5 tips to promote your music

As an independent artist, the key is to succeed in making your music known to as many people as possible. To promote your music, we have detailed 5 essential keys: social networks, online advertising, press relations, influence and concerts. 

These techniques, if applied assiduously, will help you improve your notoriety and develop your artistic project. There is no magic here. The goal is to help you build a community of engaged fans, not just artificially inflated statistics. 

1 - Create content for social media

We know you weren't born yesterday, so you know about social media and don't need to be told to use it. But do you have a content strategy? Or are you just doing it spontaneously? 

You need to set a goal. It could be the release of a new album, for example. You determine a date and put it on a schedule. From this date, you go back to today and identify other dates, which will serve as stages in the ramping up of your communication until the album is released. 

At each stage, plan content that is consistent with what you are trying to tease. It can be the announcement of the tracklist, the release of a video, the teasing of a featuring, etc... These are communication actions, which require publishing content. Put together, these actions work as a coherent whole. It is to avoid inconsistencies - such as repeating a piece of information for example - that you must plan everything in advance. 

Remember that the most important thing on the network is to create interaction. No matter what you do, ask your audience for feedback. Think of your content in terms of the reactions it can provoke. The more interaction you have, the more the networks' algorithms will favor your content. 

 

 

2 - Advertise online

As an independent artist, you have two ways to promote yourself online, the first is the one listed just above, which is free. The second is online advertising, which is paid. These are two very distinct areas, because the first one is meant to animate a community that you have already built up, and the second one is meant to get new fans. The two are complementary. 

How do you go about it? First, set a budget. Once you know how much you can spend, all you have to do is connect to Base for music, which will allow you to generate sponsoring campaigns on social networks, but also on Spotify and YouTube. The interest of using Base for music is to benefit from an expertise that is difficult to acquire. 

In the game of sponsoring, a finely calibrated campaign is the result of many attempts. You only become relevant by trying, and trying again, and again. With Base for music, you eliminate the various testing steps, saving time and money. 

 

 

3 - Do press relation

In order for your music to be heard by new listeners, you need to multiply the contacts with your potential audience. This means that you need several types of relays. You must now generate contact points coming from other sources than you. 

This is the role of the media. They have developed an audience around different topics, bringing interesting information to a specific audience. Your goal is to first identify what type of media your audience consumes. In order for your work not to be in vain, know that you have a message to get across, and that message must reach a target, through a channel. In this case, the channel is the media. So it is important to determine which channel to use to reach the right target. 

Before contacting the media, prepare an Electronic Press Kit (EPK). This is a digital file in which you will put: your bio, links to your music, links to your social networks, as well as information about your release. Once made, send this file to the media you have identified via their website or their social networks. Be careful, the message with which you will contact these media will be very important: be clear, concise and polite. You can follow up, but not too quickly, and without insisting on it repeatedly. 

 

 

4 - Work with influencers

As we said, having a wide range of touch points with your music is essential. Just like the media, influencers are an important part of your communication strategy and it can be easier to set up than the media. 

With the media, your only way to get coverage is to send out a nice EPK and keep your fingers crossed. With influencers, you can pay to be relayed. The prices will depend on the size of their audience and their engagement rate. But it's something you can build into your budget. 

Many are still hesitant to use them as the financial aspect is so unclear. If you opt for this technique, ask the influencers to give you their statistics beforehand. You have the right to know where their community is located for example and what age group it belongs to. 

Of course, you can also ask for statistics afterwards, allowing you to gauge the impact of the operation you have set up with the influencer. 

 

 

5 - Do concerts

Promoting on the Internet is good. But be present on the ground, in contact with your public! Yes, playing concerts generates income, but it's also a way to defend your music, to transmit it to an audience that doesn't know you yet. 

For that, get closer to the concert halls around you. You can get in touch with them directly, the ideal is to reach the artistic director. Look on their website, or on Linkedin. Once it's done, do as for a media : send your EPK, and don't be too insistent : an AD receives a lot of requests. 

Otherwise you can approach local associations. If you look at the programmation, you will realize that there is a certain recurrence in the cultural associations that produce events. It is important to know that a concert hall does not produce all of its events, and leaves it up to third parties who are often more accessible than them. Identify the associations that best fit your aesthetic and approach them!