How to Promote Music in 2023 [Guides for Musicians]

Music promotion is vital for every independent artist looking to make it big in the music industry. By marketing your music, you will create awareness in the public of the existence of your music; otherwise, your audience will never grow! Take advantage of the modern digital landscape making it easier for promising artists to develop their fanbase. So, how do you go about it? Here is a complete guide on music marketing.

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3 Key Pillars of Fan Engagement.

Before diving into the specifics of promoting your music independently, here are three key pillars you must adopt at the core of your music marketing strategy:

1. Consistency: You should be consistent when marketing your music to grow your audience. Being consistent in terms of quality and quantity in your marketing will differentiate your brand and boost consumer trust in your music over artists whose marketing isn’t consistent.
2. Authenticity: Your potential fan base should feel the connection between your songs and your marketing. Let them hear and feel your artistic voice in your music marketing. By doing so, your target audience will perceive you as being honest and genuine. Let your music promotion align with your songs!
3. Sustainability: There is no shortcut to building a strong fanbase! To sustain your fanbase, you must show up and do the promotion daily.

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Like any other career, your music journey requires some investments to succeed.  This guide will discuss how to market your music with the lowest investment.

1: Start with Making Good Music

Coming up with great tracks is a step ahead of your music marketing. While music promotion is about pushing your music to the top, the campaign will not be successful if your music doesn’t offer value to listeners.

Thus, before starting your music promotion, do your best to make your music as compelling as possible.

2: Streaming Optimisation

Music streaming platforms like Spotify, YouTube Music, Soundcloud, and Apple Music run algorithms that analyze an artist's popularity, music genre, and the type of listeners who might like the music. With such analysis, the platform will recommend your music to people who like your kind of music.

Most music lovers will flock to these platforms in search of new music. Sign up on the most popular streaming platforms, upload your music, and let people listen to your work. You can also use the platforms to track the popularity of your uploaded music. Besides being music-promoting platforms, streaming platforms can earn you revenue when listeners stream your music.

3: Paid Advertising

Artists from different industries are using paid advertisements to increase their audience. This form of music marketing requires a budget! Some of the platforms where paid advertising seems to be rewarding include;

A. Facebook & Instagram

Facebook and Instagram are the leading social media platforms where paid advertisement thrives. With paid advertisements, you can target people according to their interests; genre of music, or artists' preference. Advertise your music with cover art that has your music playing in the background, your music video, or a video of you hyping the music you are promoting.

In either option you will choose, don’t forget to include a link to the music leading the target audience to a streaming platform where they can stream or download the music.

B. YouTube Advertising

Like advertising on Facebook and Instagram, you can also advertise your music on YouTube targeting people of specific interests.

4: Be Active on Social Media

Whether you're advertising on social media platforms or not, as an artist, social media is a vital tool for interacting with your fans. Use your songwriting skills to craft engaging posts for your fans as you market your music. The best social media platforms for marketing your music include:

• Facebook: It remains to be the most popular social media platform where musicians organically engage with their fans through shared content, photos, text updates, and videos. To maintain engagements, ensure to reply to your fans’ comments.
• Instagram: It’s a media-driven platform that is fit for any musician looking to increase their fanbase. You can share videos, reels or even go live and market your latest track! If you have a big following, your music marketing post will go viral and thus achieve a higher audience reach.
• TikTok: This is a growing video-sharing platform. Take short video clips promoting your music and share the clips with your followers. The posts will quickly go viral and thus increase your fanbase by reaching more fans within a short time.
• YouTube: Upload quality videos consistently to build up a following on YouTube. People flock to YouTube for some fresh and all-time good music. It's an excellent place to market your work if you like doing music videos.

Promoting music on social media can be draining. To make your work easier, utilize post scheduling tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Planable. Such tools will make your marketing efforts run effortlessly.

5: Contact Playlist Curators

Landing your song on one of the public playlists on streaming platforms will give your work great exposure. It will incentivize listeners to look out for your online music catalog for more hits. To make this campaign successful, ensure your songs are added to playlists appropriate to your genre.

6: Influencer Marketing

Influencers play a significant role in today’s music marketing. These influencers run YouTube channels, music blogs, and Spotify channels with thousands of followers/subscribers. They already have an exciting audience in their specific niche. Thus, choose an influencer in your music genre for easy marketing. The active audience will consume any music the influencer shares on their YouTube channels, Spotify, and music blogs.

7: Collaborations

Most popular tracks on Spotify feature multiple artists. Collaborations offer an excellent way for musicians to expose their songs to new audiences. Get two or three artists in your genre and work on a track together. A collaborative track will have more visibility than you'll do alone.

Take advantage of tools like Vampr which works as a social media platform where musicians and music lovers connect to collaborate on a project.

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Conclusion

There are different strategies you can use for music marketing. Investing in streaming optimization, paid advertising, influencers, and contacting playlist curators will make your music heard by a larger audience! But before that, ensure to come up with good music that offers value to the listeners!