Being an artist is much more than just making music and the promo of your art is and will always be a big part of your craft. While some prefer to neglect it, actively promoting your art will only help you out with your career.
4 THOUGHTS FROM ME
1. Make content that relates to your music but is not only about your music. Instead of making a post with only the cover of your next song, make a video calling out people to listen to your song or post a photo of yourself with a smile on your face with the cover in the background. Or, if you’ve just played a gig, post a video of you playing your song live or a photo of your gig with the song in the background. The likelihood of someone clicking on a photo from you on Instagram is much bigger than clicking on a cover photo or video. Therefore, always prefer posts that show yourself as these tend to get more support, and include your music in the video/photo to promote it.
2. Build a fan mailing list and promote your music with it. Enamour, a famous producer that has released on Anjunadeep and many other labels, emails all his subscribers when new music is out and that they should check it out, and so does Above & Beyond. Not everyone will listen to it right away, but you’re making it easier for them to listen and letting them know there’s new music out there. For this to be effective, first you need people to sign up, and the easiest way is to create an incentive for them to sign up. For example, you can trade a free download for their email, or a sneak peek of a new song, or 15 min with you on Skype, etc. Once you have their emails, make sure to email them with relevant content from you and this list can become really useful to promote your new songs, live shows, live streams, etc.
3. Reach out to Youtube Channels, Spotify & Apple Music Playlists owners and push your music to them. It’s impossible these days to ignore media platforms like Spotify or Youtube when promoting your song, and we all want to get on Spotify’s editorial playlists, but there are also HUGE user-owned playlists out there that can help you promote your music. The more people listening to your music, the more Spotify’s algorithm will be watching you, but even if not, it’s more people listening to your tunes and discovering your art. Therefore, list user-owned playlists with artists you like and try to find the owner of these playlist. Then, send an email or go to SubmitHub and pitch your songs to playlists with it!
4. Reach out to DJs by sending your song directly to them for radio show support. If your song is played by Armin Van Buuren on ‘A State of Trance’, not only will you receive massive support from people who listen to that podcast live and can start following you, but you’ll also be on their Spotify playlist, which will give you 50-100k plays, and that applies to many other radio shows as well. Therefore, as soon as you can, make sure to build your own email promo list so you don’t depend on labels to get your song supported by other DJs. This not only can open doors to relationships with other artists who support you and lead to collabs, but also get your music played in radio shows or huge festivals (this happened to me when Knife Party played my song at Ultra Music Festival Korea due to my email).
2 QUESTIONS FOR YOU
To be able to promote your music effectively, you must know a few things:
1. Who is your target audience? If you don’t know this, you might be posting content that your followers don’t even like.
2. What kind of content is your target audience looking for? Try to understand what content works best for you by testing it. Post one video with one type of content, and then one with different content, and focus on the ones that perform better.
