Hi,

As someone who has worked in music marketing for the last 12 years, I’ve watched the landscape evolve and change multiple times over. From the blog era, to DSPs, to influencer marketing, to the content era we’re in now, things tend to change every few years.

The music industry is interesting in that once there’s a general way of doing things, it tends to become widely adopted without much challenge. After a recent conversation I had though, I can’t help but wonder if there’s an alternative path to how we think about finding fans.

Let's get into it below.

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This newsletter highlights:

Let's dive in ⬇️

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Quick note: this issue is a paid partnership with Rocketship. The questions, takeaways, and opinions are mine.

My conversation was with Maxwell Zotz - a Founder & CEO with +17 years of industry experience building music companies. His background includes running Ford and McDonald’s music programs, serving as the Head of Music at Max.Live, launching Set.Live, managing the independent rapper Sammy Adams, and booking Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper on college campuses via his Verge Campus platform.

Zotz most recently co-founded a company called Rocketship that has an interesting approach to marketing, A&R, and building artist careers. So much of the industry operates by posting content and letting the algorithm do its thing or paying for promotion on social media pages - as a result, most artist discovery happens after the song is released (unless a snippet goes viral pre-release).

Rocketship is trying to reverse-engineer that process, giving artists and their teams the ability to upload their song before its release and receive an analysis on their target audience based on technology. The idea is to find out who the likely supporters of that song are pre-release, based on how the song actually sounds as opposed to post-release where it’s dictated by the algorithm.

Here are some of my favorite takeaways from our conversation:

It’s funny because I think most of the music industry (myself included sometimes, if I’m being honest), uses a default playbook where you just put the song out, create a lot of content, post it, and let the algorithm find your fans. I actually remember speaking at a Music Biz Conference panel a few years ago on this exact topic - how audience discovery has evolved from artists and their teams having more control of knowing who those fans are to letting social media and the internet find them for you based on your sound, brand, and content.

The idea of finding your audience first and then shaping the marketing strategy around that data is something big brands and companies do all the time - it’s an interesting point that the music industry does the opposite.

Zotz explained how they operated at Ford:

We talked about how Luminate’s year-end 2025 report states that there were 106,000 songs released per day in 2025, with the vast majority never reaching 1,000 streams.

It’s a valid point that if you go in blind, you’re basically spending to find your audience. (This is literally part of how Meta ads work for example - you spend to find the audience and then double down on the audience that reacts). Whoever has the most money tries to hit the most people and hopes the song sticks. It can work if you're a major record label with lots of money to spend but if you’re an independent artist, it can be brutal.

I truthfully never thought about it this way because so much of how the music industry operates is either:

But if you think about it…one of the problems with most music marketing is that it’s very hard to get specific to that song or sound…it sort of sits at the genre level. For example, take an alternative hip-hop artist - they might know the general strategies or plays to run to reach a general hip-hop fan, but how do they reach or identify fans of their specific type of hip-hop? How do they know that those niche audiences will resonate with the song and that it’s worth their time?

The idea of identifying those people pre-release could serve as a parallel approach to how artists and their teams market their music.

If someone used Rocketship’s Song DNA to identify other songs that sound similar and a demographic of people who might appreciate that song, the artist and team could then research what those other artists did (it sounds like Rocketship may actually provide this information soon) and target fans who might be a fan of that specific song based on how it sounds.

On a larger level, most of how artists find out who they’re being compared to happens post-release by the algorithm…but the algorithm may be generalizing by recommending the artist, i.e. treating every song the same.

Which brings us to our next point.

One of the things Zotz and I talked about was how even with tons of data, it’s easy for artists to treat their whole catalog as one product with the same audience.

He pointed to his former management client Sammy Adams, whose platinum single “All Night Longer” built a huge college following, as an example of how specific a song’s audience can be.

This was one of the more interesting music topics I’ve talked about recently. It might seem obvious (no shit Mike, different songs resonate with different people lol) but I think it’s deeper than that.

