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Community Private Traffic is Criminally Underutilized in Music

  • Writer: Jonathan Heeter
    Jonathan Heeter
  • Feb 28
  • 1 min read

Music is built on fandom, but we spend way too much time talking to people instead of talking with them.


Private traffic is the antidote to the one way conversation happening in the music business.


By private traffic we mean: the community driven interactions that happen in peer-to-peer channels.


Hubs for private traffic include: messanger apps like What'sApp and WeChat, and large messaging boards like Reddit and Discord.


Private traffic is the most persuasive form of media because "the content" is actually real conversations between real people. High trust and group dynamics push people to share, stream and buy at a much higher rate than other forms of media.


A real life example: aren't you much more likely to try a restaurant your friend recommends than something google search serves you?


The music marketing industrial complex has been criminally underutilizing private traffic for three reasons:


  1. It's hard to quantify the results, meaning it's hard for operators to convince the people who control budgets

  2. There aren't effective tools to scale so you need real people spending real time to build, maintain and use private traffic. This is tough to do across a large roster of artists

  3. People don't know how to build private traffic


Korean and Chinese artist teams and labels are much better at using private traffic than we are in "the West." It's the secret sauce behind BTS and Black Pink. What is the BTS army besides a giant tranche of owned private traffic?



To get you started thinking about how to build and deploy private traffic, we've made a quick guide.


Download it for free.








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