The Rotor Blog
The importance of promoting your music w/ Groover
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We spoke with Groover's co-founder Dorian Perron to hear how the promotional platform came to be and why promoting your music is the secret to getting discovered.
1. Hi Dorian! Can you explain what Groover is and how it works?
Sure! Groover is the go-to promotion platform for independent musicians.
On Groover, musicians and their representatives can send their songs to the blogs, radio stations, playlisters, record companies, and music industry professionals of their choice for 2 Grooviz by curator/pro (1 Grooviz is equal to €1). You’re guaranteed that your music will be heard and that the contacts you have selected from a list of 2,000+ currently active ones will provide written feedback on it within 7 days. If not, you get your Grooviz back to reach out to additional curators & pros!
On the other side, the curators and music professionals that range from media outlets to recognized playlists, choose whether they want to feature your track.
In 4 years, more than 1.5 million pieces of feedback have been given to over 100k+ artists, triggering over 300k+ sharings & opportunities, and more than 600 signatures on record labels. Those numbers are currently growing very fast!
2. Can you tell us how the idea of Groover came to life?
Of course! I started as an indie music blogger in 2013, sharing music that I liked and thought didn’t receive the attention it deserved. I also organized live acoustic sessions at my place and live shows in Paris with indie rock & pop musicians such as Asgeir, Pete Yorn, Plants and Animals etc. It was the coolest hobby in the world. Then I met with my co-founders Romain & Rafaël in UC Berkeley in 2018, they had music projects and had struggled with getting their new tracks heard from blogs, radios, record labels etc. On my side, even though my blog Indeflagration was quite small, I was receiving over 100 requests per day from artists wanting to get their music featured!
What was already certain is that we wanted to help independent artists. We knew they encountered many obstacles and wanted to do everything at once. But we started by taking phone calls with more than 200 musicians and music industry professionals during an entire month, and we understood that the most major issue they were facing was related to the nightmare they were experiencing to promote their music. They were mentioning how tough it was to have other people than their mom, their friends and their dogs listening to their music.
Our goal from the start has been to help artists emerge through influential channels such as blogs, radios, playlist curators, starting with ensuring that their music would be listened to and that they’d receive feedback on it. To help them break this wall of the first listening that could change things, and sometimes change everything. That’s why we created Groover.
3. In a few words, how important is it for artists that a product like yours exists?
Supposedly 80,000 new tracks are released each day on Spotify. This is HUGE. Artists need help in order to stand out from the crowd and the biggest bottleneck exists after the track is created, recorded, mixed. The barriers to production and distribution are already brought down thanks to production software such as ProTools and Ableton, streaming platforms and online distributors.
Thanks to Groover, artists are guaranteed that their song, their music will be listened to by the curators and professionals they choose to reach out to among a list of over 2,000+ ones who are currently available. They can use filters and benefit from our recommendations to target them the best, and get the opportunities they deserve to get their music heard, featured, to meet with relevant people that could join their team, and to get relevant feedback on their music and their artistic project.
Groover is a connector between creative minds and the people who can help them grow their project, make it real and sustainable.
To be honest, we don’t have a lot of issues convincing artists that it is the platform they need. When we started, most of them were telling me how it was exactly what they had been looking for.
4. Do you have any success stories of artists that used the platform that you can share with us?
There are so many artists who grow their project by including Groover into their promotion strategy, it’s really hard to choose!
One example comes to mind, involving one of our users whose project has been growing quite well in the past years. The French rapper Alvin Chris told me that the first comments he received on Groover in 2019 were pretty harsh and were also all pinpointing the same points of improvement. Curators were finding him interesting and charismatic, but the beats were found to be too basic and the melodies not original enough.
He told me that he realized at that point that he needed to collaborate with other beatmakers instead of producing his beats on his own, and he spent a lot of time finding a way to be more authentic and stand out. Once he did, he started to get amazing feedback on the website, one of his tracks buzzed on TikTok (‘Coucou c’est encore moi’), his audience became even more solid after he signed with a great distributor and played at MaMA Festival in Paris in 2021. He then signed with a booker and opened for amazing artists since. He’s one of the flagships of our artist accelerator Groover Obsessions.
On top of this example, I’d mention how all our Groover Obsessions artists have been growing and the Brazilian tour the French band Entrée Libre was able to book which included the incredible Festival Sensacional, but also how Dekay signed with Chinese Man Records, Myoon with Inside Records (the record label created by infamous Youtube channel Electro Posé) and how Viratempo took advantage of the platform to grow their audience in Brazil and abroad.
5. Can you break down for us how much it costs?
It’s quite simple really :-) For every connection that artists choose to make with any of the curators or professionals on Groover, they pay €2 by contact. If they don’t get feedback within 7 days, they’ll get their 2 Grooviz - the name of the tokens on Groover - so that they can get in touch with somebody else. The current answer rate is close to 90%, which means that if an artist gets in touch with 50 curators and pros, he will get around 45 answers, and Grooviz back to get in touch with 5 others whenever he wants.
We usually recommend artists to get in touch with over 30 and even 50 contacts by campaign to get better results, and that’s what they do on average. You can find more information about our pricing here.
6. What's in the pipeline for Groover?
So many things! We’re focused on three main directions at the moment:
- Growing internationally. Groover started in France but over 75% of our activity takes place abroad now, especially in the US, Canada, Italy, the UK, the rest of Europe, Brazil etc. We’ve opened a 2nd office in Brooklyn, our home office being in Paris. We're growing our community of curators in every market and 100k artists from more than 120 different countries have already used Groover
- Improving the experience for artists for their first campaign but also their subsequent ones, especially by improving the artist dashboard with new features and a better experience. We expect that artists will be able to get the most out of their feedback, to better interact with curators, to get meaningful advice to accelerate their career and analyze their results better in order to send more relevant promotion campaigns afterwards
- Growing Groover Obsessions, our artist accelerator: we select the top performing artists on Groover and support them in order to grow their visibility, connections and career in the right way. We already support over 60 artists from all around the world and very different music genres. It’s so exciting to work alongside artists in such a human way!
On top of those priorities, we spend some time exploring new growth opportunities for artists, e.g. addressing Instagram/TikTok influencers and adapting the service in a more detailed way to each kind of curators.
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