These are all opportunities to find your initial audience in a way that doesn’t have to only rely on describing yourself as a musician. So, by knowing who the audience is that’s going to love your stuff, there’s most likely something you can look at, whether it be in your lyrics, where you’re from, or something in your background, that you’d be comfortable utilizing. And eventually, there will be partnership opportunities.įor Eileen Quinn, for example, for everyone who bought a certain kind of boat, they also received one of her CDs. Probably, she was immediately able to stand out as completely different from the other kinds of solicitations they were getting, right? So, there is one way that you can immediately differentiate yourself from your competition in terms of other artists you’re similar to, by not necessarily going for traditional musical press.

Most likely, the first question you’d ask yourself is, how many singer-songwriters are also mailing their stuff to yachting magazines? It did, however, have a niche element to it.įor example, in her song, “The Anchoring Dance,” Eileen Quinn sings: “Up on the foredeck, see them prance when they do, do, do, do the anchoring dance.”Īnd so, rather than sending her tapes or CDs at the time to “Rolling Stone,” or “Paste,” or the places we associate with music, she went the other way, and sent her stuff to yachting weekly magazines, and started doing partnerships with boating companies. Obviously, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s just fine. I believe she even recorded some albums while on boats. And all of this stemmed from one clear decision that was really antithetical to how most musicians would think, which was choosing to make music about boats. She has done very major partnerships, all without the help of the traditional music industry. However, since the 1980s, she has sold hundreds of thousands of records. Very few people are familiar with her work. One of my favorite examples is a singer-songwriter named Eileen Quinn.

We tend to think that our fans must only be looking for people who make music, and that just isn’t true.

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Eileen quinn the anchoring dance