The democratisation of the music industry has, in many ways, been a wonderful thing. Many of the gatekeepers of old have been removed and it’s now easier than ever for artists to reach their fanbase. However, while that may be a good thing for you, it’s also made it easier for everyone else and now there’s a lot of noise that artists need to rise above to make themselves heard. What that means, in real terms, is that it’s now more important than ever to have a large, professional voice that can get you noticed by the right people. It’s no longer good enough to just be a talented artist. You now need to have a keen grasp of social media and marketing. This, of course, takes a considerable amount of time — updating tour dates, promoting new music and generally keeping your information up to date and easy to find. This is where Viberate fits in.
The beauty of Viberate is it automates all of this. By linking your Viberate page to YouTube, Spotify and your social media platforms, all of that information is fed back into Viberate to give fans, event promoters, publicists and record labels quick and easily digestible information. As we all know, the music industry moves quickly, so even the smallest barrier between, for example, an event promoter and you can put them off and make them continue their search elsewhere. Without even having to click a single link, visitors to your ID page will see the country you’re based in, social media interactions, your most popular video, your most popular songs, the genres you work in, your tour dates, and where in the world your music is most popular.
That once fiddly information is now all in one place and can mean the difference between getting booked and being left out in the cold. As soon as your music arrives on streaming platforms, Viberate has already added it to your page. The same goes for tour dates and even someone high-profile following you on Instagram too. Through Viberate’s Music Network section, you can see which artists are in your network and build relationships much more quickly. You can also look at that information in the context of local scenes. You may be heading out to a new city for a show and thinking about linking up with new artists to collab with. Rather than take a punt with Twitter in the hope that the right person will see it at the right time, now you can use Viberate to filter by a city’s venues and see who already performed there, or will perform there in the future, and connect with them. You can also filter by genre and see which genre dominates the city — all before even booking your flights.
Viberate isn’t just a directory or a social aggregator, the bigger picture is perhaps even more important. Even if you are an artist who’s comfortable with basically doing all their own marketing and publicity, there’s also the data-driven aspect. If you’re a bass music DJ heading to South Africa, will you draw a bigger crowd in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban? Investigating what little data is publicly available on streaming platforms is one thing, but how do you pull this all together quickly without a convoluted spreadsheet? Again, this is where Viberate comes into its own. Now, when a booking agent or promoter gets in touch asking what your fanbase is like in a certain city or country, you don’t need to Google anything. Just send them the link to your Viberate ID and now you both have all the data you need to make that decision there and then, rather than wasting days at a time on research instead of being in the studio writing and recording.
This isn’t just a shorthand that you can give someone to answer their questions, it’s also an invaluable tool to help you understand which people you want to work with and which people you should be working with. You no longer have to explain to someone what kind of music you make and where you should be positioned — Viberate has all of that information for you and anyone else to access. Now you can quickly look up new venues in the Venues section, make sure they’re reputable and find out other people’s experiences. So far, Viberate have mapped over 130,000 venues which you can filter by genre, capacity and location. You can see which artists have performed there in the past and make sure, before you’ve even looked at flights and hotels, whether it’s worth your time and hard-earned money.
In short, the world just got a little bit smaller. You can filter out the increasingly deafening noise and focus in on the industry relationships that matter. If you want Viberate to handle it all for you, it will. But, if you’re a little more hands-on, you can tweak and customise the way Viberate presents the data and add even more detail to your ID. As it becomes more and more important to take a hands-on approach to your career, there is inevitably a lot of work to be done, but with Viberate’s tools you can be a lot more successful and a lot more accurate in the way you collaborate, tour and, most importantly, earn money in a way that makes sense for you and your career.
