If you want to be the next big face of the music industry or reach your target audience, you must implement suitable music marketing strategies.
With the immense number of new music tracks being released every day, music promotion plays a significant role in determining whether your music will reach the audience or not. That’s why music is not only a form of art anymore.
The music industry has seen a radical shift in recent years, and to have a stable position, you need to have a sure-shot marketing strategy.
What Is Music Marketing?
Every modern-day musician must be familiar with the music track and album promotion. But, marketing means something more significant. It combines strategies to connect the artists with the fanbase, get noticed by the new audience, and monetize their growth the right way.
Depending on your music career level, your marketing strategy will be different. As an artist grows, their marketing goals also change. You can have short-term or long-term strategies. However, both need regular result assessments to know when to change them.
Importance of Music Marketing
You are wrong if you are one of the musicians who think only your talent and hard work can determine your position in the music industry. We live in an era of marketing, and the domain of music is no different. Music tracks and albums are also considered a product now, and they need marketing like every other creation out for sale.
Here is how marketing can ensure your success as a musician:
- Make your music reach the right audience by making them aware of your service.
- Develop a strong relationship between you and your audience. Also, create a loyal fanbase for constant support and word-of-mouth promotion.
- Improve online sales of your music, services, and merchandise.
- Increase booking requests for music productions, recordings, concerts, and shows.
- Measure your success and compare it with other players in the industry.
- Help you establish yourself as a professional musician instead of an amateur.
Digital Vs. Traditional Music Marketing
Earlier, selling music meant selling physical products such as cassettes and CDs. At that time, traditional marketing used to work quite well, thanks to its four core elements:
- Product: Music that is up for sale
- Price: Cost of the product
- Place: Place of buying the product
- Promotion: Making the audience know about the product
However, this method does not work for digital products, and you need a modern music marketing strategy.
- Experience: Attract the audience to enjoy a wholesome experience.
- Exchange: Offer products in exchange for something other than money.
- Everyplace: Sell your music through every possible channel.
- Evangelism: Influence your fans to promote your work.
Nevertheless, any marketing campaign can include the elements of traditional and digital strategies. All you need to do is to understand your target and implement suitable plans.
Best Ways to Create a Marketing Strategy
Fan Persona
Knowing your audience persona helps you properly craft the marketing strategy. Depending on the age, demography, preference, and other factors, you can have separate plans for each segment of your target audience.
Set the Brand Tone
Defining a specific identity for you and your music should be your focus during music marketing. By making people understand that you are different than other artists, you can make a lasting impression on your audience.
Set the Goal
While creating your music promotion strategy, it should clearly define the goals. For example:
- Increasing traffic on your website or online shop
- Increasing the sales of your digital products and services
- More song download or play count on music platforms
- Increasing followers on targeted social media
- Boosting social media engagement rate
- Increasing newsletter subscriber count
Create Content for Marketing
You may need to create additional content, particularly for marketing.
- Audio: Make your mosaic and playlist available to the audience, ensuring the promotion.
- Video: Using clips from your music video, live concerts, BTS, and interviews will easily attract the audience.
- Images: Create a visual identity with photos, album cover, event graphics, posters, and social media posts.
- Written Content: Use social media and websites to talk about your music using text.
SOSTAC Method
The SOSTAC is a popular marketing method that is an acronym for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action, and Control. You can also follow this approach to excel in marketing.
Music Marketing Platforms
Ads
Social media platforms, music streaming apps, and YouTube are the best platforms for ads. You can create a budget for paid promotion and run advertisements on these platforms. It helps you boost your content alongside free promo posts.
Networking
Collaborating with music tastemakers, influencers, radio stations, bloggers, and technology journals is essential. You can get word-of-mouth or influencer-driven promotion for your music through such activities.
Social Media Handles
Create dedicated social media accounts for your profile and promote your tracks, albums, and new releases. Do not forget to reply to a few comments.
Website
If you want to control music promotion, you can develop a website. On it, keep dedicated call-to-action buttons for merch, new releases, newsletters, email subscriptions, and content subscriptions.
Music Platforms
You can upload your artist profile on leading music distribution platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Apple Music, SoundCloud, SoundHound, etc. It will enable you to take your content to a global audience.
Online Store
You can easily set up an online store for music albums, tracks, new releases, and merch. For such eCommerce sites, Shopify could be an option.
Newsletter and Email Marketing
To keep the email subscribers engaged, create a newsletter Ideas and plan. It will help you keep the audience updated on the latest happenings.
Electronic Press Kit (EPK)
Produce an EPK consisting of album information, event images, interviews, videos, etc. You can instantly share EPKs with influential parties when you get by.
Public Relations (PR)
To stay trending, you may also resort to PR through podcasts, single interviews, issuing press releases, submitting PR posts on PR websites, etc.
