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How to Promote my Music For Free – Tips for Independent Artists
July 26, 2023 •
8 min read
For an indie artist, having people to listen to your songs is essential and learning about music promotion is a huge part of the process to get to this result. Every artist is dependent on their listeners, but indie artists need the fans' support even more. Even though it is easier to start profiting with your song nowadays, there are plenty of other options competing for the listener's attention. If you've been asking yourself, "How to promote my music for free", this article is for you.
Music promotion can be the difference between you and all these other musicians that are also available on streaming platforms. Starting to promote for free is a really nice way to leverage your career and start profiting. Once you build a solid fanbase, it will be a lot easier for you to put more and bigger strategies in action. If you're an indie artist and you don't have much money to invest, you'll surely benefit from the tips we'll give. You'll learn about:
- Artist Branding
- Social Media Presence
- How to Build the Hype Around Your Release
- Extra Tools for Self-Promotion
Artist Branding: Be You in Every Place
Before thinking where you should start, let’s talk about how you want to present yourself to your public when promoting. Artist branding is an important part of promotion. Your brand will help you not only discover who you are as an artist, but also tell the public who you are.
Think of you or your band as a brand that has values and a product to sell: your music. A brand counts to the consumer as well as the quality of the product. When the listener is looking for something to hear, who is singing the song will also make a difference. If you have a well-established brand, people will be more interested in what you have to offer.
Know What You Want to Say
The first step to start your artist branding is to know what you want it to say. How do you want people to recognize you? Your branding needs to tell the public the same thing your music tells them. It is important that the product and the brand are harmonic. If your brand tells something totally different than your songs, you public may be confused about your identity as an artist.
Once you define what you want to communicate to people that are listening to you, you need to base your marketing and strategic decisions on that. Your artist branding will guide you in a lot of decisions. It can help you decide what actually makes sense for you and your career and show the public that you know what you want for yourself.
Discover Your Target Audience
Part of your branding is about yourself, but there's also a part about your public. If the decisions you make about your artistic brand does not attract the public you are expecting, it is not a good branding. For that reason, you need to know what type of people you want to be listening to you. Think about what this kind of person would like to see and feel about a brand and apply that on your artist branding. If you manage to trace a detailed profile, you'll be able to make really good choices about your branding and other strategies. Your brand needs to be the opening entrance to potential listeners and enhance the chances of them wanting to keep up with your work.
Put it Together and Promote Your Music For Free
Once you discover and get to know these two factors, you need to construct a brand for you as an artist based on them. Your marketing and strategic decisions need to be following all the research you did. Present yourself to the world as what you want to be known for. Set up your artist brand and start promoting your songs.
After all that, it's time to put yourself out there. Have you ever heard that if you don't have any social media profiles, you don't exist? If you want to be noticed, especially as an artist, it is extremely important that you have a strong presence on social networks. They are a nice tool for artists and enable you to create a closer relationship with your fans. Your followers can also use your profiles to know more about you, your future plans and releases.
Social media is also a nice way to promote your music for free because the users really appreciate organic content. Paid ads on social media can be really helpful; but that doesn't mean that a good organic and free content will not bring you the attention you are seeking. These social networks don't only work with super productions. Social media platforms are part of the answer to the "how to promote my music for free" question. A simple but well thought content can catch the viewers attention if it's what they are looking for.
In these types of platforms, your content needs to be public oriented. As you've previously done when making your artist branding, think about what your public wants to see. If your content gets to the right people but does not catch their attention, your effort will be in vain. The algorithm can help by delivering your content to the desired public, but you need to show it that your content is pleasing to these people.
Try a few different types of content — but make sure they are in harmony with your profile and with one another. See which type your public seemed to like the best and invest more time in it. It's important to have different types of content in your profile, but follow the same pattern your public appears to enjoy. Just don't forget to keep your essence and what you set up for you in your artist branding.
Make Them Feel Close to You
As said before, social media enables a closer connection between artists and fans. Value to your followers, make them feel appreciated. Taking requests that make sense for you is a good way to build the connection with them. Answering questions about your work is a way to keep the closeness as well. You can also make them feel more special by sharing exclusive content with your followers on social media. Behind the scenes is good content: it shows the backstage of your work and shows them a part of the process to make the songs. It may even make them appreciate the songs more after seeing how hard you had worked.
Build the Hype
Another great way to promote yourself in social media is by using it to build the hype around future releases. If you start commenting about a future song, teasing your public with a few spoilers, it will make them look forward to the release. That way, your song will be a hit from the beginning and this also helps with the algorithm.
Motivate your followers to pre-save the songs. This shows that people are already interested in you and the song that is not even fully out. Keep talking about your new music. It may seem too repetitive, but not everything that you post will be seen by your followers. If you constantly post about it, your public will start remembering more about the release and the chances of them coming back to check the song when it's out is higher.
Streaming Platforms
All of this will not work if your music is not already on the main streaming platforms. So make sure that all of your songs are available to stream. Have in mind that all the promotion is to take the listeners to this platform. So organize them and make the algorithm act in your favor.
All your profiles need to be ready to receive visits. Add your social media there, write a good biography and upload some photos. All of this will make your profile seem more professional and welcoming to whoever is visiting. But just leaving you songs there will not be enough. Besides everything we've shared, there are more specific strategies that you can apply on streaming platforms to get more listeners. Check it out:
Having a song pitched by a platform to be part of an official playlist is a huge step in every artist's career. To make that possible, you need to write a good pitch. A pitch is a text where you say more about your music, what inspired you and other details. In Spotify, pitching is the most important part of the process of choosing a song to for an editorial playlist.
You need to send the text at least one week before the release of the song for it to be eligible to make into an official playlist. So take a significant time to write the text and add things that really them understand what is behind all the choices you have made to that production.
Show Your Music to the World
All the things listed in this article are a way to promote your music for free. All you need is time and effort to make them happen and start your path to success. If you are an indie artist, make sure to give value to your listeners because they are what you need to keep growing. Continue to study and find new ways to use all these free tools that are available nowadays. Find which ones of them are better for you so you can make very good use of them.
