Dorian Perron talks about artists going international with Groover!

From music export opportunities to successful release campaigns, we talked to Groover’s co-founder Dorian Perron about it all! If you are an artist, or work within an artist’s team, read on to find out more about this French music promotion platform. Use the sign up code at the end of the article to get a discount on your next Groover campaign!

Tell us more about your early days in Music Business? How did the idea for Groover come about? Early days are not that far away ;) But it’s true I started my music industry journey 10 years ago so I’m not entirely new to it! I started by founding an indie music blog - Indeflagration - in 2013, sharing music that I liked and thought didn’t receive the attention it deserved. I also organised live acoustic sessions at my place and live shows in Paris with indie rock & pop musicians such as Asgeir, Pete Yorn, Plants and Animals etc. It was clearly an amazing time, everything was completely new! Then I met with my co-founders Romain & Rafaël in UC Berkeley in 2018, they had music projects and had struggled with getting their new tracks heard from blogs, radios, record labels etc. On my side, even though my blog was quite small, I was receiving over 100 requests per day from artists wanting to get their music featured.

(L to R) Groover Co-Founders Romain Palmieri, Rafael Cohen and Dorian Perron

What was already certain is that we wanted to help independent artists. We knew they encountered many obstacles. We had conversations with over 200 musicians and music industry professionals over the phone during an entire month, and we understood that the most major issue they were facing was promoting their music. They were mentioning how tough it was to have other people than their mom, their friends and their dogs listening to their music… It was not complicated to realise that artists need help in order to stand out from the crowd when supposedly 80,000 new tracks are released each day on Spotify. We realised that the biggest bottleneck exists after the track is created, recorded, mixed.

Our goal from the start has been to help artists emerge through influential channels such as blogs, radios, playlist curators, Youtube channels, starting with the guarantee that their music would be listened to and that they’d receive feedback on it. To help them break this wall of the first listening that could change everything. So yeah, that’s why we created Groover.

What role do you think Groover can play in an artist’s music export strategy? I strongly believe Groover can be a real key to starting in a new market from scratch. It’s actually what artists tell us themselves! We’ve actually been growing really fast in the US, and what American artists tell us about why they love Groover is the fact that it is very international, that they can target France, Italy, Brazil, Canada and more, get curators & pros to listen to their music and to actually share it. It can also help them establish an initial presence in a market they’d like to tour in for instance, without having to hire an expensive PR agent who will be struggling to get anything since the project will start in the market from ground zero. In fact, a full-on PR mission will be more effective after a Groover campaign will have helped build some initial contacts and coverage.

Preview of curators available on Groover

Since you can choose the contacts you want to get in touch with, you can have a worldwide strategy or decide to target specific countries using the filters available. Of the 2,000 currently available curators & pros on Groover, 300+ are in France, 250+ in Brazil, 200+ in Italy, 180+ in the US, 150+ in the UK, more than 100 in Spanish-speaking countries etc.

We’re seeing a lot of French artists getting traction in Brazil, the UK, the US, Mexico and more, but also the contrary: artists from all over the world making their way into blogs, radios and playlists based in France.

At which point in a release strategy should an artist plan a Groover campaign? What does an effective Groover campaign look like? We’ve actually written a very detailed article about this which you can read here. There’s no exact rules, as we often get artists sending their tracks weeks and even months after it’s been released and finding success with playlists and other media outlets. Ideally we typically recommend sending your Groover campaign on release day if you’re targeting Spotify playlist curators, so that you’re sure they have access to your track and can add it to their playlist since they tend to process their submissions and playlist adds very quickly. For radios and media outlets, anywhere from 2 weeks before a song is released to after the release day is fine. You can indeed wait for the song to be released before reaching out through Groover. So timewise, it’s open and depends on what the artist wants to achieve. An effective Groover campaign starts with targeting the highest number of curators and professionals that are relevant to the artist (we give more tips about the ideal budget here), and we recommend getting in touch with at least 30 and even 50 curators if you want to get significant results from your Groover experience. It’s important for the artists to know what exactly their objective is. Do they want media coverage? Do they want structured feedback? The more they’re aware of what they want to achieve, the easier it becomes to filter through our 2,000+ curators and professionals and get the most out of it. We’re of course available to help out, our filters and recommendation algorithms are also very helpful.

Can you share an example of a success story in music export through a Groover campaign? Thanks to their first promotion campaign on Groover and the success it had, we signed the French band Entrée Libre to our artist accelerator Groover Obsessions. We were able to help the band tour in Brazil with 3 gigs including performing at Festival Sensacional in Belo Horizonte which is one of the biggest independent music festivals in the country! More information here.

We’ve also recently explored a case study on the Groover Blog about Mathieu Saïkaly’s recent track Neptune, explaining how it got into a lot of relevant independent playlists thanks to Groover and triggered Spotify’s algorithms (read the detailed case study here). His audience grew a lot especially on an international level while being a French artist.

Groover Obsessions live

Groover also runs its continuous artist accelerator program “Groover Obsessions”. Please tell more about this and your future plans with it! We launched Groover Obsessions in 2021 with the aim to support the best artists we discovered on Groover. The main goal is to help them enhance their visibility and audience online, but we also bring other services to them in a highly focused way such as distributing their music, offering them opportunities to perform at shows, producing beautiful content with them or simply helping them develop their brand. We also involve external partners to bring them the full scale of services they need, and we collaborate with other structures very easily. It’s smooth and all for the artist at all times, without blocking them if they get future amazing opportunities.

Today we have over 60 artists from around the world that we’ve been working with and the results so far have been incredibly positive. We recently started supporting more advanced artists such as the French-American duo Faux Real and we’re hoping to sign some more talented artists that we’re discovering on Groover!

Team @Groover

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Want to try Groover out? Music Cities Events users can now enjoy a 10% discount. Sign up on Groover and use the code MCEGROOVERVIP [more explanations on how to apply the special discount here]

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