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How To Promote Your Music – Essencial Guide For The Independent Artist

May 12, 2021 • 12 min read

If you've been working on music promotion for a while and feel you've missed some basic strategies, this is the article for you. Here we will objectively discuss some important tactics and topics when it comes to how to promote your music. Believe me, good marketing makes ALL the difference in an artist's career. But when we talk about marketing done right, we are referring to valuing the artist's real qualities. We see many cases of "false advertising", where non-existent qualifications are attributed, and fundamental deficiencies are hidden. This is what you will NOT learn here. What you will find here is a direct and effective way to create and apply your music promotion. You will learn some techniques that can open doors and get you "in the game" once and for all. Searching you will find several music marketing companies that specialize in promoting artists. However, our intention is to enable you to develop a marketing strategy that will bring good results to your music career.

Mapping the way

How to promote your music always firstly goes through understanding to whom are you "selling" to. In digital marketing this would be defining the "persona" of the campaign. By defining this, you greatly increase the chances of success in your sells. Knowing your audience will get you better communicating to them and thus attracting their attention. What kind of audience consumes the music you make? What does this audience listens to? Where do they go? Who are their idols? What do they wear and what do they consume? Information of this kind will even help you in the search for possible sponsors and partners. In general terms, at this stage you can define items such as
  • Predominant age and gender of the audience that listens to your musical style;
  • Preferred social networks of this public;
  • Artists that this audience follows;
  • Where these artists are present on the web and their marketing actions;
  • Profile of the radio and TV stations that this audience listens to and watches;
  • Where these artists play and who their booking agents are.
This map serves as an initial basis for identifying who and where your audience is. But just as important as this initial analysis is to maintain it. Audiences change, and so do their preferences. Stay connected with them and their preferences, and you will always be in the right place at the right time.

How to promote your music with presence on the Internet

I believe you have no doubt that one of the most important items in your music marketing is your web presence. This presence, besides social networks and streaming services can also happen with a website.

Website

Many people believe that websites are a thing of the past. That it is enough to have a fanpage, an Instagram profile, and a YouTube channel. Not quite. It is essential to have profiles on these social networks, but a website will also be essencial. Think of your website as a home of your own, where you can arrange things 100% your way. A place where anyone who enters will immediately identify your branding as an artist. They will hear your music and watch your videos without distractions or interruptions from commercials. You may, for example, have an e-shop inside your website. It will bring you direct financial gain selling band merchandise, and, in a second moment, a gain in publicity. How? Whoever buys a t-shirt of your band will be out there promoting your band. You can even give your fans the chance to sing with your band playing for them. All you need is to know how to make a lyric video. Do you know what is an elevator pitch? Your website may contain a specific strategy with a diverse number of them. By making a good impression, and knowing how to make a good call to action for your work, you will certainly have a more professional and trustworthy face to both your audience and potential contractors. How to promote your music will be much easier. Also take a look on what is an electronic press kit and how it can be allied to your website and elevator pitch strategy. Another example of use is the possibility of creating a list of e-mails or cell phones for contact by WhatsApp. This can be done within the site itself or with a capture page, also known as a "landing page".

Landing pages

Landing pages are simple pages with images and titles that call for action through reciprocity. You offer something attractive in exchange for a valid e-mail address or contact. They have a form to be filled in with the visitor's data. It's a right-on-spot tatics of how to promote your music. A "mini script" of a capture page could be: Create content that is attractive to your audience; E.g.: Give away a band t-shirt. Create a linked promotion so that the visitor himself promotes your page; E.g.: Every 200 people who sign up, double the number of raffled items. Automatically you will have a contact list with a very high percentage of people who are sympathetic to your work. You can use this list to promote your music, shows, raffles, etc. how to sell music

How to promote your music on Social Media

We cannot talk about music promotion without talking about social media music marketing. Virtually any professional can benefit from a good social media presence. As long as you choose the most appropriate ones for your area and know how to work with them, how to promote your music will be much easier. For the music market we can consider essential: YouTube for Artists, Instagram and Facebook. We also have SoundCloud and other more specific ones. But it is not enough just to be on those firts ones. More importantly is to make them work in your favor. Empty social networks without any movement can be a huge loss of time. You need to engage your audience. And being careful with your posts is the way to do this. By now you know your audience, so publish content that is relevant to them. Always with a visual identity that is in line with your artist branding. Improving the quality of photos and videos, publishing updated material, and maintaining a frequency of publication will make all the difference. This will help you to have a good organic reach, that is, your publications reaching more people without investing money in it. There are several techniques that you can deepen as you advance in the subject: Instagram music promotion and master You Tube for Artists are some of them.

How to promote your music with SEO strategy

There are many options for virtual promotion, but there is one thing they all have in common: The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools. In Portuguese, Search Engine Optimization. How to promote your music is actually pretty close to good writing and communication. They are what will make your publications and posts reach your audience and your audience will reach them. How? By making your site and your publications appear among the first results of search engines like Google, for example. Which, by the way, has some free content on SEO strategies. The idea is to assign specific characteristics to your publications. When someone searches for something on the web, the search engine looks for these characteristics. If your content contains some characteristic that matches what is being searched for... Bingo! There you are on the search results screen. For starters, your must use and abuse of your brand's name on texts about it. On your texts, try using external references for ideas or institutions that may somehow have something to do with your project. The main ideia is to maintain a blog and an internal linking strategies between posts. Make references to yourself and everything you right, try to connect things. That will help Google find you and define you as an authority on that subject that people search for so much.