Naturally, if an artist has a big feature or a song that sonically feels way different from the rest of their music, they may approach them differently but it can get even deeper than that on a song level. Even songs that are similar in sound can in theory be marketed to different people. A jazz rap song could potentially resonate with fans of jazz music or maybe pockets of boombap.

Marketing every song the exact same way to the same people might actually be disqualifying or ignoring people who could be unique supporters of a specific song.

Near the end of our conversation, Zotz revisited Ford’s strategy and why it can be so useful to the music industry:

Zotz refers to it as treating songs like vehicles, which is a great analogy. Let’s call it The Ford Model: where every song is treated as its own product line, with its own buyer and its own message. For example, Ford doesn't market the F-150 to families looking to buy a minivan haha.

Some might read this and think: "But my fans are my fans. I'm one artist."

On some level, that’s true. Ford is still Ford, and the brand is what holds it all together. But the artist people see is the sum of every song, and each song brings in different people.

Each song is a potential door to artist discovery and the goal is to know who walks through each one, then give them a reason to stay for the rest.

We mentioned it briefly earlier but most artists get their "similar artists" from the "Fans also like" section on Spotify. That list is built from listening behavior which naturally comes after a song is released. The algorithm essentially decides who your audience is after the music is out.

Rocketship takes an alternative approach, starting with the song instead, using its Song DNA feature. Zotz and his team spent over a year building the technology behind its feature - it breaks a song down across 82 points of its "DNA," modeled on how an A&R actually listens. Then it compares that against a quarter million notable songs in English and Spanish from the past several decades. That technology is able to scan the components of a song and tell you who the potential audience might be based on similar sounding songs.

Essentially, if you upload a song nobody has heard yet, you can get up to 20 similar songs, the potential total audience for that sound, and where those listeners live, down to country and city.

His best example was a female country artist in South Dakota whose song's DNA matched a big Jason Aldean record. So before release:

Then when the original drops, in theory those same fans could get retargeted with a song they're already predisposed to like.

From there, the platform runs what it calls "missions": a playlisting strategy, social copy and content ideas, or a full 30-day release plan on a small budget. Missions start as low as $5, and the song analysis is free for a limited time.

I was able to try the platform for myself before it launched and uploaded an example song to see Song DNA in action. 

The findings are genuinely interesting - the similiar artists and sounds were mostly music I had never heard of before but when I listened to see how close they were, I actually saw a lot of similarities. The research felt niche like it was actually trying to find similiar sounding songs even if those songs or artists weren’t big or established yet. 

For me personally, that might’ve been one of my bigger takeaways using the product…that when comparing or doing research ourselves, there are only so many emerging artists we can be aware of - whereas the platform goes super niche and shows you references you may not have thought of yet. 

This approach can also apply to those working in the industry itself. For example, how A&Rs pick their singles. In theory, they could use a platform like Rocketship to analyze a collection of songs and see which one has the highest potential audience along with which sections of the song could potentially be most viral.

Additional use cases could also include re-analyzing your back catalog and choosing which artists to open for, based on who shares your audience. AJR and Jack Harlow both opened for Sammy Adams on the way up.

Another use case could be matching a writer's demo to the artist who should record it, which is part of an enterprise version Rocketship is building.

To be clear, none of this is intended to replace taste, it’s simply just to aid the process using data and give more context.

My takeaway from our conversation is that this way of thinking isn’t intended to replace anything. It’s an approach for another way of doing things.

The ability to use data to find fans of specific songs and where those people live is intriguing. So is the idea of being more thoughtful about how songs are released and the potential fans of each. It’s an approach that in some ways is antithetical to the “spray & pray” content era that we’re in now.

I don’t think the algorithm is going anywhere, and neither does Zotz but knowing who a song is for before it drops feels less like a new tool and more like a question we stopped asking. As Zotz put it: “I think passive listening and fandom are two different things.”

Rocketship launched Tuesday, and the song analysis is free for a limited time. [Try it HERE and learn more about the product HERE]. If you do, I’d be curious whether the audience it finds is the one you thought you had.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

P.S. If you're an independent artist, manager, or music company trying to get a release off the ground in the next few months, I'd love to help. Tell me what you're working on HERE.