• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, March 8, 2016

Music streaming service Pandora announced the release of AMPcast today, a tool which will enable artists to record audio messages on their mobile phones for their fans on Pandora’s platform.

Artists can target fans currently listening to their music, providing local concert dates, album releases and include links for fans to buy tickets or albums.

Pandora launched a similar service, Artist Audio Messages, last year, but those messages had to be recorded in a studio and weren’t self-serve the way AMPcast messages are.

The previous iteration did see some success though, with some artists getting click-through rates (CTR) as high as 17.6% on their messages.

Tim Westergren, Pandora’s founder and former touring musician, said in a statement that the tool could change the way artists think about marketing.

Musicians in the digital age have an unprecedented opportunity for discovery and exposure—in the EDM scene, for example, many major DJs have literally shot from relative obscurity and a few hundred followers to headlining festivals in the space of a couple of months.

The ability to get music out there has its drawbacks though, as the lack of ability to monetize digitally can be rough on both aspiring and established artists—the former of whom often double as social-media manager, marketer, producer, and tour manager by themselves.

By connecting the service to concerts (which is where the money is for musicians) and album drops, musicians will be able to use data to understand their fan bases better.