Marketing Your Music
- In This Quick Guide:
- Generating Publicity
- Promoting Your Music Online
- Promoting via Nontraditional Media
Whether you’re playing live gigs or have a new album for sale, you need to make people aware of you and your music. This is what marketing is all about: promoting your music and everything you’re doing. In this guide, you’ll learn all of the ways to market yourself, from print publicity to social media marketing.
Generating Publicity
One of the most popular and effective forms of promotion is publicity. Unlike advertising, where you buy your space, publicity is all about getting key people in the media to pay attention to and mention or review your music.
How to Publicize Your Music
Publicity is typically handled by an individual publicist or public relations firm. The publicist ideally has a database of contacts within the entertainment industry, including music reviewers, arts editors, journalists, bloggers, and the like. When you have something to promote, the publicist uses all the tools at their disposal to get the word out to these key individuals. If all works well, some or all of the people contacted will give you exposure in the newspapers, magazines, blogs, websites, and such they write for or manage.
You could also obtain a list of these individuals and contact them yourself, thus saving you the expense of a freelance publicist. But you probably don’t know any of these folks firsthand, which means you’d be cold calling—which may or may not be successful. A good publicist knows many of these people personally, which means they’ll answer her calls and open her e-mails. In other words, a good publicist won’t be ignored.
Creating a Press Kit
If you do choose to do your own publicity, you need to start by preparing a press kit. This kit should include the following:
- Your CD: The finished product with full artwork, if you have it, or a pre-release version if that’s all you have.
- Track list: Include all song titles, songwriter info, artist name, and other important credits.
- Cover letter: This is your welcome to the reviewer. It should briefly introduce you and your CD, and point out (subtly) why your music is worthy of review.
- Bio: This should be a one-page background of you or your band, with information about your current CD at the very top.
- Fact sheet: Separate from everything else, this is a short bulleted list of important information culled from your bio and cover letter.
- Photograph: The typical publicity photo of you or your band. It should be an 8" × 10" black and white glossy, of course.
All the contents should be placed within an attractive, well-designed folder. And make sure that every element in your kit—including your CD—includes your e-mail address and other contact information. The worst thing in the world would be for a reviewer to like your CD but have no way to contact you for more information.
Contacting the Press
Send this press kit to key national and local reviewers, music journalists, bloggers, and the like. You can get the names with a targeted Internet search or by subscribing to CMJ.
Once you’ve sent out your press kits, wait a week or two then phone or e-mail the reviewer and ask if he received your CD. If so, ask if he’s listened to the CD yet, and if he has, ask if he plans to write about it, when the review will appear, and if you can get a copy of it (or a link to it, if it’s online).
And remember, it’s not just about getting reviews. It’s even better if you can score an interview or feature article. To that end, include any interesting information about yourself in the press release—anything that might be worthy of journalistic interest. Maybe you’re the relative of someone famous, or worked with a well-known artist on the album; if so, mention it. Try to think of anything that gives you or your music a hook that a magazine or newspaper can grab on to.
Promoting Your Music Online
A whole range of promotion is available via the Internet. That’s right, you can do lots of things online to promote your music—many of them both lower cost and more effective than traditional promotional activities. These include the following:
- E-mail: Sign up your fans to an e-mail mailing list and then send out e-mail bulletins and newsletters when you have something you want to announce, such as a new CD release, upcoming tour, and so forth.
- Website or blog: Use your website or blog to keep your fans informed of your latest news, including CD releases and tour dates. You can also use your website to promote a CD release by offering free tracks for downloading.
- Social networks: Most artists today have their own MySpace (www.myspace.com) page, which offers news, streaming music, and the like. You can also use Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Twitter (www.twitter.com) to disseminate important information about new releases, tours, and the like.
- Online publicity: Thanks to the Internet, you no longer need to send out physical press kits, instead, you can send out virtual press kits via e-mail. In addition, you need to target bloggers and online music journalists as part of your PR efforts.
- Online advertising: Internet-based advertising, especially of the pay-per-click variety, is a lot less expensive and a lot more effective than traditional print, radio, or television advertising. It’s affordable enough that even new and struggling artists can include it as part of their promotional mix.
Online promotion is well suited for the independent musician. The Internet does a good job of leveling the playing field; the little guys can do the same things online that a major label does, and in fact look more important than they might be. That’s because online promotion is also much less expensive than traditional promotion; you can reach a lot of people for little expense.
In addition, the Internet facilitates direct contact between an artist and his fans. Whether you’re talking an e-mail newsletter, blog, MySpace page, or whatever, you’re communicating directly with the people who care most about you and your music. It’s the type of one-to-one relationship that just isn’t possible with traditional media.
Promoting via Nontraditional Media
Where do people hear new music these days? Believe it or not, many listeners get exposed to new songs by hearing them in TV shows, movie soundtracks, and even television and radio commercials. That’s right, placing a song in any of these musically nontraditional media can have a big impact. In fact, this is how many bands of late have made a name for themselves.
To do this, you need to work with your music publisher to get your music considered for placement in these media. It’s not easy, and you probably won’t receive a big payment for the placement (typically a few thousand dollars), but the impact comes when listeners like what they hear and want to hear more. For this placement to be most effective, make sure you negotiate a mention of you and your music (and a link to your website) on the show or movie’s website; you want to make it easy for people to find out who’s playing that song they liked.
Using these marketing and promotion techniques you’ll have a huge fan base for your music in no time!
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Music Business by Michael Miller
