Music Marketing advice

[Ewoof]

Hey guys, 

I'm currently making a music video and an ep and hoping to release it this fall.  I would like to know your experience with marketing a song or an album. What advice would you give starting out? Hope to hear from you guys.

 

Ewoof 

[Lord Tim]

There's no real shortcuts to getting marketing working well for an indie release. If you haven't put in the legwork first, it's going to be a really hard sell for anyone to give a crap, considering the amount of music that gets pumped out every day.

What I'd recommend first is this:

1. Don't suck. Make sure your video and EP sounds like it could compete with the market that you're aiming for. What I mean by this is if you're a brutal death metal band, aiming to make your mix or video compete with the K-pop market is probably not going to do you many favours. Don't skimp on artwork - people ignore the "don't judge a book by its cover" thing all the time.

2. Get your ducks in a row. Make sure your EP is back from the pressing plant, you've sorted out any rights involved, you've set up your digital distro, you have a professional bio with professional photos, etc. and you have an electronic press kit up on a site somewhere. It's worth putting together a basic website for your band, even if it's just a portal to link to your social media sites and your online sales portals (Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.)  There's a lot of website builders out there like Wix or Squarespace or whatever that are basically drag and drop, and have a lot of marketing and sales tools already built in.

3. This is the most contentious one here that I'll offer an alternative to in a bit - find a PR company to push you around to 'zines, shows, playlists, etc.  If you're new and starting out, you just won't have the inside connections that a dedicated PR team has. They can get your foot in the door all over the place and maximise your exposure. Is it cheap? No, not really. But going with a PR team may mean the difference between selling 7 copies of your EP to family and friends to getting good exposure across the board and moving the entire batch. I run a label, and while we're really savvy with doing promo and have a pretty great following for our main acts, we still often hire PR teams to find new places we haven't explored yet, or even just to take the pressure off of us doing everything ourselves.

"But I don't have the money to pay for a PR team!"

Yep, fair comment!

OK, so if you can't go in that direction, this is all an upwards hike that may pay off over several releases.

First, that website you made? Make sure you have a mailing list sign-up on there. Direct marketing really makes a difference. Use a service like Mailchimp to set up campaigns and track your marketing. It may not pay off for this first EP but if this makes a bit of a buzz and gets people interested enough to sign up for your mailing list, the next one will sell MUCH better because you have an audience you can talk to directly and tell them about your new release.

Facebook is utter rubbish but it's still a decent place to start promoting. Start your dialogue with your fans now - if you sell *at* them, nobody will care. Post a lot of content, make a lot of posts that elicit a response, and this both boosts your relevancy ranking and also makes you much more personable to potential fans. Upload your video directly to Facebook first (they hate linking to external sites), pay for a boost, and make sure you target your audience. If you don't, expect all of your money to go to a click farm in Uzbekistan. "Wow I had no idea most of our fans were 72 - 80 year old women in central Asia! Huh, who knew?"  And then a few weeks later, link your YouTube video and boost that as well and use that as another talking point. The more you can talk about yourselves without actually making it look like you're selling stuff at people, the better.

One thing to keep in mind is that your music is essentially worthless. Worthless as music that you want your money back on anyway. The actual product itself is super valuable but don't hope you'll get back the money and time you spent making it because you likely won't. Approach this as a paid advertisement for your brand. You made an album full of jingles to sell your merch, basically.  Be prepared to write everything off as advertising costs for your *next* release.

Doing this right is all about playing the long game. Think 2 releases ahead when you do anything and plan your goals and budget around that.  But the absolute key is fan building and audience interaction and keeping at least a consistent dialogue going with your audience, if not a good stream of consistent content.  Even with all of that I'd *still* recommend a PR company to augment anything you do, but that will get you on the right path.

Good luck! It's a pretty rough landscape out there!

[Glenn Stanton]

3 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

our fans were 72 - 80 year old women in central Asia!

hey! don't be knockin' those rockin' old folks!  ? 

[Lord Tim]

You know it's a funny story - there's another band called LORD from Hungary that we often get lumped in with on streaming sites. If we don't specify that we want to target English speaking countries, and between the ages of 18 and 65, we'll find more often than not that it'll just default to Hungary as our primary audience. It's mostly annoying but the weird, and actually kind of hilarious, thing is that we've actually made a fair wad of Hungarian fans by accident because of that. Swings and roundabouts, hey?

