How Artists Can Turn Social Media Virality Into Sold Out Shows

Consistency Creates More Doors In

Alyssa Castiglia, senior director of A&R and head of A&R research at UnitedMasters, starts with the release calendar itself. “I always tell artists the most important thing they can do is release music consistently, not only because I’d rather the algorithm support your actual music over social media imprint but because then your fans have more touch points to discover you at,” Castiglia said. “Then I’d find a way to translate what the live experience is over socials. If you’re a great singer, sing live, covers, your own songs, ad libs. If you’re a great producer, show how you create your track from scratch.”

She also points to what happens once a show actually gets booked. “In this economy, where folks have to justify going out, make sure when you do have shows they’re intentional and unique experiences that bring your community together,” Castiglia said.

Chappell Roan is the case study for what patience and consistent output can build. She signed to Atlantic Records at 17 and began uploading covers and original songs years before most people had heard her name. Her first EP under the Chappell Roan name arrived in 2017. She kept releasing, kept performing, and kept refining a persona built around drag culture and camp long before “Good Luck, Babe!” broke into the mainstream in 2024. By the time the viral moment happened, there was already a fully formed live show waiting on the other side of it, drag performers opening her sets, a percentage of every ticket going to a trans-led charity, and a visual world fans had been building toward for years. The overnight success took nearly a decade of exactly the kind of touch points Castiglia describes.

That timeline matters for artists and teams looking for a shortcut. Roan’s audience did not need to be convinced to buy a ticket once “Good Luck, Babe!” broke, because the live show was already the payoff to a story they had been following. The song did the work of pulling new listeners in. The years of consistent releases and increasingly elaborate performances did the work of making sure there was somewhere real for those listeners to land.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask the Fans Directly

Alyssa Sarti Garcia, owner and head of marketing at VOZ360, focuses on building a direct line of communication rather than relying on public-facing platforms alone. “Launch their community fan base channels for them to have direct communication with their fans, and then host a super fan feedback session where I ask fans questions about their music and branding and get feedback on what they think,” Garcia said. “Talking to the fans is the first step I would take because you find out so much when you communicate directly with your audience.”

Garcia points out that the answers are often more specific than teams expect. “Maybe they didn’t like the last song they released, or they didn’t share the last video you made because of X reason. Getting to the root of why a fan isn’t going deeper into an artist’s ecosystem is where I would start in translating a digital audience to a touring audience.”

Taylor Swift’s Secret Sessions are the clearest large-scale example of this instinct in action. Ahead of albums like 1989, reputation, and Lover, Swift personally selected small groups of fans and invited them into her homes to hear the record before release, then spent hours talking with them about the songs, their favorite lyrics, and what the era meant to them. The sessions were never framed as market research, but they functioned as one. Swift got direct, in-person reactions to the material before it reached the public, and the fans who attended became some of the most vocal early advocates for each rollout, posting about the experience for weeks before the album arrived.

The scale is different from what most developing artists can pull off, and Swift’s version involves a level of production most teams will never have the budget for. But the underlying move, gathering a small group of real fans and asking them what they think before the wider release goes out, is available at any level. It does not require a house or a film crew. It requires being willing to ask the question and sit with the answer, which is closer to what Garcia is describing than it might first appear.

The Common Thread

Castiglia, Ward, and Garcia are describing three different tactics, a release cadence, a comment section strategy, and a feedback loop, but they are all solving the same problem from the same direction. None of them start with paid promotion, a bigger content budget, or a flashier rollout. They start by treating the existing digital audience as individuals rather than as a metric.

That is a harder sell internally than it sounds. Consistent releases, personal replies, and fan listening sessions do not show up cleanly on a dashboard the way follower growth or view counts do. But the artists who have made the digital-to-live jump, whether over a decade like Chappell Roan or in near real time like Gracie Abrams, all converted the same way: by making the people already paying attention feel like they were part of something, well before there was a tour to sell them a ticket to.