16 May 2026
How to Start an Email List as a Musician
Hi,
Alongside BandTools updates, I’ll occasionally share thoughts on audience-building, fan engagement, and promotion, which are the kinds of challenges that inspired BandTools in the first place. This is the first of those posts.
The problem with building on rented land
If you’re an independent musician, there’s a good chance that most of your connection with fans happens on social media. Instagram, TikTok, maybe Facebook. You post about upcoming gigs, share clips from the studio, announce new releases. It feels like you’re building something.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: those followers aren’t really yours. They belong to the platform. An algorithm decides which of them see what you post, and that algorithm does not have your interests at heart. It has the platform’s interests at heart, which mostly means keeping people scrolling and showing them ads.
The numbers bear this out. Average organic reach on Instagram is around 5% of your followers. On Facebook it’s closer to 2.5%. That means if you have 1,000 followers on Instagram, roughly 50 of them see your post. You worked hard to build that audience, yet the platform is showing your work to one in twenty of them.
And it’s getting worse. Every year, organic reach declines a little further. Every few months, another algorithm change reshuffles the deck. And every now and then, an entire platform disappears. Vine. MySpace. TikTok has been banned and unbanned so many times that building a strategy around it feels like building a house on a fault line.
None of this means social media is useless. It’s brilliant for discovery, for being found by people who don’t yet know your music exists. But it’s a terrible place to maintain a relationship with people who already care.
What an email list actually does
An email list is the simplest version of something musicians have always needed: a direct line to the people who want to hear from you.
When someone gives you their email address, they’re saying “yes, I want to know what you’re up to.” And when you send them a newsletter, it arrives in their inbox. Not buried in a feed. Not filtered by an algorithm. Not competing with a hundred other posts for a fraction of a second of attention. It just arrives, and they either open it or they don’t.
Open rates for small email lists, which are the kind most musicians would have, typically sit between 40% and 60%. Compare that to the 5% reach on social media and the difference is stark. You’re reaching ten times more of your actual audience.
But the real value isn’t just the numbers. It’s the nature of the relationship. Someone reading your newsletter chose to be there. They’re not doom-scrolling past your update on the way to something else. They opened an email from you. That’s a fundamentally different level of attention, and it’s why email consistently outperforms social media for driving action such as buying tickets, listening to a new release or showing up at a gig.
And unlike followers on any platform, your email list is yours. No company can change the rules and take it away. If you switch tools, you take the list with you. If a platform shuts down tomorrow, your list is still there.
“But I only have 50 fans”
This is the objection heard most often, and it gets things exactly backwards.
You don’t wait until you have a big audience to start an email list. The email list is how you build the audience. Every person you add is someone you can reach directly, reliably, forever. Fifty people who open every email you send, who buy tickets to your gigs, who share your music with their friends, are fifty people who are worth more than five thousand followers who scroll past your posts without stopping.
Start where you are. If you have ten people who’d want to hear from you, start with ten. The habit of communicating directly with your audience is what matters, not the size of the list when you begin.
“I wouldn’t know what to write”
You don’t need to be a writer. You’re not producing a magazine. You’re sending an email to people who like your music and want to know what you’re doing.
Your first email can be as simple as: “Hi, I’m [name], thanks for signing up. I’ll send you the occasional update about gigs, new music, and whatever else is going on. Here’s what’s coming up next.” That’s it. That’s a perfectly good first newsletter.
After that, the content tends to take care of itself. You’ve got a gig coming up: email your list. You’ve just released something: email your list. You had a funny thing happen at rehearsal, or you’ve been listening to an album that changed the way you think about songwriting, or you want to share a demo: email your list. Write like you’re writing to a friend, because in a sense, you are.
The bar is much lower than you think. Nobody subscribed to a musician’s email list expecting polished marketing copy. They subscribed because they like you and your music. Be yourself. That’s the whole point.
“Isn’t email dead?”
No. It’s just not fashionable to talk about, because there’s no vanity metric attached to it. You can’t see how many email subscribers someone has by glancing at their profile. It doesn’t generate likes or comments or shares. It quietly works in the background, driving more ticket sales and more genuine engagement than any social platform, and it’s been doing that for decades.
