Cold Listeners
Overview
Cold listeners are brand new and are only just being exposed to who you are and what you do for the first time.
In the online world, your Cold audience is made up of those who stumble across a piece of your content for the first time.
This could be anything from finding one of your posts on an Instagram hashtag to seeing an interview you did on any kind of online press publication.
In the real world, your Cold audience is made up of those who are just being exposed to you for the first time.
This could be anything from being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to walk past one of your performances to seeing a poster for your upcoming tour on a local billboard.
Cold listeners are in the first stage of your Listen Path.
The higher the quality is of the access point they come from, the higher the compatibility the Cold listener will be.
Behavioural Traits
Cold listeners are generally uncommitted, unreliable and uninterested. They have no reason to want to support you yet.
They cannot be forced to complete an action, they must want to move forward on complete it on their own.
To them, you are just another artist in the world.
They didn’t know who you were an hour ago and they will probably assume that they won’t know who you are an hour from now.
To a Cold listener, you are considered as one of the many different pieces of content that they are exposed to each day.
In order for them to consider you as something special, you must find a way to capture their curiosity.
Cold listeners will not usually choose to actively seek your content, they are normally exposed to it by pure chance.
This means that you cannot expect a Cold listener to want to support your music, just yet.
You have to give them a reason to want to, first.
Conversions
Brand Awareness 
Low-Level Conversions 
Medium-Level Conversions
High-Level Conversions
Brand awareness is advertising without asking anything in return. LLCs are a small request (‘listen to my new song!’). MLCs are a medium request (‘buy this cheap thing!’). HLCs are a high request (‘buy the vip package!’).
Cold listeners will not respond to any conversion strategy, no matter what commitment level is required.
There is no chance that someone who is uninterested in your music will want to make a big purchase, so HLCs should not be attempted.
And as they have yet to build an interest in your music, there is no chance that they’d be prepared to make any type of purchase, no matter how affordable it may be, so MLCs should not be attempted.
Cold listeners will still usually not respond to you asking them to complete a small action, like listening to your latest song, watching your latest music video or following you on Twitter. They have yet to build a reason to want to support you, so LLCs should not be attempted.
Cold listeners respond the best to high-quality brand awareness campaigns. These campaigns aim to provide the highest amount of exposure with no ask for the user to do anything in order to receive the content.
The better the quality of your brand awareness campaign, the higher quality the access point your provide for your Listen Path and the higher the compatibility of the listeners that it will attract. This will mean that your Cold listeners will transition to the second stage of the Listen Path much faster.
How to Find Them
Cold listeners can be found anywhere in the world.
Their compatibility level will scale depending on how targeted your brand awareness campaign is.
For example, if you go into a crowded shopping mall and hand out flyers to your latest performance, you’ll find a lot of Cold listeners.
If you go online and start posting content with no real intention or focus, you’ll find a lot of Cold listeners.
These Cold listeners, however, are likely to be incompatible with your music and will therefore not transition easily down your Listen Path.
This makes this option of exposure a poor access point.
On the other hand, if you refine your Summary Fan (as discussed in The 4D Songwriter: How to Dominate the New Music Industry), you’ll know where to find your highest quality of listener.
You can then put your content in front of their eyes and attract a Cold audience with the highest compatibility.
Cold listeners with a high compatibility will transition effortlessly down your Listen Path.
My Audience Is Cold
Cold listeners are in quite a delicate phase. It is in this stage that you must find a way to impress them before they decide to move on.
You will need to find a way to spark their curiosity to help them find a point of relatability or connection to want to explore. Cold listeners with low compatibility will take a lot of convincing to become Curious, but highly compatible Cold listeners will spark their curiosity almost instantly.
To transition them to Curious, you will need to provide your audience with a range of different types of content that dive deep into the four dimensions (and their individual elements).
You will then need to use your Pages area and social media analytics to see which types of your posts are resonating best with your audience and then scale their production accordingly.
For example, if you find out that after a few weeks of varying content that your audience is loving when you talk about your Story and where you came from before starting your music journey, start to create more of that.
This content is obviously desired and your audience will want to see more of it. This will likely be where your audience will build their point of curiosity.
However, don’t assume that this will always be the case. Continue to test for the most optimal content every now and then to be able to notice what your audience is responding to best. This will allow you to scale the content that moves Cold listeners to Curious.
Lastly, when you find the most resonating content, do not cease to create your other types of content, just scale them back. You want to provide as many access points to your Listen Path as possible.
Don’t remove access points that may provide high-quality listeners altogether, just because another access point is working better at that point in time.