The Components of a Music Marketing Plan
Now you can start brainstorming to devise a tactic to achieve the goals. A marketing plan is the simplest way of getting started. Your music content marketing plan should consist of some considerations and actions as outlined below:
The Audience and Fans
Your marketing campaign and its messaging should include the fans and listeners. The marketing content must engage all the audiences like casual fans, passive fans, strangers, super fans, and engaged fans.
Campaign Elements
These could be flyers, printed QR codes with surprise rewards, brochures, artist profile posters, contests, giveaways, exclusive music, video messages, and fan interaction events. Additionally, smart links work like a charm to manage various aspects of the campaign elements.
Create a List of Metrics for Measurement
In the music marketing industry, various metrics for success are measured depending on the marketing event and content. For example, the streams, subscriptions, and sales figures are a music album’s success metrics.
You need to keep the hype around your content always active. Hence, plan for evergreen marketing rather than one-time events.
Music Marketing Tools
Find below some high-quality music promotion platforms and tools to help you grow your career in the creative music industry:
Beatchain
Beatchain lets independent, new, and small-scale music artists break free from the captivity of music production sharks who tries to control creativity. It is a relatively easy-to-understand and no-code platform to manage personal marketing goals to sell your creativity in the music spectrum.
The features of Beatchain that help you efficiently market your creative content are:
- Build an army of fans quickly by adding your content and letting the tool do the rest.
- You can also use its Launchpad to engage the fan base by regularly publishing music on social media.
Apart from the above, it provides services like smart music links, blogs, and data analytics.
Spotify for Artists
Spotify is a widespread audio streaming platform. Apart from music retailing, it also offers tools and platforms for the creative growth of artists. To let independent music artists focus on creativity, Spotify for Artists platform offers various services.
Highlighted features of this music marketing platform are:
- Career development plans for budding and independent musicians and singers.
- The platform also lets you easily create a digital fanbase.
- Its algorithmic placements and editorial playlisting are golden opportunities for you to become famous quickly.
- Its Marquee feature allows you to show sponsored recommendations to Spotify audiences and convert listeners to fans.
- Impress the audience with social-ready and picture-perfect graphic content of the artist profiles, albums, tracks, and playlists.
That’s not all! Spotify for Artists also offers you to market exclusive merchandise for fans, run a publishing gig, or mingle with the listeners via Music + Talk.
Linkfire
You can become a one-man show for your assets, team, data, and promotion by signing up for music marketing services from Linkfire. It offers Smart Links and Platform services to its creative music creator client base.
You can streamline content delivery using the Smart Link service, showcase new releases, and organize existing music or songs. The idea is to stay in front of the audience or fans and keep them engaged.
The Platform is the tool where all the magic happens. Its utilities are:
- Building smart links.
- Collaborating with other music and audio content creators efficiently.
- Analyze data and know what your audience and fans like and deliver accordingly.
Linkfire also is the go-to destination for cost-effective and efficient promotion of your artist profile or music content.
DropTrack is yet another popular platform for promoting your music creation career. If you are a budding and individual music content creator, then you need to get noticed by top personalities in this spectrum.
Key features of this full-service music promotion tool are:
- Promoting music among your contacts of influencers.
- If you do not have contacts, the tool will submit your content to its directory of industry experts.
- Get real-time data analytics service that shows feedback, likes, dislikes, comments, etc., in one place.
Unleash a powerful networking opportunity by checking out DropTrack. It ensures that the music industry influencers like bloggers, global DJs, radio stations, record labels, playlist curators, and music supervisors know your work.
MySphera
The psychology of music listeners has significantly changed due to social media and online marketing. Now, there are a group of creative professionals who create a taste of music for their target audience. These are known as Tastemakers, aka influencers for music.
You need to connect with the right tastemaker to boost your content promotion effort. MySphera enables you to do that in the right way. The platform has a roster of 2,000+ tastemakers who can influence the ups and downs of your content.
So far, the platform has served over 20,000 musicians and helped them feature 100,000+ content via tastemakers.
Soundcharts
You can get more listens, likes, and referrals when you adjust your content according to the audience’s feedback. Soundcharts make this happen by offering you premium data insights on your music.
The tool is highly effective for:
- A dashboard view of charts, social media engagements, and playlist data.
- Get sources of growth data by platform and country.
- Get artist benchmarking data.
Hence, you may try its “For Artists” plan to experience the difference in your career growth. The plan offers you digital artist profiles, insights from the audience, alerts, charts ranking, radio airplay data, email reports, and playlist exposure.
Conclusion
The idea of music marketing may sound exhausting to many artists, but it is a crucial step to becoming successful in the ever-growing global music industry. With the help of the right marketing strategies, you can create a solid fanbase and make your music available to most people.
To ease up the process, artists can use the tool mentioned above. Also, do not forget to review your strategies regularly. You may also be interested in including music smart links in your marketing plan.