[telecode 101]

I dont need to market my music. I have decided I am going to just make art music that no one wants to listen to. that way i dont need to worry about this marketing stuff. ?

[Tim Smith]

30 minutes ago, telecode 101 said:

I dont need to market my music. I have decided I am going to just make art music that no one wants to listen to. that way i dont need to worry about this marketing stuff. ?

Same here. Unless something unforeseen develops. I put out one CD and online album with CD baby. It was distributed across all platforms. As Lord Tim says, it was completely buried under mounds of other music the very first day it came out. No one was looking for it. No one knows anything about my music, so it came down to genre. IOW only those looking for that type of music bumped into it and only if they were somehow lucky in their searches and happened to stumble across it which was highly unlikely.

My expectations going into it were not high. I did it as more of an experiment. I should have known the outcome already. I notified everyone I knew to that the music was out there. Social media is mainly about others putting out what they want you to see and hear. Not the other way around.

This isn't a pity party for me. I'm perfectly content to make my own music and put some of it out to listen basically for free. Unlike Lord Tim my goals are totally different. I don't need to sell music for income. Sure it would be nice if I could.

In order to be very successful a person first needs good music. Not just good music, over the top good music. Then they need backing of promo people that constantly put it out there. Sometimes an Ace helps. A card that makes something about you different than anyone else or uniquely attractive. Hopefully you already have it and it's a natural thing like my tendency toward some celtic feel music. I didn't put that dog on for marketing, it's just something a little different about what I do. This attracts some listeners and turns off others. Otherwise your music just sits on the same shelf all of the other more common stuff does. Sensationalism works on YouTube. Using an  attention grabbing title or picture up front. Once you get them in the door you have to hold them because I unwatch YouTubers who put lots of icing on their promo and there is no content to their videos.

Frankly in this day and age a person might just do better busking in a public place with a cup for tips. Or an act that does wedding etc. 

For larger acts you have to account for all of the gear set up, concert promotions if playing live. Get to the gig play well and so forth. Larger corporate promoted acts handle all of that while smaller acts are on their own. All of those expenses come out of any profits. Name recognition helps.

It's just a lot to have to manage and organize and most musicians are not organized people. Even if solely online much is really involved in even making a few dollars here and there.

[Lord Tim]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making music just for the pure enjoyment of it, or even uploading that for people to hear/buy. It's sort of refreshing doing that, actually.

I personally hate the marketing side of things, it seriously takes all of the joy out of it for me, despite the knowledge and experience I have from doing it for so long. Luckily our bassist thrives on that and looks after the bulk of it for our band and our label.

Honestly, if you're not planning to do stuff on a commercial level like we do, save yourself the headache and focus on what you love instead, IMO.

[Julia286]

The way you can market and promote your music is to use social media and creating a platform for your music. This will help you engage and interact with your audience while also showing them who you are as an artists. Another way you can promote music is by using music submission platforms such as One Submit where they send your music to Spotify playlists, TikTok influencers, Youtube Channels, Record labels, blogs, and more in oprder to get your music heard by real listeners. Here is the link to One Submit: https://www.one-submit.com/ 

[telecode 101]

On 7/19/2022 at 6:31 AM, Julia286 said:

The way you can market and promote your music is to use social media and creating a platform for your music. This will help you engage and interact with your audience while also showing them who you are as an artists. Another way you can promote music is by using music submission platforms such as One Submit where they send your music to Spotify playlists, TikTok influencers, Youtube Channels, Record labels, blogs, and more in oprder to get your music heard by real listeners. Here is the link to One Submit: https://www.one-submit.com/ 

I try to stay on top of this stuff. Its all an exercise in futility as you are basically running up a cliff. Basically, the amount of new music being released every day increases exponentially and there really is no cloud based service that can keep up with that. If you can't find you target market or "audience" in your direct geographic area where you share a community and are able to directly interact with them, you are a needle in a haystack on the internet. This is sort of where true talent shines through and a person who is able to pickup an instrument and showcase their musical talent to an audience can shine through. The rest of it is a bit like a lottery with really bad odds at  maybe being able to one day make minimum wage slightly above poverty level income from making music. Its best to just consider it a hobby and treat it as a personal artistic release. The reality is, you are basically doing what old ladies do who like to paint flowers in their back wards. They will never become Picasso or Dali.. they will just be grandma who paints really cool little paintings.