Why the Majority of Music Marketing Advice You’ve been Given Sucks!
I have always despised the kinds of how-to guides that are just a long list of things you aren’t doing that you need to be, the vast majority of so-called “Music Marketing Guide’s” seem to always neglect to offer any actual practical advice for getting your music heard.
So here I’m going to try and pull off my own version of bettering exactly that and teach you how with just a few but very practical Music Marketing Tips you can start to see real results in as little as a month.
Musicians and Music Producers have A LOT at their disposal, the issue that most go nowhere I don’t believe is down to a lack of talent but down to a lack of knowledge for executing a real music marketing plan.
I’m not going to take this in the kind of direction you might expect, I feel as if the ways you would market your music in the old days are long gone. What you’re about to learn is practical music marketing tasks you can carry out by yourself a few hours a night, as the result of building a loyal profitable fan base using only a few cost-effective tools to automate a successful music marketing plan like it’s 2018.
Everything here I’ve personally used to grow Your Local Musician, so think about how you landed here, There is a reason you found me, hopefully, that’s reason enough for you to understand that I know what I’m talking about.
What You Will Learn
- Changing The Way You Think About Marketing
- How to Collect Emails & Grow Your Fanbase
- Building a Brand With Youtube
Changing The Way You Think About Marketing
It’s easy to want to be the next Dre or Timbaland, but you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t understand the basic fundamentals necessary.
With nearly next to no investment involved, I never accept finances as a reason to not market your music as aggressively as you can, The reality is that there are two characteristics within us all to blame and how you tackle them depends on you and you alone!
- Laziness
- Understanding
Laziness in most people is a B**** that just won’t quit, And for some of you it will never go away, but for those that have the drive and determination to make something out of their craft, it can be easy enough to shift.
Understanding is one complicated beast to get your head around, If you’re great at music, that’s brilliant, you’ve already done half the work to make yourself a marketable artist, Now it’s time to pour that same enthusiasm into learning a new set of skills to get your name out there.
Stage one in improving your mindset is mastering one out of these two fundamentals, Can you guess which one?
Stage two is mustering the balls to try something new! Learn one channel before tackling them all, being a great musician is not enough these days!
You have plenty of channels to communicate with your audience at your disposal, the easiest of which in my experience tend to be:
- Your Website
- Youtube
Choose one channel and master it! it’s always best to have a website to be seen as more of a professional entity but building your brand on one of these platforms is just a matter of always showing up every day with fresh content.
There is a common misconception that to make any business profitable (not just a music business) you need to be able to attract millions of people to earn a livable income.
That couldn’t be any further from the truth! while it may be true that the bigger the audience the better, half of the world doesn’t need to know you even exist to make money.
All you really need is a small tribe of people that love what you do! Aim for 1000 true fans and monetize them, the basics are simple, improve the way you think of marketing and you’ll communicate with your audience in a much more effective way.
How to Collect Emails & Grow Your Fanbase
One of the first ways I started to make money from music is by building an email list of adoring fans (that’s you right?)
More often than not I’ve heard musicians say that paying for a monthly subscription for an email provider isn’t worth it because they don’t have enough fans or a big enough following yet.
I don’t believe its harsh to say that I was very close to punching a few of those people square in the face, An email marketing list is not something you do once you get to a certain point in your music career, email marketing is one of the most effective and profitable ways to communicate with your fanbase of engaged individuals, If an email marketing provider is charging you $49 a month, all you have to do is make 2 or 3 sales of merch a month to cover the costs, it doesn’t seem so scary when you think of it that way does it?
Collecting email addresses is just as easy for musicians as it is for any other kind of business using a simple formula of lead magnets and landing pages.
What are lead magnets?
Using Lead Magnets is an inbound marketing technique that ultimately means giving someone something for free (a.k.a The Magnet) in exchange for their email.
So if you’re a Musician or Music Producer, this could be anything ranging from a free song, beat, or drum pack, the more imaginative you are the better.
If you’re playing shows an easy way to collect emails is to set up a tablet on your merch stand and display a landing page allowing show attendees to enter their email if they enjoyed the show, The goal later being to follow up with them and updating them with information on what you’re up to.
What does a landing page look like?
Landing pages shouldn’t be over the top or complicated, keeping them simple with a big title is all you need, pretty landing pages are fine but most will tell you that ugly landing pages tend to convert a hell of a lot better, keep distractions to a minimum and let people know what they’re signing up for.
If you smashed the show, fans will flock like eagles to your merch stand begging for a copy of your album buy a shirt, and give you their email.
The great thing about spreading your name, in the beginning, is that there is no need to hard-sell anyone anything, concentrate on the music, and put quality stuff out regularly.
Your true fans of what you do will buy like it’s their religion! and they’re the only people you want to focus on.
Recommended Email Marketing Providers
Building A Brand With Youtube
Building a Brand using Youtube is both for me one of the most fun and easiest ways to reach new audiences and grow your music business, setting up a channel is easy and I won’t get into that here, now go ahead and crack on with that!
If you do video’s outside of the realm of just music or beats, you have the opportunity to get found easier by keyword optimizing your videos, As a music producer you could choose to do Music Production Tutorials in your chosen DAW, And if you’re a Guitarist, show others how to play!
Putting yourself out there as an educator is one of the easiest ways to gain a loyal subscriber base that goes insane for your content!
Ultimately the goal here is to earn subs, the more subs you pick up the better.
Getting people to subscribe to your channel is actually a lot easier than most make it out to be. If you stick to using a checklist-style formula every time you do a video and are putting stuff out on a regular basis it will pick a lot faster than you think.
The Youtube Video Optimization Checklist
- Conduct In-depth Keyword Research For Your Given Topic (Learn More)
- Decide What Your Primary Keyword Will Be!
- Give Your Video A Keyword Optimised Title
- Make The Video
- Export The Video And Name it The Title of Your Video
- Upload to Youtube
- List as Many Alternative And Descriptive Keywords for Your Video Title
- Use The Keywords In The List As Your Video tags (Learn More)
- Write A Long Form Video Description
- Stay Consistent!
Take that exact process and do it multiple times per week for a year and I guarantee you that your channel will grow!
One of the biggest goals when growing a Youtube Channel is not just to get your videos ranked, but to also aim for them to get shown in the suggested box.
As you’ll see above 30% of my views for the Controller Assignments videos have been because people have found it in the Youtube suggestions box, Achieving this is just a matter of being consistent, uploading regularly, and sticking to the checklist.
The more consistent you are with uploading videos of any kind, the Youtube algorithm then begins to see you as an authority and then actually promoted you for free! and when you have passed the monetization policy you will also be able to profit from AdSense revenue.
By releasing videos that are educational and optimized, your following will grow in a very natural way, the more people that discover your educational content will be a lot more willing to also view your music videos and become a fan.
How are you growing your music business? If there is anything you would add to this list, drop it in the comments below.
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With 17 Years music production experience, George Matthews is the CEO of Your Local Musician, he also makes music under the name Grimmm and releases Lo-fi music.
