Promoting Your Music On The Web

[Richard Tracey]

YouTube, Bandcamp, revernation and twitter seem to be the most popular at the moment for promoting your music.

 

If you check SongStuff on twitter, you might find like minded people to follow and let them know about your music.

[Sreyashi Mukherjee]

21 minutes ago, HoboSage said:

http://musically.com/2017/07/07/stream-ripping-music-piracy-growing/

 

Promoting your music online via the streaming of full tracks having no audio watermarks is essentially becoming equivalent to giving MP3's of your recordings away for free so that stream-ripping app developers and stream-ripping sites can make money off your work.  Have you ever posted a track on Soundcloud publicly?  Google it, and there's a good chance you'll find it available for download on a pirate site.

 

 

I've noticed that you have pulled out your songs from Soundcloud. I guess you're migrating to bigger players (?). That question aside, how does one go for audio watermarking? Also, what are the other ways to safeguard songs from being pirated?

[Peggy]

8 minutes ago, HoboSage said:

I'm in the process of getting good mixes for my "catalog" of tunes, and then I'm putting them on my own new website (not published yet) where I'll allow streaming and sell or give away downloads.  And yes, I intend to have my picture on the site.  YIKES! LOL

Awesome project going!  Picture too?

Peggy

[Just1L]

29 minutes ago, HoboSage said:

And yes, I intend to have my picture on the site.  YIKES! LOL

 

That's a deal breaker. LOL jk

[Sreyashi Mukherjee]

1 hour ago, HoboSage said:

And yes, I intend to have my picture on the site.  YIKES! LOL

Do give out your last name, too (abracadabra!) 

[Mukti Soman]

I Think Loving Music and Spreading it though you friends and relatives and receiving same is the best way to promote

 

Like i Love the Songs of MTV Unplugged   Listen You Will Love it.

 

 

[john]

On 14/02/2018 at 11:38 AM, Mukti Soman said:

I Think Loving Music and Spreading it though you friends and relatives and receiving same is the best way to promote

 

Like i Love the Songs of MTV Unplugged   Listen You Will Love it.

 

 

 

You’d be wrong. Friends and family are NOT natural fans of your music. If anything they support your music because they love you. Your grandmother is not a regular fan of hip hop. Neither are her friends.

 

I would type more to explain but I suspect you are just here to plug your MTV links on Viacom.

[Glammerocity]

This tale might translate to the web, though might not be as useful for most people. I'll tell it anyway.

 

I worked with Big John Duncan in the 90s on a studio project. He was guitarist with punk band the Exploited, then with Goodbye Mr. McKenzie and the Blood Uncles. He had a punk band called the Gin Goblins at the time and I did a website for them. He told me they'd call The Sun and complain about this disgusting punk band in Edinburgh, which was breaking into crypts to have sex and such like. It was all nonsense but just the kind of thing the right wing press likes to get indignant about. The Sun eventually sussed it was nonsense but didn't care, it was good copy. They printed a front page story, when the band said they were going to do a Halloween gig at Gogarburn psychiatric hospital, now the site of Royal Bank of Scotland's HQ, appropriately enough.

 

When I started a band with a mate we were trying to think of names and I said it has to be short enough so the lettering is big on posters. He said what do posters matter? I said because people might not come to the gig but they will see the poster, then next time they see the poster they'll know we're getting more gigs and they'll mention us to friends, who won't have heard of us but will notice the poster next time they see it and thus a buzz is created. OK, it's a loose theory but it's all about getting your name out there - who cares if they come to the gig, as long as they feel they might've missed out on something? - and the Gin Goblins got front page national press while playing small pubs.

 

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about," from which P.T. Barnum derived his quote, "There's no such thing as bad publicity," which Brendan Behan later adapted to, "There's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary." Obviously it doesn't help if you have some secret pornstar dalliance hidden away in your past. Or does it?

 

TL;DR: Never let the truth get in the way of a good press release.

[Dejan Tachevski]

Try to get your video posted or shared by some social media page like CoverWorld , it should get you some exposure to the right audience.

CoverWorld - https://www.facebook.com/coverworldmusic/?modal=admin_todo_tour

[Just1L]

It's one thing to have your music posted throughout the myriad of venues on the web, it's an entirely different beast actually promoting it so it gets listened to.