Every musician you admire who seems to have a loyal, dedicated fanbase i.e. the ones who fill rooms reliably, who sell out merch drops, who have fans who’d drive two hours to see them play, almost certainly has a way to contact those people directly. For most of them, that’s email.
How to actually start
The practical steps are straightforward. Don’t overthink them.
Pick a tool. You need something that lets you collect email addresses and send newsletters. There are plenty of options. BandTools is one. It’s what I’ve built, specifically for musicians, and the free plan gives you up to 500 subscribers and two newsletters a month. But there are other good tools out there too. The tool matters far less than actually starting.
Create a subscribe page. Whatever tool you choose, it will give you a page where people can sign up. This is your landing page, the place you’ll send people when you want them to join your list.
Put the link everywhere. Your Instagram bio. Your Bandcamp page. Your Linktree. Your website, if you have one. Anywhere a fan might look for more information about you, the subscribe link should be there and easy to find.
Get a QR code. Most newsletter tools can generate one for you. In BandTools, it’s on the “Share” page and takes about two seconds. Print it on a card, stick it on your merch table, tape it to your instrument case. The people at your gigs are the warmest audience you’ll ever have because they already like you enough to show up. Don’t let them leave without a way to hear from you again.
Send your first email. Don’t wait until you have a hundred subscribers or until you’ve crafted the perfect message. Send something to the first five people who sign up. Thank them for subscribing, tell them what you’re working on, and let them know you’ll be in touch. Done.
The compound effect
Here’s the thing about email lists that isn’t immediately obvious: they compound.
If you pick up one new subscriber a week, which is entirely realistic for a musician who gigs regularly and has the link in the right places, then you’ll have 50 subscribers in a year. That might sound modest, but it’s 50 people you can reach directly, every single time, without paying for ads or hoping an algorithm is feeling generous.
In two years, it’s 100. In three, it’s 150. And unlike social media followers, these people don’t drift away because a platform changed how its feed works. They stay unless they actively choose to leave.
The best time to start an email list was when you played your first gig. The second best time is now.
John
If you’re an independent musician, there’s a good chance that most of your connection with fans happens on social media. Instagram, TikTok, maybe Facebook. You post about upcoming gigs, share clips from the studio, announce new releases. It feels like you’re building something.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: those followers aren’t really yours. They belong to the platform. An algorithm decides which of them see what you post, and that algorithm does not have your interests at heart. It has the platform’s interests at heart, which mostly means keeping people scrolling and showing them ads.
The numbers bear this out. Average organic reach on Instagram is around 5% of your followers. On Facebook it’s closer to 2.5%. That means if you have 1,000 followers on Instagram, roughly 50 of them see your post. You worked hard to build that audience, yet the platform is showing your work to one in twenty of them.
And it’s getting worse. Every year, organic reach declines a little further. Every few months, another algorithm change reshuffles the deck. And every now and then, an entire platform disappears. Vine. MySpace. TikTok has been banned and unbanned so many times that building a strategy around it feels like building a house on a fault line.
None of this means social media is useless. It’s brilliant for discovery, for being found by people who don’t yet know your music exists. But it’s a terrible place to maintain a relationship with people who already care.
What an email list actually does
An email list is the simplest version of something musicians have always needed: a direct line to the people who want to hear from you.
When someone gives you their email address, they’re saying “yes, I want to know what you’re up to.” And when you send them a newsletter, it arrives in their inbox. Not buried in a feed. Not filtered by an algorithm. Not competing with a hundred other posts for a fraction of a second of attention. It just arrives, and they either open it or they don’t.
Open rates for small email lists, which are the kind most musicians would have, typically sit between 40% and 60%. Compare that to the 5% reach on social media and the difference is stark. You’re reaching ten times more of your actual audience.
But the real value isn’t just the numbers. It’s the nature of the relationship. Someone reading your newsletter chose to be there. They’re not doom-scrolling past your update on the way to something else. They opened an email from you. That’s a fundamentally different level of attention, and it’s why email consistently outperforms social media for driving action such as buying tickets, listening to a new release or showing up at a gig.
