Nicholas D.miller, a.k.a ILLENIUM, has been able to skyrocket to the top of the music business in the past couple of years. He has already dropped three studio albums and has been signed to a major label called Artwerks. In 2019, He performed in places like EDC, UMF, and Madison square garden, which is every musician’s dream. Nick is in his prime, but it was not easy for him to get there. It took him years of practice, patience and one last thing to get as successful as he is right now. And the one big secret thing responsible to his success is Instagram.
When I say that the reason behind ILLENIUM’s success is Instagram, I don’t mean that Instagram made music for Nick and all he had to do was come up with the coolest artist name ever. I wish it was that easy, but that is not what happened. What Instagram did for him instead is that they ran ads for his music. Instagram has 1 billion active users every month, and the way it works is that Instagram lets you select a location and the demographic of people you want to target the ad to. Then, based on how much money you pay, it sends your content out to a set number of people for a set amount of time. When ILLENIUM first started to make music, he was able to draw attention from people through this feature on Instagram. Since he didn’t have a record label to do his promotions at that time, he used Instagram for it.
Now that we know how easy it is to run ads on Instagram, we should all quit our jobs and start selling music. Just kidding, it is not as easy as it seems. Even with ads, you need have a unique style in music that people can relate to in order to stand out as a musician, and you need to be delivering content very consistently if you want to keep yourself relevant. ILLENIUM got successful only because he dropped three studio albums in the span of three years (2016 to 2019). Writing 42 songs in there years is no joke, and keep in mind that we have not even counted the singles he released outside of his album. This plethora of tracks drew him sustained amount of attention for a long amount of time and brought him a fan base full of people that love his music.
Illenium eventually got the attention of big labels because of his growing fan base, and is now signed to major labels like Artwerks, Armada Music, and OWSLA among plenty more. He also has 500K Subscribers on YouTube and has the privilege to do his very own Live shows all year round in the best venues because everyone loves his music so much. Anybody who has a dream to be a successful artist like ILLENIUM must get on Instagram and run ads to get their music the attention and the platform that it deserves. Reaching the top of the music industry is not rocket science but running ads on Instagram can give you a blast off to reach the top.