In one of the more fascinating examples I’ve seen, Vinnie Barbaro’s DIVEBAR YOUTH project has not only hit the mark with a broad spread of tastemakers, not only grown audience at a strong rate, but also done it using a core principle of marketing – one which most artists either don’t know or don’t realise the power of. Not just a quality artist, his last twelve months are also a salutary lesson in how to grow.
We’ll start with the impressive results, audience first. DIVEBAR YOUTH’s Spotify following has nearly doubled in twelve months, adding nearly three thousand followers for a total of 6.3k at the last count. That’s an 87% increase from a year ago, and is the sort of rapid, consistent trajectory that implies stickiness and quick appeal to listeners. The vast majority of bands starting from the 3k mark don’t grow that fast in just a year.
One part of that growth is tied to critic support – looking at the playlists he’s appeared on, it’s pretty much the wishlist of any emerging artist in Australia – Spotify’s New Music AU & NZ and triple j’s New Music Hitlist are both there for scale, with mid-range players like Home & Hosed and Indie Arrivals also well-represented. Grassroots independents likeTuna Tuesday and, er, me have also been on board to round it all out.
That’s a really wide spectrum of critic and tastemaker support, and is another signal of belief in the project.
Where it all goes mad though is in the sheer volume of releases. DIVEBAR YOUTH has released – count ’em! – no less than twelve new tracks in as many months, and I’m convinced this is a key factor in his rapid growth.
Let’s get even nerdier. A core tenet of marketing is called ‘mental availability’, most famously described by Professor Byron Sharp, one of the world’s leading marketing scientists, in his seminal book “How Brands Grow”. I’ll spare you the details (which are awesome btw), but the core point is that for any product to grow, you have to create mental availability in an audience – you have to give them the chance to think of your stuff when they’re in the market for it.
This is paired with its twin imperative to create ‘physical availability’ – once they’ve thought of it, people actually need to be able to get hold of your stuff. There’s not much point of advertising ketchup if it’s not on the shelves of your local supermarket, and the same goes for music. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but it needs to be out there for it to be listened to – you’d be surprised at how often that isn’t actually true.
What DIVEBAR YOUTH has done with this constant release schedule is ensure that his products – his songs – have constantly been in the air supply across the entire year, with barely a single week without being playlisted somewhere, without a single month of going quiet. Those tracks build over time to create a wider catalogue of physical availability that new listeners can explore, which builds streams but also in turn further cements mental availability.
The scientific theory holds that increasing both leads to growth – and this is a textbook example of how to do it.
So, DIVEBAR YOUTH is killing it with audiences, killing it with critics and growing like a weed. And, it turns out, is a marketing genius to boot.
Don’t just listen – learn.
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* I tend to use Spotify Followers as the key metric to watch, instead of Monthly Listeners or Popularity. Monthlies are great, but they can be messed up by an artist being a contributor or songwriter on another artist’s track, and (along with Popularity) can fluctuate pretty wildly. Followers implies a conscious choice of preference from a user, so for me is the strongest and steadiest signal of solid, ongoing audience support.
Listen to DIVEBAR YOUTH on Spotify, or follow them on Instagram
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