And unlike followers on any platform, your email list is yours. No company can change the rules and take it away. If you switch tools, you take the list with you. If a platform shuts down tomorrow, your list is still there.
“But I only have 50 fans”
This is the objection heard most often, and it gets things exactly backwards.
You don’t wait until you have a big audience to start an email list. The email list is how you build the audience. Every person you add is someone you can reach directly, reliably, forever. Fifty people who open every email you send, who buy tickets to your gigs, who share your music with their friends, are fifty people who are worth more than five thousand followers who scroll past your posts without stopping.
Start where you are. If you have ten people who’d want to hear from you, start with ten. The habit of communicating directly with your audience is what matters, not the size of the list when you begin.
“I wouldn’t know what to write”
You don’t need to be a writer. You’re not producing a magazine. You’re sending an email to people who like your music and want to know what you’re doing.
Your first email can be as simple as: “Hi, I’m [name], thanks for signing up. I’ll send you the occasional update about gigs, new music, and whatever else is going on. Here’s what’s coming up next.” That’s it. That’s a perfectly good first newsletter.
After that, the content tends to take care of itself. You’ve got a gig coming up: email your list. You’ve just released something: email your list. You had a funny thing happen at rehearsal, or you’ve been listening to an album that changed the way you think about songwriting, or you want to share a demo: email your list. Write like you’re writing to a friend, because in a sense, you are.
The bar is much lower than you think. Nobody subscribed to a musician’s email list expecting polished marketing copy. They subscribed because they like you and your music. Be yourself. That’s the whole point.
“Isn’t email dead?”
No. It’s just not fashionable to talk about, because there’s no vanity metric attached to it. You can’t see how many email subscribers someone has by glancing at their profile. It doesn’t generate likes or comments or shares. It quietly works in the background, driving more ticket sales and more genuine engagement than any social platform, and it’s been doing that for decades.
Every musician you admire who seems to have a loyal, dedicated fanbase i.e. the ones who fill rooms reliably, who sell out merch drops, who have fans who’d drive two hours to see them play, almost certainly has a way to contact those people directly. For most of them, that’s email.
How to actually start
The practical steps are straightforward. Don’t overthink them.
Pick a tool. You need something that lets you collect email addresses and send newsletters. There are plenty of options. BandTools is one. It’s what I’ve built, specifically for musicians, and the free plan gives you up to 500 subscribers and two newsletters a month. But there are other good tools out there too. The tool matters far less than actually starting.
Create a subscribe page. Whatever tool you choose, it will give you a page where people can sign up. This is your landing page, the place you’ll send people when you want them to join your list.
Put the link everywhere. Your Instagram bio. Your Bandcamp page. Your Linktree. Your website, if you have one. Anywhere a fan might look for more information about you, the subscribe link should be there and easy to find.
Get a QR code. Most newsletter tools can generate one for you. In BandTools, it’s on the “Share” page and takes about two seconds. Print it on a card, stick it on your merch table, tape it to your instrument case. The people at your gigs are the warmest audience you’ll ever have because they already like you enough to show up. Don’t let them leave without a way to hear from you again.
Send your first email. Don’t wait until you have a hundred subscribers or until you’ve crafted the perfect message. Send something to the first five people who sign up. Thank them for subscribing, tell them what you’re working on, and let them know you’ll be in touch. Done.
The compound effect
Here’s the thing about email lists that isn’t immediately obvious: they compound.
If you pick up one new subscriber a week, which is entirely realistic for a musician who gigs regularly and has the link in the right places, then you’ll have 50 subscribers in a year. That might sound modest, but it’s 50 people you can reach directly, every single time, without paying for ads or hoping an algorithm is feeling generous.
In two years, it’s 100. In three, it’s 150. And unlike social media followers, these people don’t drift away because a platform changed how its feed works. They stay unless they actively choose to leave.
The best time to start an email list was when you played your first gig. The second best time is now.
John