If you aspire to develop a career in music, producing outstanding music is not sufficient. To go a long way, you need to have a strong strategy on marketing your music and developing a genuine fanbase. The internet brings endless approaches to promote your music that allows you to do many creative experiments. Here I discuss some of them.
- Build an Engaging Presence in Social Media Platforms
Although social media is not a conventional marketing place, it can do the work for you in very effective ways. Make a strong and consistent presence on social media platforms and let yourself findable when searched there. Your primary objective would be to promote your music but you do that across another content that can catch the attention of the audience. Create social media videos and images that are casual, entertaining and engaging where you can include some promotional materials. For example: make a video on how you record in your studio with some promotional information on your upcoming song. Conversely, make a teaser of your upcoming song and add your studio experiences in it.
- Get an Official Website
While your social media presence might be casual or semi-casual, develop an official website and give it a formal look. Showcase your tracks, albums, major achievements, awards on the site. This needs to be your formal profile for producers, recording companies etc. In addition to this, send formal emails to your colleagues and friends with a new release, concert schedule etc so that they can listen to them and share with others.
- Get into Playlists
Nowadays, streaming and playlisting have a crucial role in promoting your song and raising your rank. Streaming and playlisting platforms that are subscription based like Spotify, Apple Music, etc make you listen to thousands of listeners without the requirement of purchasing your tracks or albums individually. This is an excellent option to reach a large number of audiences who do not prefer to pay for individual songs. The curated playlists are usually a mix of different tracks and having your song in them increases your chance to be listened to randomly and reach audiences who have not heard you before. Also, these streams are counted with weight when compiling different music charts. Therefore, it is very important to get yourself listed in different curated playlists. Platforms like Spotify have algorithms that recommend songs to people based on their preferences and this will naturally help you increase your Spotify plays.
- Do Research and Know your Audience
Do research on your previous social media posts and your statistics from other playlists and sites and try to identify your audience, what they like, which part of the world they are from, what is their age range etc. This way you would understand what type of your works are most popular. Try to focus more on that specific area and put your effort into generating more unique and quality songs of that type. For example: If your genre is pop and you identify that young people from East Europe like it most, you should focus on pop music, conduct more research on East-European pop music and generate exclusive songs for them.
- Connect with Other Artists
There are artists who share each other’s songs and thus promote and grow together. Connect with your fellow artists, develop a good collaborative relation and share each other’s contents.
- Play Live and Do Something Different
Nowadays Social Medias have a live option where you can perform live and do some chit-chats with your audiences. This helps in developing a warm relationship with your audience and get yourself more promoted to others.