Title, description and tags

In any social media there will always be the possibility for you to include title and description, and in some cases the "tags" as well. And it is these features that will make you "grow and show up" on the web. In other words, it's essencial if you're looking for how to promote your music. Tags are words that define your post and must be separated by commas. If you make a post about guitar lessons, use direct tags such as "guitar lesson, play guitar, learn guitar". Many musicians have not mastered these techniques yet, and don't want to. So it is worthwhile for you to familiarize yourself with them, learn how to use them, and get ahead of many of them.

How to promote your music on Streaming services

Along with social networks, this is the great advent of modern times for the artistic career. Thanks to streaming services, artists no longer depend on radio and TV stations to get their work to the public. It's definetly the new paradigma on how to promote your music. Among the main services are
  • YouTube for Artists
  • Spotify
  • Apple Music
  • Deezer
  • Amazon Music

Getting your music onto digital platforms

In order to get your music onto streaming services, you will need a company to do this work for you. These are known as digital distributors or music aggregators. Each one has its own way of working, so research and choose the one that suits you best. Your distributor is the one who will pass the royalties to you, so make a good choice. Hardly you will find distributors that won't keep a good percantage of your royalties. So work your math on this and understand who's the best for you. PS. Magroove will do it for free!

How to promote your music with graphic and written content

Someone once said: "The first impression is the one that stays!". So, in addition to all the strategies and techniques, put a lot of effort into the visuals of your work. Make your photos and videos with the best professional that your budget allows. Make an appointment with him, explain in detail what you want and who the target audience is. Not saving time in this pre-production stage means saving money later on. Unless you are a professional designer, some other personel will be needed in the creation of your content. You will need someone who knows how to make an album cover design and how to make a band logo. Someone to produce a good release and profile and cover images with the correct settings for each social network.

Artist Branding

Every artist needs to identify and define his branding. It is the identity of his work. Many artists make the mistake of creating a logo, stage visual identity, etc., without a defined branding. Result: one item does not "talk" with another. Important: Your entire marketing project must be coherent with your artist branding. This is what will give the direction to your actions, including the creation of your graphic material. If you don't have one yet, take a look at this article: Artist Branding. You will find a guide on how to organize yours, create it, and use it in your campaigns.

Advertise your actions!

Commercially speaking, there is no point in having a perfect show, recording your best song, and nobody knowing about it. So, for each interesting event, have good publicity material. That is why, besides a virtual presence, it is important to do shows, to be seen "live". This yields comments from your audience, new photos and videos, and space in the media before and after the show. And of course, online publications too, both yours and your audience's. Start building an e-mail list containing contacts from the specialized media, music, culture, friends, contractors, etc. Go back to our landing page topic if you want to know a great to way to do this! Put together a release about what you are advertising, with clear and objective information. Include a promotional photo, your contacts and social networks.  If you are publicizing an event you can include a complimentary invitation for the journalist. If you are just starting out, don't skip steps or try to do all at once. Work on these first steps that we talked about, and go forward as you feel confident to do so. Remember to always keep track of online changes, and follow expert advises on how to build online presence. Remember: Less is more. It is better to have a qualified presence in only one social network than to be in all of them in a "half-assed" style. Think of your artistic career as a whole. Have a balance between your web presence and your "real life" performance. As you become better known, you will always be watched. In your attitudes, your positions, on stage or on the street. We are always in the truth, but for the artist this has a greater weight and must be taken seriously. A hasty post or publication can mean several steps backwards. The phrase: "It takes a lifetime to build an image and 30 seconds to destroy it" illustrates this idea well.

Magroove at your service

Magroove offers different services to the musician. We seek to be more and more at the service of artists by providing not only the highest technology on the market but also a good strategic support and essential tools to make a living from music.

Music recommendation

Our main service is music recommendation. We created an app that recommends music through a high-tech artificial intelligence system that identifies similar elements between songs. You upload your songs, they enter our library and, for the user of the app, your song will be recommended based on a "like" he gives to another song. In other words, your song will be recommended alongside legendary songs. If your song has similar elements to Imagine (John Lennon), for example, it will be recommended to the user who hit "like" for Imagine. We believe that in this way we significantly decrease the blockage between the public eager to get to know new artists and the brilliant new artists who remain outside the mainstream spotlight.

Upload to digital services providers - Spotify, Deezer, Tidal and more

We are also a distributor for digital music streaming platforms. Our partners are the biggest ones in the market - Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Tidal, and many others. Our differential is that by uploading your music with us, you receive 100% of your royalties generated on all platforms. We do not charge per track, we only have a small fee for maintenance costs, we will keep the first $5.00 that your release (each set of songs, album, EP, etc) generates of royalties in total (not from each platform).

Website builder and band merch

By signing with us, you will also receive a platform to create a website for your project. This website is customizable and contains snippets of your songs along with links to the platforms where they can be listened in full. We also offer a t-shirt production service. We have a huge collection of designs and you can customize each t-shirt with the band's name, tour name and date, and album/EP name. We take care of the whole process of production, payment, and international distribution of the T-shirts, which can be sold through the website we provide. Getting started is a snap! In 5 quick steps you will have your music on the biggest streaming platforms Sign up now!
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