Do you know how to promote your band or yourself? Do you think it’s too much for a young musician to handle? You need to realize that it’s not as hard as you think. Just take concrete steps of music pr and avoid the frequent mistakes of many aspiring musicians.
A beginner musician should have a certain strategy or a plan to promote his music, band, and brand. You should be able to “sell” yourself and your music. To do that, follow the steps described below.
Promotion Steps
Come up with an original name for your band or your musical nickname. You need to be very careful about this. Your name or nickname should reflect the essence of your music and be bright and easy to remember at that. It’s not an easy task.
Invest in your music. Did you think of money? If so, you were only partly right. You should also invest your time, effort, persistence, and work. But money matters too, and you can invest it in music equipment.
Establish useful contacts. No one is saying that you can’t promote yourself successfully without connections. If you’re talented, your talent may do all the work. Still, getting to know more experienced and successful musicians and learning from their professional knowledge, subtleties, and experience is not a waste of time!
Choose your target audience. You’ve probably already decided, at least in general terms, on the style and genre of your music that you want to promote. If so, you need to understand what people like about that particular style of music and, accordingly, focus on it. Learn to anticipate the tastes of your listeners.
“Word of mouth” is the best marketing tool. Share all your tracks with your friends, acquaintances, relatives, invite them to rehearsals, or even try to get them involved in the performance of some of your songs. All this will make them talk and tell their acquaintances about you, and they, in turn, will tell their acquaintances, and so on. Once you start this promotion process, you can’t stop it.
Keep looking for new ideas. Everyone uses a different method: some have a small dictaphone at hand, some carry a notebook, and others prefer tear-off sheets. Any option will do because the main thing is to write down ideas when they come to you. Do not rely only on your memory. Write down your ideas so you can come back to them later.
Record your best composition. But keep your priorities straight, i.e., don’t focus on the quality of the recording so much as to go to a recording studio! Remember, the main thing is the song itself and how much it resonates with the listener. It will be great if your song has something technically unusual in it, like a drum solo.
Use social networks. Initially, it is there that your main audience will be. Create accounts, groups, and official pages for you and your group on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. There you will also be able to post your previously recorded song, and an unlimited number of people will listen to it.
YouTube. Record a video of you or your band playing, or create a real music video and post it on YouTube. You can get a huge amount of views there, which will give a tangible boost to the promotion of your music. You can find a lot of motivating success stories about that!
Blogs. It’s not about your blog but other people’s blogs. Music reviews, interviews, and guest blogs are good ways to gain new fans. Pay attention to blogs about musicians similar to you, ideally those on the same level as you.
Don’t Get Complacent
If you’ve become popular or your popularity begins to grow quickly or slowly but surely, the most important thing is to hold on to the position you’ve reached and keep growing. Promoting your music will not seem so complicated at this stage, compared to your main task — to grow further, which is the hardest thing in the music industry (or any industry, for that matter).
Setting Up Your Music Business
Touring, releasing music, and branding are the three main sources of income in the music industry. Each of them has a wide range of subtypes. However, now it’s important to understand how you can make money from the three main sources:
- As to touring and live performances, everything is pretty simple. It’s about getting fans to your concerts and being in touch with promoters who will get you into major festivals.
- As to releasing music, creating and recording original music can ensure you have underlying rights and performance rights, giving you the ability to publish and control your work.
- Branding requires that your image, logo, and symbols be clear and consistent with what you do, reflecting your musical mission.
Register Your Work
If you write and release your music, you should understand how performing rights societies (PRSs) raise money for artists. In the United States, ASCAP and BMI are foremost RPSs. They monitor the use of your music on the radio, television, streaming services, at events, in commercials, movies, etc. Based on that, they make payments to you — the author and publisher — according to how you have registered your works.
If you are the sole author, you get the full share of the revenue stream. If you are also the publisher (if your works are original and you release them on your label), you will receive your full share of the publication income. So make sure you register as an author and publisher. Yes, this requires some research, but it’s worth it.
Keep Moving Forward!
You have to stay the course, not deviate from it, and believe that your hard work will eventually pay off. Also, every artist must analyze and reconsider their path moving forward sooner or later. As with most businesses, you should take inventory of where you are now in your career and map out the next few years of work with your team every few years.
We hope these tips will prove useful to you in your musical journey. Good luck!
