7 Tips for Music Marketing

No doubt you got into music because you love music, not because you love marketing. While musical talent plays a huge role in success in this industry, marketing is also extremely important – but it doesn’t have to be rocket science. Today, anyone can be good at marketing. It’s all about knowing your fans and knowing yourself.

Check out these 7 tips for music marketing from Music Think Tank:

1. Marketing Your Music Is Necessary, But Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult

As someone who speaks to musicians almost on a daily basis, I know that many have the feeling that marketing their music is going to be difficult. This is an understandable fear; most people get in the music industry for the love of the music, and don’t think they’ll ever have to learn how to market in order for them to get their music heard.

That said, if you do want to get your music heard, marketing is a necessary part of things. The good news though, is promoting your music doesn’t have to be hard. Pretty much all of it can be learned, and it doesn’t require a degree in science or maths to put into place a solid promotion plan for your music career. As long as you’re willing to learn and put the work in where needed, after a while marketing your music should become second nature to you. Who knows, you may even start finding it fun. 🙂

2. Music Marketing Is All About Raising Awareness

A lot of musicians when starting out feel like if they make their music good enough, they will get noticed. That all they have to do is record a good album, make it available to people in stores (or somewhere online) and their music will start making sales and getting downloads.

While I can see why people would think this, it’s far from the truth! Anyone who’s tried this tactic before will know that this isn’t the case. All that happens is you make 0 or very few sales.

Being talented and letting people know about your talent are two very different things. As well as making music that people actually want to listen to, you need to get them to give you a listen in the first place. After all, how will people know you’re talented if they don’t give you that initial chance?

New acts are coming out all the time fighting for people attention, to the stage where if you tell people online you make music and give them a free copy of your new album, most people won’t even download it. It’s because of this that you need to convince people your music is worth trying out. This is what music marketing is!

By marketing your music you’re doing two things:

1. You’re showing people that your music exists, and
2. You’re convincing people to give it a try.

If these two things don’t happen, don’t expect your next release to do very well.

3. Marketing Is Often Most Effective When It’s A Two Way Process

While some of things you do to market your music will only involve one way interaction (you relaying a message to fans and potential fans), things will really start taking off for you when you make this interaction with fans two way. By this I mean you don’t always want to be relaying messages to them and then shutting your ears. When you update your social sites for example, as you get more followers, chances are people will often reply to something you’ve said. They want to continue the conversation you started.

What I often see however, are fans replying on musician’s walls, but the musicians not replying in return. Even if they’re asked a reasonable question. While the affect of this won’t be as big if you’re always gaining new fans and have a very big fanbase, when you’re still in the growing stage, replying to the majority of your fans will help you grow a lot quicker.

By getting them involved in your music career, you’re creating more loyal fans who will stick around for a lot longer. When you speak to them, you make them feel like they’re part of your journey. Because of this they’re more likely to support and share what you do.

If you didn’t reply to them however, it’d be more likely they’d become frustrated trying to talk to you, and you continually ignoring them. If then another musicians was giving them more attention, it’s very likely they’d continue following and supporting them instead.

While marketing doesn’t always have to be two way, if you don’t implement a two way dialog somewhere in your music career, you’re going to find it a lot more difficult to build up a fanbase than those musicians who do.

To read the other 4 points, visit Music Think Tank.

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