Here are some music marketing and promotion tips and ideas. They will teach you where and how to market and promote your music in this evolving music industry.
Whether you like Facebook or not, if you’re a musician you should have a Facebook account. Start by setting up a personal account. Just go to Facebook.com and follow the instructions. It’s easy. If you already have an account, the next thing is to set up a page named after your business or one titled after your band or artist name. Scroll to the bottom of your FB profile and click “Create A Page”. This will give you a few options including “brand or product”, “entertainment”, and “artist, band or public figure”. Within these main headings there are several categories to choose from. Select the most appropriate one.
After your Facebook account is set up, use it to promote your music. You can post your Youtube music videos, performances and songs on your page and your fans will be able to “like”, share or comment on them. FB is a great way to attract new fans. As fans comment on your posts, their friends will view these comments and possibly like your page and add their own comments. Your music spreads virally and your fan base increases.
With hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, the independent artist must make this medium one of his/her music marketing and promotion tools.
Music marketing and promotion on Youtube
Youtube is another powerful music marketing and promotion tool. If you already have an account that’s great. Otherwise you should set one up. Setting up a youtube account is very straightforward. Simply go to youtube.com and follow the instructions. Do you have music videos? They should be on Youtube. There’s really no getting around this. Just like Facebook, this social media is a means of spreading your music videos virally.
When you upload your music, ensure that you label them properly. For instance if you’re not a popular artiste but doing Jazz music, don’t title your video “John Brown – Still Away”. Not many people know John Brown or your song, Still Away, so no one will be searching for you, and your video won’t be found. However if you title it “John Brown – Jazz Music – Still Away”, there’s a great chance that folks will find you when they search for Jazz music. They already know about Jazz music and are using this term to search.
Even if you don’t have a music video, youtube is still a great medium to promote your song. You can use software like Windows Movie Maker to create a “video” with pictures and audio. I have several youtube “videos” with just a few pictures, titles and audio.
Fans can embed your video and place it on their website or Facebook account. They can link to it from Twitter or other Social media. That way more and more people get to know about your music and you gather more fans. There’s simply no way one can be a successful artist today without harnessing the power of the Internet and social media.
Music marketing and promotion on Twitter
Another leading social network is Twitter. A twitter account is another must. The only diversion with Twitter is that the more popular you already are the better this network works for you. However you can still use twitter to build up a following. One way to get noticed is to post or comment on the profile of others, especially accounts with lots of followers. The more helpful and interesting these posts are, the better. Post regularly, and in some of your posts, link to your songs and videos or your FB or Youtube page.
Posting on twitter is a great way to let fans follow your updates. Let them know when you have written a new song, when you’re in studio, where you’re performing, and so on.
Another way to market and promote your music is to give it away for free. Increasingly, people are not willing to pay for music, not like before. The more Internet savvy people are, the more they are looking to download music for free. The music industry is even said to be dying since CD sales and music sales have declined considerably. I don’t believe it’s dying, but that it is evolving. In this age, my view is that music (not all) should be given away for free. (I give my music away for free at www.socafreak.com/mantius.html) That way more people will get familiar with your songs and you can be booked for live performances. I understand that some artistes will be opposed to this take but it’s a sad reality that must be faced.
An alternative is the subscription model where fans subscribe to your music for a small charge and are allowed to download as many songs as possible. But this works better if a website allows fans to download music from other artistes as well, not just you.
If you have a website, you can probably use your music as a means of getting them to subscribe to your newsletter. You can ask visitors to join your ezine and get free downloads of your music in return.
Building your own website
One of the best music marketing and promotion tools is having an information website. What genre of music are you into? Jazz, rock, country, hip hop? You can create a content website on any of these areas and use it to get people to know about your music. If you’re a country artiste no one may be searching for your music since they don’t know you as yet. But they will surely be searching for country music if they are country music fans. You can build a website on some aspect of country music and attract country music lovers.
One of the best programs for building an information website is Site Build It! (SBI). Site Build it is what I use to build ultimatesongwriting.com and seven other music related websites. They teach you how to build a website that gets lots of visitors. A website without traffic is dead. You need several thousands of visitors per month. Update: Latest recommendation for building a site is WordPress.
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