I’m still surprised to find so many artists without any lists to speak of.  My musical hero King’s X is guilty as charged.  Part of the reason why they still toil in relative obscurity after 30 years of making jaw-droppingly amazing rock music lies in their lack of business savvyness.  I would jump at a chance to be their business strategist, I’ll probably work for free!

A list gives you something concrete to build.  A list, you can interact with.  A list is your asset, the measure of where you are in your career.

And call me old-fashioned, but when I think of a list I still think the best list is an e-mail list.  A list of real people with their e-mail addresses is so valuable, because these are the people who gave you permission to directly send messages to their inboxes (don’t ever put people on your e-mail list without their explicit permission — being tagged as a spammer has dire consequences).  Hopefully you have copies of that list backed up so you will never lose it.

Facebook fans are great and so are YouTube and Twitter followers — more power to ya if you got them.  But there are at least two problems with relying on a certain proprietary platform:

1. You are at their mercy.  If you violate one of their policies inadvertently, poof!  They have every right to nuke your account, and with it goes your list.
2. Trends come and go.  MySpace, anyone?  Even the Roman Empire didn’t last forever.  A lot of these platforms won’t let you back up your friends/follower list.  They may stop using those platforms, too.

So if you’re planning for a long-term career as an artist, I still recommend a good ol’ e-mail list.  It’s simple, it’s yours, and it’s most reliable.  There are many affordable vendors who can help you manage your list and send messages.  I’m using Your Mailing List Provider but I heard good things about MailChimp, too.  Or you can just use ReverbNation.

In the other words, you really have no excuse for not owning and growing a list.  If you have it, you can see, in concrete numbers, where you are in building your audience, plus it leads to specific strategies on how to grow the list.  If you don’t have it, it’s a lot harder to gauge how many fans you have out there.

So, get a list going.  Sooner the better.