I’ve lived through the birth of social media marketing. A career highlight of mine was having my old band featured on the front page of MySpace, where we instantly gained a ton of followers and listeners overnight. It was exciting, interactive, and customizable—at the time, that was the place to go to discover up-and-coming music.
About a year after that big moment, Facebook arrived and took over. Bands were creating artist pages, and everyone who still cared about the music flocked over there. Shortly after, a disastrous UI update hit MySpace and that was the end of it. Everyone moved to Facebook.
My band, which once had tens of thousands of fans, no longer really had an audience. We had to build it all over again on Facebook, and you can guess where that leads: Instagram.
The "T-Shirt Box" Mistake
We were lucky to have so many people discover us on all of these platforms. We were also naive. We didn’t realize we needed to build a database of our own in parallel. In fact, I think we had a piece of paper in a t-shirt box where we would collect people's emails at live shows. Believe me, they never got used—and those were the people who actually wanted to hear from us.
Traditional platforms gatekeep emails, phone numbers, locations, and engagement metrics for one reason: control. They attract attention to their "free" platform, and then, in order for you to reach your own fans beyond a 1–3% organic reach, you have to pay a premium. It’s not unusual to pay $0.50–$1.00 just to get a single conversion. Even then, you still have minimal information and the level of interest remains uncertain.
Owning the Connection
With platforms like OnPitch, we integrate with Instagram and Shopify, provide QR codes, and give you the ability to implement intake forms in your link-in-bio and website. This gives you access to a real contact list with verified interest.
If someone signs up with their information, it’s because they want to hear from you—not because you accidentally showed up while they were doom-scrolling on socials.
The data that these social media companies keep locked away from you? YOU now own it. With OnPitch, you are not the product; OnPitch is the tool, and we give you the infrastructure to house, export, and build your fan data with no strings attached. Don’t like us anymore? Export your list and go elsewhere, no questions asked. That’s exactly the service I would want as an artist, so that’s what I built.
The Long Game
Being a career artist is a marathon. In order to run it to the end, every connection you build is important. People don’t change their emails and phone numbers all that much—I’ve had the same ones since my early 20s!
Use these wild, viral social platforms to get discovered by new people. But when they stop scrolling and follow you, make sure you have a contact list like OnPitch ready to go. If they think, "Hey, I’d like to see them live sometime," you need to be able to reach them directly.
Audiences these days are built brick by brick. OnPitch gives you the tools to handle email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing to reach a global audience on your own terms.
