Discovery in the the music industry in the modern day doesn’t look at all like how it did “back in the day,” and Fox N’ Vead know that from experience.
Logan Fox and Christian Vead, the duo and co-founders of the group, joined the Whiskey Riff Raff podcast and discussed their love for playing live, how their latest album – Playing The Game – felt like a combination of five genres, the process of coming together as a band and choosing a signature sound being difficult, and threw out some of the early band names that they almost went with over Fox N’ Vead.
Fox and Vead also touched on how their latest project was labeled as country (even though they might not call it that), believing that God brought them together, the state of Texas loving them and embracing them as their own… even though they are from North Carolina, and their outlook on why labels don’t do artist development anymore.
Sticking with that last point, the duo talked a lot about how analytics and social media drive the modern day artist. In fact, Logan Fox told us that artists are expected to kind of have things figured out – at least in the social media and marketing sense – before the labels even come knocking:
“Once you realize (social media) is a tool… if you aren’t utilizing social media, and every bit about it, and learning everything about it, you are wasting the biggest potential you have. Gone are the days where you are playing an open mic at a bar and some big label executive is there.
Labels don’t do artist development anymore. They expect you to have a following already. So if you aren’t using social media – even just setting up your iPhone and playing in front of it – you are wasting your time.”
@whiskeyriff The Whikey Riff Raff Podcast @Fox N’ Vead #whiskeyriffraff ♬ original sound – Whiskey Riff
It’s a hard truth for up and coming artists out there, but it’s the truth nonetheless.
Once you are an artist or a band that sticks, like Fox N’ Vead, that’s really just the beginning of the social media journey. For Logan Fox and Christian Vead, they know that all of the aveneues of social media are important, but there’s one that they pay attention to more than others:
“Instagram has analytics, and that’s really what we pay attention to the most. TikTok is so ‘you never know’ and with Spotify, monthlies go up and down. In my opinion, Instagram engagement and ticket sales, they correlate.”
And even though Spotify’s analytics can jump around a bit, Fox N’ Vead does take some comfort in some of the numbers that the streaming platform provides to them. Fox told us that their music has a tendency to stick. Or at the very least, listening to one song piques the interest of the consumer, and inspires them to discover more of the band’s work:
“On Spotify, on the analytics, you can see each listener, and there’s a stat for how many songs they’ll listen to. People who first find us, on average, they’ll listen to six more songs. They’ll find one, and then they just keep finding the niche songs. We have a couple of songs in every genre, so that’s pretty cool.”
In other words, the discovery process for bands like Fox N’ Vead never stops… it just evolves.
You can hear about all of that and more from Fox N’ Vead by checking out the interview on YouTube or making sure to download the podcast on Apple Podcasts by searching “Whiskey Riff Raff” or by clicking here.
We’re also available on Spotify and wherever else you can listen to podcasts.
Cheers, y’all.
