Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bulat Nasibullin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Bulat, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

Having been a musician and independent artist for the last 16 years, I saw the birth of social media and how it has changed the world particularly for musicians. The first social media I remember was myspace and myspace music was a the first music streaming service that I can remember. You set up a musician/band profile and you could upload a few songs so in essence it was the original music streaming waaaayyyy before Spotify or Apple Music!

As time went on and social media became ubiquitous and as music streaming became the norm, musicians started trying to get traction on Spotify via different means. Spotify has a playlisting feature built in and there are millions of playlists out there and so Artists were like ‘How do I get on these playlists?’ And so a shady Spotify Playlisting industry was born, you pay a company some money for them to place your song on their Spotify playlist with a few thousand followers… Great right? Well no, because some of these companies now figured out that it’s cheaper to have a click farm instead of actual organic, engaged users listening to these playlists so the artists are literally getting conned! There are some legit playlist promotion companies out there but if I had a dollar for everytime a musician got scammed, I would be retiring tomorrow!

So then if this is all useless how does a musician gain some traction on Spotify? Where do you even start? Social Media advertising, in particular Meta ads for musicians is becoming a very common tool used by musicians to drive traffic to streaming services, selling merch and live show tickets. But it can get pretty complex so that’s where NELA Records comes in!

Bulat, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was an independent artist for over 15 years, played in various bands in London UK, Vancouver Canada and Los Angeles. As I got older and wiser, I realized that 21 year old me could really benefit from some direction and help with avoiding scams like Spotify playlisting, Pay to play etc. So I started NELA Records Music Marketing Agency, we specialize in Social Media Ads for musicians helping them with engagement on streaming services like Spotify as well as merch sales, live show ticket sales and social media engagement in general.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nelarecords.com
• Instagram: @nelarecords
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nela-records-2b15891b7/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtSi0rRAyDOwMzirP3mycNQ