Nelsun

As an emerging Artiste: X (twitter) is where you talk about your music. TikTok is where you showcase the value of your music. Facebook is where you build and nurture your community. IG is where you display your growth and achievements.

As an emerging Artiste who wants to gain motion and exposure, you have to invest in your body. Because there are some situations that will require you to perform for hours, to take off your shirts to dance, move around the stage, create content, and engage audiences in ways that require physical energy and confidence in your body. That means you’ve to exercise, eat properly, sleep well, build your stamina, and Improve your flexibility. Whether as a male or female, take care of your appearance. Develop the physical confidence that allows you to focus on your performance rather than constantly worrying about your body. But this isn’t about achieving a particular body type. It’s about being healthy, energetic, comfortable in yourself and physically prepared for the demands of the career you want. As an artiste, you are the product and the performer. So while you are still emerging, invest in the development of your body, not just the music. Your career may eventually demand more from your body than you currently imagine. Prepare for it.

The Three Elements Your Music Content Should Have as an Emerging Artiste: When you are pushing your music as an emerging Artiste, every piece of content you create should have a job to do and must answer these three important questions: 1. How should people use your music? This is referred to as the manual effect. Your content should serve as a manual for experiencing your music. Your content has to show the viewer how to use your music as product, by how you demonstrate the dance, show the emotion, create a situation around the song, highlight a story, display creativity, energy, the lifestyle or the particular experience that your music was created to deliver. Don’t just stand in front of the camera moving your hands, use a creative means to show your audience how to experience the value of the music. Your content should communicate seamlessly how the viewer should apply your music to their life. 2. Why should people care? People have countless songs, Artistes and pieces of content competing for their attention. Your content therefore needs to communicate why someone should stop, listen, engage, follow, share, discuss or amplify. What benefit does your music or your brand provide? Maybe it makes them dance, expresses something they feel, gives them a soundtrack for a particular experience, entertains them or gives them something worth sharing with their friends or improves their status. Your responsibility is to deliberately construct the content so that the audience can recognize a reason to care. 3. Where do you want their attention to go? Attention without direction can easily become wasted attention. After someone discovers your music and understands why they should care, what do you want them to do next? Do you want them to stream the song? Follow you? Use the sound? Share the content? Come to your show? Join your community? Become a genuine fan? Help amplify what you are building so that promoters, investors, labels or other industry stakeholders can discover you? Your content should give attention somewhere to go. That is your call to action. The HOW demonstrates the use of the product. The WHY establishes the value of the product. The WHERE directs the attention generated by the content toward your intended outcome. This is why simply standing in front of a camera, moving your hands from left to right and saying, isn’t necessarily an effective content strategy. Movement is not the same thing as communication. A piece of content should communicate an experience, establish a reason to care and provide a direction for the attention it generates. When an Artiste understands these three elements, content creation for music stops being merely about posting and starts becoming a tool for product education, audience development or influence, and market penetration.

What Does it Mean To Have a Community As An Emerging Artiste? As an emerging Artiste, your community should be a system and structure made up of people who don’t just like or want to support you, but who also have characteristics, interests, resources, networks, and behaviours that resemble the market you are trying to reach. A community goes beyond the group of people you have on WhatsApp who are interested in supporting you to a certain level with engagement, or dance with you when you are shooting content, who follow you to shows, or people who volunteer to act as your team. In the real sense of building a successful music career, your community should be a microcosm of the market you are trying to penetrate. Their reactions to your music, as well as their feedback and usage of your music can give you valuable information about what may happen when your music reaches the broader market. For example, if you are trying to gain presence among university students, your community should contain people who belong to that environment or have strong access and influence within it. If you are targeting a particular demographic, your community should contain people who understand the nature and characteristics of that demographic, participate in it, and can influence others within it. If you consistently create music that resonates with a community that genuinely resembles your ideal market, their response can provide useful evidence about the viability of your music, positioning, messaging, and your potential market fit. But there is another important dimension. Your community should not only resemble your market. It should also have the capacity to influence the market. The people in your community should ideally have relationships, networks, platforms, resources, or social influence that allow them to introduce what you are doing to other people with similar characteristics. That is the difference between having a crowd and having a community. A crowd can cheer for you, but your community should help you understand, enter, and move through a market. So don’t measure your community simply by the number of people in your WhatsApp group, or people dancing in your videos, or escorting you to shows. Ask yourself: Do these people look like the market I want to serve? Do they behave like that market? Do they have access to that market? Can they influence people within that market? Do they have the resources or purchasing power to participate in the value I am creating? If the answer is yes, then you are not simply building a fan group but building a market laboratory, a distribution network, and an early ecosystem around your music. Your community doesn’t have to be large. It has to be relevant. Because the goal isn’t to have the most people around you, but to have the right people whose behaviour can teach you about the market, whose participation can validate what you are creating, and whose networks can help you amplify it beyond the community itself.

A record label that does not have a defined culture, a clear set of values, and systems that guide how the label operates and develops its Artistes will struggle to take those Artistes to their maximum potential. Money alone cannot build a great record label. A strong label culture answers important questions such as: What does this label believe about music? What does it value in an Artiste? How does it develop talent? How does it make decisions? How are resources allocated? How are Artistes treated? How are conflicts resolved? What happens when an Artiste fails? What happens when an Artiste succeeds? What standards must everyone within the organization uphold? Without clear answers to these questions, the label often becomes dependent on individual personalities and moods. The executive wants one thing today. The manager wants another thing tomorrow. The Artiste has a different expectation. The marketing team operates based on whatever seems popular. Money gets spent without a clear framework for measuring its purpose. Eventually, the cracks begin to show. Mismanagement, misuse of resources, internal conflicts, unclear expectations, Artist-management disputes, and eventually, Artistes leaving the label with resentment on both sides. A record label should not merely be a company that signs Artistes and finances releases. It should be an institution with a culture, philosophy, system of values, development methodology, and way of working.

Dear Artistes, Stay safe out there. The simpler a contract, the more dangerous it is. Don’t even read any contract, talk more of signing one without an ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER.