who knows? By the time this airs, you might see your band name tagged on a facebook post, you might see it pop up on a Tiktok, just, you know, keep your eyes open and be ready because it's gonna be a great time.

Alright, perfect. Thanks so much, Brandon and I just want to toss out there, I can vouch for how friendly you are via messenger because my friend Dustin from Two eyes Open said oh hit up Brandon and I did. And here we are doing this interview. Yeah, yeah, shout to Dustin, great guy. One of the best. Yeah, yeah. Dustin is awesome. Two Eyes Open is a really fun projects and uh I think he's got some exciting new stuff coming up this year too, so I'm sure he does.

Can't wait man. Well, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it and I hope you have a great evening. Same to you, Thank you for having me. Mhm. That does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast, thank you so much for tuning in and listening and big thanks to Brandon Ossont of the magazine for coming on the show to share so much knowledge about Spotify marketing and marketing in general, and really setting an example for education and having a plan. I love that he was talking about Having that full year plan, that 20 page document like that is amazing.

That is key. If you want to actually do something with your band, set your goals, close your eyes and find out what you need to do to reach those goals. That is how you grow your band really nothing you can change about that. Then once you have those big goals, figure out each step you need to take to get there and write those goals down. So as you're going along the way, you can check things off, that is how to make a plan. And then of course everything he shared about Spotify, like I am a Spotify new by myself, so I'm so happy to have Brandon sharing his information about Spotify.

And I highly recommend you check out all the links he mentioned. Like I said, they're in the show notes at Bandhive dot rocks slash 113. You can just go ahead and command click all of them open up all those tabs. I know you have like 30 tabs open anyway, so just go ahead and do that and learn learn, learn, learn education is so important. We'll be back with another new episode next Tuesday at six a.m. Eastern right here on your favorite podcast app. Until then, thanks again for listening.

I hope you have a great week. Stay safe. And of course, as always, keep rocking