Six Techniques to Pursue Success in Music Marketing and Promotion
Every artist embodies uniqueness, from their musical output to their sense of style, every artist is on a journey to tell their story. Every decision they make from what their next single is to what they choose to wear for their next press interview is all made in pursuit of marketing themselves to successfully communicate their perspective of the world to those listening. Seth Combs, who helped launch Beats by Dre and served as CMO of Sessions Live, educates artists stating, "It's your ability between songs to connect, to interact with fans, that will truly transform your career. Let the fan fall in love with you, because that's where the true connection happens." For emerging artists to achieve this art of storytelling, they must map out how they want to communicate with their audience and pave a path to ensure that music reaches their fan base.
There are obvious ways to get your music heard, from social media to independent playlist curators, but how do you approach music marketing from a strategic perspective? While there's no exact technique for music marketing that guarantees optimal success, artists should consider these six music marketing strategies and tips from the music industry's connoisseurs as they strategize how to release their forthcoming music.
Put Your Music First
Understand Your Market Place
Recognize Your Strengths
Set Goals For Yourself
Use Your Creativity
Engage Your Audience
1. Put Your Music First
Don't sacrifice your music for stream counts. All successful marketing has one thing in common: authenticity. When you have something authentic and genuine to communicate with your audience, the probability of long-term success is that much higher. Instant success in a music career doesn't always equate to the ideal situation it is presumed to be.
Distinguish your craft, devote to your craft, and then start to prepare how to get your music discovered.
Tips:
"You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff." - Quincy Jones
" I think the hardest thing to overcome is judging yourself and being your own worst critic." - Nile Rodgers
"Anytime I see an artist worried about how their music will be received, [I say] they should continue to create — and not let any success or failure trip you up." - Matt McGreevey, General Manager, at Epitaph Records/ANTI
2. Understand Your Market Place
When you're prepared to get your music discovered, determining what markets will be most effective for your music and how to position yourself as an artist will be vital in developing the right music marketing strategies.
Luckily, the digital era has provided us with massive amounts of data that artists can leverage for their benefit. Platform-owned tools, such as Spotify for Artists, give artists the ability to develop market intelligence by providing data analytics collected from users streaming their music. Artists can understand who their fan base might be and how they compare to other similar artists. This insight creates a window of opportunity for an artist to model their music marketing strategies after neighboring artists who have previously been successful in their approach to promoting and marketing their music.
Tips:
"How do I know that this song is really sticking? From the moment I put this song into rotation to now, how fast did it grow? Velocity metrics, or how quickly it [the song] grew, that KPI [Key Performance Indicator] is so much more important than total streams. Eventually, if you're an artist and you release a song, it will get to a million streams. It might take you a million years, but eventually, it will get there. But if you can get to a million streams from zero faster than Artist B, then obviously Artist A is much more influential." - Jackson Bull, former Program Director at SiriusXM
"Of course, there are many ways to slice and dice artist performance, but there is near universal consensus on some general, undeniably good indicators for artists' success. Using those indicators to identify a "best case" scenario, we can then compare all artists on a scale of how close they got to the "best" artist according to today's stats. We concluded that a hypothetical best case scenario for performer success is exemplified by…. Broadest exposure to audiences.… Healthy fan engagement.… Success across multiple platforms.… Having longevity with audiences, rather than just being a flash in the pan: While we want to catch viral sensations as they're happening, the best artists don't just have a lucky hit and then fade into obscurity. They leverage that hit's momentum to keep producing, keep engaging, and keep growing." - Josh Hayes, former Data Scientist at Chartmetric
3. Recognize Your Strengths
Know where to put most of your energy and where to back off. Once you can determine the KPI’s that are most important to neighboring artists, you should understand your strengths and your potential downfalls to decide where to invest more of yourself in your music marketing strategy.
Tip:
"On the management side of my work, it's [data] largely considered with touring, looking at markets where a specific song, sometimes, or an artist as a whole, really resonates…. I've mostly used that data to map out tours, to route tours to cities that make the most sense based on listeners. Also with age groups, deciding whether or not to set your show as all ages, 18+, or 21+. That affects the deals that you have to strike with buyers in each market." - Ross Nicol, Founder of Off Season Creative
"Know your value. Whether it's an engaged audience on TikTok, lots of active listeners on Apple Music, or a synch on a popular TV series. Know where your value lies and use it to your advantage. It's possible to share this as information, instead of 'bragging.' If a DSP sees you being supported, they are more likely to listen and consider adding you to their programming as well." - Mike Warner, Artist and Label Relations at Chartmetric
4. Set Goals For Yourself
Artists must define their objectives and then set measurable benchmarks to determine if they're moving towards or away from their goals. Artists should establish goals that incorporate all of the SMART goal criteria (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely) to provide a sense of direction and help clarify where they should be focusing their efforts. Once an artist knows their goals, they can begin to incorporate data into their decision making. This month that might mean growing your listeners by 10 percent. The next month that might translate to 40K more streams than the month before.
Tip:
Start small, and don't skip steps. "It's happened a lot where an artist is streaming super super well, but nobody wants to go see them at a show … which goes a lot more into the touring strategy than it says about the artist…. It speaks a lot to the agents and the strategy that they've developed through intuition and trial and error…. When you have an artist like that, it's really important to start small: "Don't skip steps." There are important venues that you don't want to skip, because if you play there and it's small, first of all, you get touring experience … and you get to really hone your live performance and figure out what you and an audience look like together. And then if that sells well, you can kind of graduate to the next sized room…. So, it's important to not skip those steps, and in those ways, you can kind of not have the experience of being a wildly successful streaming artist and then not being able to sell a ticket." - Diana Gregmore, Business Intelligence Analyst at Paradigm Talent Agency
5. Use Your Creativity
Ensure you alter your music marketing strategy to fit your music and not the other way around. You should never have to change your music to meet the needs of an album campaign. After all, music marketing is essentially an extension of the narrative you are trying to communicate to fans. Let your individualism shine through and utilize creativity to reinforce your story to your audience.
Tip:
"Right when I got to Mom + Pop, we were diving into the Courtney Barnett campaign, the 'Tell Me How You Really Feel' campaign. That was probably one of the coolest uses of data and email captures…. She basically started out her campaign with a splash page on her website that was just like, 'Tell me how you really feel'…. Some people would write, 'I feel sad today, or I feel happy'… but then some people would go super in-depth and write paragraphs…. Afterwards, we took all of that data, we took all of those emails and all of the responses and built our campaign around those responses." - Elliot Althoff, Associate Manager of Digital Strategy at Republic Records and former Digital Marketing Coordinator at Mom + Pop Music
6. Engage Your Audience
Show your fans you care! When your music marketing strategy prioritizes direct communication with your fans over self-promotion, your fans will feel more valued and, in return, be willing to follow and share your music with others. The more engaged your audience is with your music, the more long term monetary success you will receive. Whether it's taking the time to reply to fans' comments on Instagram or hosting a live Q&A every week, fans will take notice, which will allow you to begin fostering a relationship with your audience. Establish a tight-knit community with the audience you already have and then develop ways to establish them in other places.
Tip:
"If you have a bunch of fake followers that don't interact with your content, then you obliterate your engagement rate, and your engagement rate is probably the most valuable asset you have on your social media platforms…. [My engagement rate] goes from 7 percent on an average day to 20-25 percent if I'm doing something super dope. For a male social media account that's not half-naked all the time, that's a big deal to me…. I don't want to look poppin'…. I want to be poppin'!" - Call Me Ace, Billboard Charting Rapper and Global Program Manager at YouTube