Ian “Splash” Downey is a rising music artist out of Portland, Oregon and is also a longtime friend of mine. In June 2020, I committed to helping manage and market Splash as an artist. His music was high quality, but he was struggling to gain traction. I believed that with an increase in marketing efforts, he would be able to reach a much larger audience.
I started by creating a website and an electronic press kit (EPK) that served as a music resume when reaching out to playlist curators, label executives, and concert promoters. Next, we mapped out a plan, identified opportunities for growth, and got to work. Over the past two and a half years, this work has included:
Countless Studio Sessions
Countless photo shoots and music video shoots
Releasing his music as singles, EP’s, and albums, with detailed release plans that always included professional cover art, submissions to blog and playlist curators, photo/video shots for social media promotion, etc
Testing out a variety of marketing strategies, including running Instagram ads, paid blog posts on high traffic music sites, playing music for label executives, etc
Moving down to Los Angeles together in order to be in the thick of the industry, surrounded by creatives and in better positions to network with higher-ups in the music industry
Our marketing strategies and release planning showed immediate results. Splash’s first new single released with my help was why u no stay? , which came out in late August 2020. Before this song, Splash’s highest-streamed track on Spotify had about 7,000 streams. why u no stay? surpassed this number within 3 weeks of its release and has over 53,000 streams as of September 2022. The following statistics and graphs show the overall growth Splash experienced from June 2020 - December 2020, the time right after we began working together.
A lot of my time with Splash helped me develop my project management skills. In the world of an artist, you are constantly dealing with moving pieces, such as booking studio sessions, music video shoots, scheduling interviews, submitting songs on-time, etc. Releasing music on-time with a comprehensive marketing plan can be difficult, so I created workback schedules to make sure every aspect of a release was executed. Here is an example of a schedule I created for Island Bounce, a song that Splash released in October 2020.
Today, Splash has at least 8 songs that have recorded over 10,000 streams. He has doubled his social media following and increased his overall streams and listeners by about 10x since I started working with him. He has performed multiple live shows and has been reached out to by various music executives in talks to sign a deal, but for now remains independent. Currently, we are in Los Angeles pursuing this dream harder than ever.