[Louder Me]

Many ways to promote music on the web, Let's take a look at some basic strategies
Live Music Promotion. 
Use Social Media to promote the music. 
Promote your music on your website.
Reach out to Music Blogs, 
Collaborate with Other Musicians and many more.

[john]

43 minutes ago, Louder Me said:

Many ways to promote music on the web, Let's take a look at some basic strategies
Live Music Promotion. 
Use Social Media to promote the music. 
Promote your music on your website.
Reach out to Music Blogs, 
Collaborate with Other Musicians and many more.

 

What works best for you? Do you do anything special to make it work?

[john]

On 9/3/2020 at 8:33 AM, Theodore Kidd said:

I can't stress for myself how important branding is now. I usually promote my "brand" (which includes my music) daily via every social media platform that relates to what I'm doing. I've found my own styles for posting images by adding unique effects and what-not. 

 

Paid adverting really seems to be more and more of a necessity if you want to cut through the crowd as well - and it makes sense. Sometimes a paid ad campaign online can help get my music at least out to more people without having to self-promote constantly. 

 

The outside world shouldn't be neglected at all though - once Covid is over I'll be running up and down the street getting the word out (quite literally)!

Good to see you are thinking about your brand. Most indies don’t. I’ve just about finished writing up the ebook branding component for a future music marketing course, next comes video scripting! It won’t be ready as a course for a couple of months. I will have other stuff available before then, but that course deals with advertising too, particularly Facebook advertising and a whole load of other strategies, tactics and tools. It’s aimed at the professional and semiprofessional indie market. I ended up with so much info I have had to split it into two courses!
 

Advertising is by far the most effective way to reach new audience, but it is only cost effective if you have the right back end to catch and keep fans. Yes there are a load of free/guerrilla tactics, but they largely limit you to second degree contacts. Advertising allows you to reach your target audience based upon their preferences and interests.

 

What is your typical cost per lead (CPL)? Somewhere between $0.10 and $0.30? What about Cost Per Fan (paying customers)? Somewhere between $0.50 and $1.20?

 

Who do you use for your email marketing? What other tools are you using? If I can review your set up I will see what advice/suggestions I can offer to help you.

[Cody]

On 9/3/2020 at 2:33 AM, Theodore Kidd said:

The outside world shouldn't be neglected at all though - once Covid is over I'll be running up and down the street getting the word out (quite literally)!

 

The bad thing about that is, so will everyone else  hahah used to be what I was good at, while everyone was at home thinking they were gonna be the next youtube/facebook superstar, was lots of small live venue gigs to be had 🤣  Scary times indeed for anyone with music as a chosen or chosen by profession.  That's not even taking into account, the what I can only imagine will be a huge influx of new talented people that never gave it a chance.......  I'm trying to be optimistic though, and think it'll be good for music as a whole in the long run.  

[john]

1 hour ago, Theodore Kidd said:

 

Unfortunately I am still quite new and a lot is trial and error so my CPL was $.50 for one of the three ads I've run, where I share my music video on Facebook, hoping to draw attention to my latest release. Nothing has been set up to have customers purchase anything yet but that will be what I'm marketing next.

 

My latest campaign that was run via Reverbnation for my Dear music video was $0.13 CPL and I'm happy with the results for that. I saw the traction on the video go up too, without having to solely rely on self-promotion. 

 

At the moment I'm using Godaddy for my email marketing as well as Reverbnation and Bandcamp. 

 

Does it sound like I'm on the right track at all? 

 

Thanks for your time and advice. 

It’s a massive topic, so I have a few questions just to clarify your set up...

How are you running your Facebook Ads? Ad manager account? Boosted posts? Are you using image/video + text?

 

So you set up an ad that directly links to where...?  The song url on reverbnation? Your bandcamp page?

Do you have a website other than bandcamp?

 

When you say godaddy, do you just mean their standard email hosting?

 

iirc, neither Reverbnation nor Bandcamp provide a proper autoresponder (email marketing essential).

 

Have you set up a Facebook messenger bot?
 

Don’t rush out to google stuff, or least don’t rush to action on Googlings!

 

It sounds like you are saying:

 

AD -> Song Page

 

Where they can then play the song.

