Between the music industry’s digitization and subsequent democratization of tools and access, more new music was created and released than before. Thus, it is vital to have a proper promotion strategy and marketing plan for music artists. Fortunately, there are some great marketing tips for music artists that can help with their music promotion.
1 – Develop a Strategy and Establish Your Goals
Before you start spending money on promotions, you might want to develop a marketing strategy to assess what you can and cannot do properly. If you plan on releasing new music, new album, or music videos, you’ll need to write an action plan with a list of your goals for any actions you want to take. You’ll need to write down all the steps you need to take to reach your set goals.
2 – Define Your Audience
Before you start your marketing efforts to promote your music, you will need to define your potential audience and see how your fans are. The crucial part of digital marketing for musicians is to know where to place their music. Knowing information about where your audience is based and how old they are can create a music marketing strategy that will accurately reach all potential fans.
3 – Use Social Media to Boost Your Online Presence
People spend around 24 hours on the Internet per week. Almost 33% of that online time is spent on social media, which means that people spend approximately an hour per day consuming content on social media.
4 – Keep People Updated on Facebook
Facebook is a great place to organize and promote upcoming events and concerts. You can easily keep your fans updated about your new events, virtual or offline.And it’s an excellent platform to connect all of your fans in one place -it can be through your page, event, or you can even create an internal Facebook group where you can share and be involved with your fans.
Independent artists can highly benefit from creating private Facebook groups when offering different crowdfunding options.
5 – Create Beautiful and Interesting Content for Instagram
Speaking of Facebook, there’s Instagram, Although the apps are connected (not just by the company, but the integration as well)
6 – Communicate with Your Fans Through Twitter
Twitter is a great platform that artists can use to promote new music in a very casual way. One of the best tips for independent music artists is to be active on Twitter. News travels fast on the platform, and you can easily reach many people with your music. All it takes is to post something and wait for the retweets to start.
7 – Take Advantage of TikTok
TikTok has developed into one of the hottest apps available. The userbase of TikTok users is growing daily, slowly reaching the 1bilion number, making it clear that it can be a great channel to promote music, making it an excellent choice for music artists. And artists are using it – there are many bands and individual artists who have signed up on TikTok and created great content.
Since young people enjoy micro-entertainment and short and straightforward bursts of distraction, TikTok marketing can be an excellent tool for any brand or individual to engage with an audience and promote their business, or in the case of artists – music. It is a great way to market your music independently and engage with your fans with simple and fun content you can make without any planning.
8 – Document Your Daily Life
The best way to use your social media channels as a music artist is to give a sneak peek of your life for your fans to enjoy. Document your rehearsals, walks, daily life situations, thoughts by creating videos, posting pictures, using stories on the platforms you can, engage with your people. Keep your fans updated and involved so that you can remain relevant in their lives.
9 – Involve Followers and Fans
A great way to use your social media is to involve your fans in some decisions and engage with your followers on your social media. Ask your fans questions, get them to leave comments, and engage with your posts by involving them in a process. Or just ask them to share their thoughts on your songs and albums. Keep your audience engaged, and you can build a loyal audience that will be there for any event you have.
10 – Create a Cool Website
Nowadays, everyone has a website. And why should artists be any different? A website is a great platform to promote an artist or band and their art. And it’s a place that’s fully controlled by the artist that makes it. You don’t depend on platforms and other websites to post about you – you are the content creator of your website.
However, your website should be a dynamic thing. It needs to adapt and change to reflect you and events that happen in your career. A new album comes out – you need to update the website. The new tour announced – update. Your fans want to go to your website and get informed by seeing the news, happenings, ticket sales, merch, and other things about you and your music. You can set up landing pages that raise awareness, promote a specific song or album, collect email addresses, sell merch, or just keep your fans updated with news or blog posts.
11 – Sell Merchandise
Who doesn’t like to have merch? Merchandise is a must today. People want to celebrate their favorite artist with the world by showing off a T-shirt or pin from their favorite artists. But make sure you have an ad budget and a little sales funnel set to attract new fans and sell your branded products!
12 – Create Compelling Content
Everyone is online, and everyone wants to read something while they are browsing the web. You need to reach people in different ways if you’re going to get them to listen to your latest stuff. Create content for your website and create content you can use to reach out to websites that can feature your content or arrange an interview to talk to you about what you want people to know.
13 – Get Press Coverage
Blogs and online magazines about music are a great way of attracting new eyes and ears to your music. Make sure you contact anyone you can to try and get featured. Work on having compelling content on any platform you can – you never know who you can reach!
14 – Share Your Music on Digital Platforms
One of the best tips for upcoming music artists is to use digital platforms like Spotify and Deezer to share their music to reach new audiences who will potentially love their music. Being on a streaming platform ensures your music is available for fans everywhere. Yet, just being there is not enough.
15 – Get Playlisted
Since streaming is the most popular way of listening to music, platforms like Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music have implemented new ways of curating music for their listeners with playlists. With playlists, people listen to songs they like and discover new music similar to their taste.
As a musician who is just starting, it’s best to start getting your music placed on playlists.
You’ll need to get verified on any platform and build your profile. Then you’ll need to reach out to playlist owners and pitch your music. When choosing the playlists you want to be featured in, keep in mind that you can pitch to lesser-known and unofficial playlists. Many unofficial Spotify curators have playlists with a decent number of followers you can reach out to and be featured in.
You can find owners of these playlists on social media to let them know that you love their playlists and ask and point out why your song can be a great addition to it. Be polite and don’t spam them. And of course, as soon as you get featured, make sure you promote the playlist on your social media and website so that people will listen to them.
16 – Create Your Own Playlist
Apart from reaching out to be featured on different playlist, to promote yourself on Spotify or any other streaming platform you can also make your own playlist. It’s always best to have something of your own that you can monitor and be in control of. As a musician, having your own playlist means you have full control of your music there, but you can also associate yourself with other artists and feature them on your playlist.
17 – Establish a Mailing Group And Send Newsletters
An email list is a great and valuable tool for music promotion. Unlike your blog posts and press coverage, an email list is a direct way of building a fan base. When someone signs up for your email list, they are willingly applying to hear from you, and you need to take advantage of that!
So what do you send as a newsletter? Your newsletter should drive people to your website, so make sure you include links and updates about what is happening -like when you have an album coming or a tour. However, you need permission to email a person, so that means you can only reach out to people who signup for your playlist or buy something from your website.
18 – Use Crowdfunding
Many artists often wonder (and potentially struggle with): “How to market your music independently?”. The main struggle with being an independent artist is finding your funding – securing the money you need to create your music without a label funding everything. Among the best tips for independent music artists to succeed is to use crowdfunding to make sure they can create music their fans want. Many bands have turned to crowdfund and started using Kickstarter to secure the money they need to release an album. With crowdfunding, you can offer your fans a lot and get the support you need to give them the music they want. Just look at what Icon For Hire achieved.
19 – Record Music Tutorials
A great way to create compelling content is to offer music tutorials of your songs. People will want to watch you play, and they will like to learn how to play their favorite tracks – yours! So offering compelling tutorials on how to play your most famous songs, and then you can even repost their videos as a way of showing your appreciation.
20 – Don’t Be Afraid and Release Your Singles
Before you finalize your album and release everything on it, you should release a single or two – or even three. Why? Releasing singles gives your fans a preview of what they can expect with the entire album. If you’re an independent artist using crowdfunding, singles are a great way to attract more people to fund you.