Lead magnets for musicians and bands when you want a mailing list

You announce the show three weeks out. Eleven thousand followers, and the post reaches about four hundred of them, most of whom live nowhere near the venue. On the night you play to sixty people, forty of whom came because somebody in the band texted them personally. That gap, between the size of your following and the number of people you can actually reach on a given Tuesday, is the whole reason to build a mailing list, and the fastest way to build one is to give something away that only a real fan would want.

The problem with an audience you do not hold

Streaming numbers and follower counts are real, in the sense that they describe something, but they are not a channel. You cannot decide to reach those people. You can only publish and hope the distribution goes your way, and it goes your way least often at exactly the moments that matter: a run of dates, a record you funded yourself, a last-minute support slot.

The awkward truth underneath is that most of your listeners are not fans. They are people who liked a song once in a playlist and have no interest in your Wednesday in Leeds. That is fine and it is normal. What you need is a way to separate the small group who would travel from the large group who would not, and the only reliable separator is a small act of effort. Somebody who types their email address to get a thing has done a bit of work, and that bit of work is the signal.

The genuinely hard part is having something worth the effort. Bands tend to reach for whatever they have lying around, usually a single already on every platform, which nobody swaps an email address for. The give-away has to be something that does not exist elsewhere, and making it costs you an afternoon you would rather spend writing.

A follow, versus a name you keep

Both look like audience growth. Only one of them still works when the platform changes its mind.

What to actually give away

The test for each of these is simple: would a passive listener bother? If the answer is yes, it is probably too broad to sort anybody. You want the thing that makes a certain sort of person sit up.

• A stem pack from one track. Separate drums, bass, guitars and vocals as a zip. Producers and bedroom remixers will take this instantly, and some of them will make something and tag you, which is distribution you did not have to buy.
• An unreleased demo or an alternate take. Not the polished version. The one recorded in a kitchen with the count-in still on it. Scarcity does the work here, and it costs you nothing because the file already exists on a hard drive.
• Tab, chords or sheet music. Guitarists searching for how to play your song are the single most motivated group in your audience, and they are currently finding a wrong transcription on some ad-riddled site. Give them the correct one with your name on it.
• A live recording of a specific night. Two or three songs from a room, with the audience audible. This one sorts brilliantly for touring, because the people who take it are the people who go to gigs.
• A one-page anything: lyrics, a zine, a poster. Cheap to make, easy to print, and the sort of object that ends up on a wall. Good for younger audiences and for bands whose identity is visual as much as musical.

Setting it up before the next announcement

This is a one-evening job and it wants doing before you have news, not during. The free plan keeps your store.fan link, unlimited link cards and the full storefront designer forever, with 28 themes and 11 layouts, so the page can look like the band before you have paid anybody anything.

Three hundred names before the tour

Imagine you put up a stem pack in February and mention it three times over two months: once on its own, once in a post about how the track was recorded, once pinned in a bio. By April a few hundred people have taken it. Not a huge number against your follower count, and a much better number than it sounds, because every one of them typed an address to get it.

In May you announce a run of dates. Instead of posting and hoping, you export the list, sort it by the city question, and write to the people in each town before the tickets go public. What happens next is not guaranteed and it will vary enormously by city, but the mechanism is different in kind from posting: the message arrives, and it arrives with a name on it. The bands that fill small rooms consistently are almost never the ones with the biggest follower counts. They are the ones who wrote down who came last time.

The mistake: giving away the wrong song

The instinct is to lead with your best and most accessible track, because that is what wins over strangers. But a lead magnet is not there to win over strangers, it is there to identify the people who are already interested, and your most accessible song is the one they can already hear for nothing on any platform. Offering it as a free download is offering somebody a glass of water beside a running tap. The give-away should be slightly awkward: the demo with the wrong ending, the stems only a producer would want, the tab only a guitarist would use. Narrow feels like it will get fewer takers, and it does, and every one of those takers is worth ten of the others. You are not trying to grow a number. You are trying to find sixty people who will come out on a Tuesday.

Pick the file only a real fan would want, put it behind a checkout that costs them nothing, and ask which city they are in. Do it now, while there is no announcement, so that the list already exists on the day you need it. Everything else on this page can wait. If you want to see what else can share the link, the features page covers all ten product types, and the FAQ explains how payouts reach your own Stripe account.