Promoting Your Music - From A Marketers Perspective

[MusicMonarch]

 

The best way to promote your music is to think outside of the box. The great thing about the music industry is that if you have good music, it's only a matter of finding your target audience.

Finding your target audience can be achieved many different ways. I will provide a few cheap/free methods below.

1. Go to fiverr.com and pay someone $5 to distribute your music to their facebook friends or fan pages. Here are a few gigs that I found while doing a quick search.

   * http://fiverr.com/gilbertosamba/promote-your-band-artist-or-music-project-to-100000-facebook-music-loving-fans-mainly-ukire-and-usa-but-world-also

   * http://fiverr.com/promote_million/promote-your-music-or-bandutube-videowebsite-over-1532100-real-people

2. Create a Cover song that compliments your voice. Use this method to "piggyback" off of popular artists.

Now let me get to the most important part that 90% of musicians forget... and that is CAPTURING FANS.

It's very important to capture your fans in a way that allows you to interract and stay in contact with them. So what is the best way to do this? A simple email subscriber list!

Here is how the process works:

1. Potential Fan listens to your music on Youtube.

2. In the description you add "Listen to more of my music" and place a link to your website.

3. The potential fan comes to your website where you say "enter your name and email to be notified when I release a new song" or you ask for their name and email in return for a free download of your "hottest" song.

4. Potential fan now becomes an actual fan by entering their name/email on your site

Doing this is a great way to build a fan base that you can contact on the fly. Imagine if only 3% of the people who listen to your music on youtube go to your website and put in their name/email. If you get 1,000 people to listen to your song, that's 30 new contacts/fans.

Now all you have to do is create cover songs and promote your music on fiverr. Eventually you will find a fiverr gig that is working great for you - so continue to use it.

The only other advice I could give is to be yourself, be unique, and add your own style to the cover songs. All it takes is for one of your cover songs to go viral and you could easily build a large email subscriber list of hundreds if not thousands of new fans.

Hope this helps and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

[matthewearly84]

This is great advice.

I wouldn't really call it out the box thinking, but its good to see you're giving sound MODERN DAY advice.

Would you say that when sending out about your latest tracks, that you allow the users to download for free?

[Gitter]

 

God, so bad.

 

First off, 99.9% of the fiverr 'social media promotion services' are across an array of privately controlled shill accounts. The money you pay to 'promote your music to facebook friends' is being promoted on the same bull{censored} accounts that you can also buy on Fiverr to get 2000 facebook likes or 3000 Twitter followers.

Its a scam. There is no promotional value in that since the intent of promotion is getting people to care and those aren't actual people.

If you're a touring band, target social media outlets that are dedicated to the area you will be playing in. Post videos. Learn how to do a press release. See if you can't wrangle an interview with the town newspaper reporter who handles the 'events' section. Talk to your venue and remind them (and remind them again) to put up your posters....

 

Whats that? You didn't send them any posters in advance?

There are 101 strategies to promote a band. Fiverr isn't one.

 

[daddymack]

there are no short cuts and there are no pat answers...try everything as long as it doesn't cost too much $...frankly, I think social media is never going to be the panacea marketing strategem everybody thinks it is...unless you are ALREADY well known...

[MusicMonarch]

matthewearly84

That is completely up to you. Providing your new fans with free content is a great way to build rapport with them - that's what we call it in the "marketing world". The main component is that you want to grab their email address so that you can further your "relationship" with them as a fan. Providing them with a free track in return for their email address is a great way to start building this relationship.

[MusicMonarch]

Gitter

I disagree with you completely. First off, I have been using Fiverr for over a year now to direct fans to multiple business related facebook pages with varying degrees of success.

I did a promotion through fiverr for a travel agency who was holding a contest for a free vacation giveaway. All the person had to do was write a comment about why they deserve the vacation and like the travel agencies facebook page.

I spent $5 on one fiverr gig for my initial test and it brought in over 150 likes to their facebook page and 60+ unique REAL comments.

So you're telling me that the companies interaction with these individuals was fake? That those 60+ comments were automated comments from fake facebook accounts? They weren't... I can promise you that...

Here is the test that I did using a $5 fiverr gig before promoting the travel agency to see what type of numbers we could get. The fiverr gig I used was a facebook page with 340,000 likes...

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=139991092822730&set=a.139337566221416.30709.139336376221535&type=1&theater

Those are real people, real likes, and real comments...

Here is a screenshot of the Facebook Insights from the campaign:

http://imgur.com/Z478gpY

Here is a screenshot showing the purchase on fiverr in my control panel:

http://imgur.com/OYHh0TV

Here are the Google Analytics for that campaign:

http://imgur.com/QfQC0sd

I know exactly what you're referring too though and you're partially correct. There are people who offer services such as 2,000 facebook likes to your page for $5. The accounts they use are what we call "bot accounts" which are created with automated software.

What you have to realize is there are facebook page admins who have got lucky and their pages go viral. I've seen random "meme" facebook pages with 500,000+ REAL likes because they went viral.

Paying $5 with the potential to reach over 500,000 peoples status page is worth it in my opinion. Let's say you get 250 people to click your video and listen to your music. Would you not pay $5.00 for 250 new fans - with the potential to collect those new fans email addresses? I would... and I do...

Do you also know how many non-mainstream musicians have had their music go viral on facebook?

The methods you suggest are old school and don't work... Post a press release? Really? Who reads press releases... You would have better luck getting exposure by just posting your music on youtube and distributing it to related music forums...