 

 

 

[john]

Ok. Getting a better idea now. What content management system is it? It doesn’t look like Wordpress.

 

Out of interest there is a conspicuous absence of music on your site. Create a video tab and create an embedded grid of your YouTube videos. You could do similar for your soundcloud player. If at a later point you make videos or music member only you just change how and where you feature them.

 

Boosted Facebook posts is not recommended. It’s pretty expensive and audience targeting is more limited. Look to set up a Facebook Ads Manager account:

 

https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/step-by-step-ads-manager-account

 

and associate it with your Facebook artist page. Talking if, I recommend having a page separate from your personal profile.

 

Gotta make some food. Will try and post a little more later.

[john]

5 hours ago, Theodore Kidd said:

 

I can't thank you enough for your advice man, it means a lot.

 

Sorry, what do you mean by content management system? For my emails I use the Godaddy email system that they've set up. 

 

Can't believe I haven't set up a music or video section on my site! Thanks for that man. I've created two tabs now - one for music and the other for videos. I've linked three videos with a title and brief description next to each. Should I include all of my videos? 

 

Thanks for letting me know about boosted Facebook posts. I will now use my Facebook Ads Manager account. It's been linked to my Facebook artist page. 

 

Here is my site if you'd like to see the updates. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. 

 

https://theodorekidd.com/

 

Thanks for your time and stay well.

 

 

 

Let’s move to specific topics on the marketing critique board and within the marketing challenge.

Some we can deal with some within the current challenge, others we should do in dedicated topics in the marketing critique.

 

So, as an example, let’s deal with your site within a critique topic, but as I will be looking at landing pages within the challenge we can deal with that specific aspect of sites as part of the challenge.

 

A second critique topic: your brand.

 

If you set up the two critique topics (1. Site design and content, 2. Your brand), we can go from there. Just use @john to include me in the discussion. Perhaps invite the other challenge participants to join us in those topics?

 

CMS. - Content Management System - Software used for managing your website. Adding pages, menus, blog entries etc

[prod00]

I work in marketing, mostly on social media, facebook & instagram ads, google campaigns, etc... and on my free time I have been helping promote a friend of mine who is a hip hop artist here in Mexico, he already has a few years of experience and even though I don't consider myself a hip hop fan, I really like a lot of his songs and think he's actually really good... anyway, back to my point, we have been running a lot of paid campaigns on FB and Ig, testing what works better, images, videos, no text, lyrics on them, etc. and lately we have been trying to get more attention with organic reach, and no paid ads.

 

I can offer some insights of what we have learned so far. Sadly there aren't as many insights as I would like, but hey, it's something! and if it can help you save some time or testing, that's good.

 

first of all content is key, you have to be really appealing, eye catching. We learned that normal life photos, photos that show you as a regular dude like everyone else, with a nice background usually get more likes, than a concert photo, no matter how cool the photo is, which was somehow strange for me, but what can you do?

 

when publishing videos for a song, what I can say is that, if you trust your lyrics and have some really powerful phrases in there, put the lyrics or the phrase in the video of your song, whether is a story or a feed video, adding the lyrics we thought were good, really increased or number of clicks. in this case in particular, but was also useful for creating promotional images, we used some tools to produce more professional content. I do some design, but I am in no way a pro, so tools like canva or, in our case what we used was placeit because it has a specific section just for musicians with lots of templates and designs, a lot of them free, that are quite useful. We made some images to promote gigs, but mainly we made short videos for stories and the news feed, that looked really good and gave the impression to have a lot of production, which like I said early on, eye-catching content is key.

 

Lastly, what I can say that worked well on the videos we created, was to try to have something unexpected in them, something funny or just silly, that would make people share them, and using phrases like the all-time classic "wait for it" in the copy of the post, this worked really good and got us a lot of likes and shares, but the something to keep in mind in here, is to not over do it, because it can get old really quick if you only do things like these.

 

Sorry for the long post but I really hope yo can get something out of this and it can help you have a clearer vision for what you want to achieve, and how to do it.

[john]

@Theodore Kidd did you post anything up and I missed it?

[Jack Jason]

Yo, whassup, everyone, y'all must check out my ol' school rap, am deala on yt, I do the real stuff