Two months in: numbers for the launch of an acoustic music community

In mid-October, I teamed up with a Nashville-based buddy of mine (who I grew up with) to launch an acoustic music website.

About AcoustiCult

AcoustiCult (www.acousticult.com) is focused on bluegrass, folk, blues, and Americana music. We created a site with interviews focusing on both established and up-and-coming artists. We also created accounts on almost every social platform, and started compiling a newsletter list.

Building The Site

I decided to keep it super simple. My partner is pretty tech-savvy but doesn’t really have the interest or time in learning a complicated platform, so I built the site in WordPress and used off-the-shelf tools like Mailchimp to hook up our newsletter. Nothing too complicated - just made sure our signup forms worked well and did a lot of technical optimization for SEO.

Launch

We launched on October 10th. In the meantime, Jed had been completing interviews with a long list of artists. We hard-launched with fifteen articles, and kept adding a few more each week. We have over 40 articles so far!

Results

Since October 10th, we have had 12,229 visitors on the site. This absolutely blew us away...I did not expect this many people. Most of these are referrals from the artists themselves. We’ve got around 500 fans scattered across our social media platforms, and almost 200 newsletter subscribers. SEO hasn’t really picked up yet (we’re only getting 70-80 visitors/week from organic traffic).

What’s next? Problems?

Growing the site, of course! We plan on branching out to gear reviews, album releases, and events. We unexpectedly landed our first sponsorship two weeks ago, which put our project in the black (barely). We’ve already been contacted by a handful of PR publicists (Nashville crawls with them) so we’re currently working with a few of them to cross-promote some projects.
As far as problems, right now our traffic is 80% from artist referrals, so basically that means that only 20% of our traffic comes from our own audience and search engines. Hopefully this grows over time (I expect it to!)

Ultimately, AcoustiCult is a fun project for me. I didn’t expect it could be monetized in the way it has turned out, but that’s an added bonus.