Online Music Marketing and Artist Promotion

Before you dive too deep into this post, please read Marketing Your Music Online – Step One. And as a reminder, check out the rest of my posts to get even more information about music marketing.

As an overview, I will briefly recap step one… In step one we discussed market research. It makes no sense at all to throw your music at the entire world via the Internet. We discussed a couple of methods in which to decide who your target audience is. The point that I really wanted you to take away from that post was… make sure that you are marketing your music to people online not to the Internet itself.

So… let’s move on to step two. If you want to market your music online you will, very simply, have to make your music and your message available to people who are online. This might sound like an obvious concept, but I can’t tell you how many times I have seen musicians not take advantage of the resources on the web. What am I even talking about…? Well, the Internet is made up of billions of interconnected websites. This is why we call it the web. What you or your band needs to do in order to market your music online is to be one of those websites. Now I can already hear some of you saying, defiantly, but I have a MySpace page or a FaceBook page or a ReverbNation page. I am certainly not telling you to trade those things in for a website of your own, but you just simply cannot exist on social networking sites alone. You absolutely must have both. Why? Because you need to have a place where you can control 100% of the content that your visitors are seeing.  Social networking is going to be a large part of your online presence, don’t get me wrong, but your website should most certainly be your hub online. This is where your message is detailed and delivered in the most effective way possible. This is where your message leads your visitors toward your sales funnel. This is where you can concentrate your efforts in branding yourself. Social networking is a part of this process and will be covered generally in a future post. For in depth information about how to use social networking as a musician, visit Music Success in Nine Weeks and Road Map to Social Media Success. These are the best resources I know of to really hone your social networking efforts.

I know that many of you don’t have a lot of money to spend on things like a website or hosting. Here’s the thing… of all the expenses that we incur as musicians or as humans living on this planet, it seems like hosting is a pretty reasonable value for the money you will need to put out for this. The hosting service I use is: Host Gator. They have plans starting at $4.95 per month. However, I strongly recommend that you choose the plan above that for $7.95 per month. The major difference here is the latter plan offers unlimited domain names for the same monthly price. This is very important for what you want to do. I will give you one example of why this is desirable: If your band name is “The Noisy Pieces”, you should seriously consider buying www.thenoisypieces.com, www.thenoseypieces.com, www.thenoisypeaces.com and so on. With the $7.95 per month plan you are able to put all of these domain names (and more) under the same hosting account. The point is simply, you don’t want to rely on people getting the name of your band right in order to find your site.

Why not free hosting? you ask… Well, free hosting is cool for one reason only… It’s free! I love free things with a passion and if there was a free option that I knew of that worked, I would certainly tell you about it. Here’s the deal with the free hosting… Free hosting accounts often force you to allow advertisements for whatever the hosting company chooses to appear on your site. Now if you have an indie pop band and people who visit your site see advertisements for baby diapers, this is not good. Not only does it not jive with the feeling of your band or your site or the interests of your visitors, it also offers an exit from your site to your visitors. Also not good. Unwanted advertisements are only one reason to avoid free hosting. Two other important reasons are: you don’t get to have your own domain name and it may not stay free. With free hosting your domain will look something like: www.hosting company.bandname.com – no good. You definitely want www.bandname.com (as well as variations). Also, I have heard of free hosting becoming not free. This means that you can choose to pay what they are suddenly asking you to payor you can loose your domain with them and any visitors you have coming to your site or inbound links you have won’t work. Again, no good.

So, very simply, having your own website is an absolute necessity and having that website hosted is the best way to go hands down. Again the company I use for my hosting is: Host Gator. I find it affordable, their customer service is very accessible  and I have never had any problems with the company.

I did not talk about any design suggestions for a musicians website. This feels like a topic that deserves its own post. I will go into the detail of design suggestions in a future post. The only thing that I will say now, in case any of you are wanting to jump into the design phase is: Host Gator offers basic design templates and editing software and  don’t use flash. It is slow to load (visitors hate slow websites) and the search engines can’t read it. I will expand on that in a future post.

Keep a look out for Step Three of Marketing your Music Online in a future post.

Tom Siegel

P.S. – For more information about how to put together an online music marketing strategy sign up for my newsletter at www.indieleap.com. and check out my other posts for more information about Music Marketing

As I said in a previous post (Online Music Marketing – Do It!), with a couple of simple steps you could market your own music online (without the help of a record label) and possibly make a profound impact on your desired audience. In my next few posts I will spell out some simple steps to get started with your online music marketing campaign. This post is dedicated to step one… This step is the first step in the process of marketing anything, music or otherwise. Many independent musicians don’t think like a marketing professional and furthermore do not regard their music as a product nor do they consider their audience consumers. Here’s the deal… for the purposes of this post that is exactly what we are going to do.

So… what is the first step in marketing your music online? Research. Now, maybe this seems boring, but it is extremely important. If you are planning on making any kind of impact with your music online, you first have to figure out who your audience is. There are 1,802,330,457 Internet users worldwide (26% of the global population). There is a pretty good chance that not every person on the web is a potential fan of yours. So you need to figure out the demographics of your audience. 

There are the typical demographic factors such as age, gender, race, income bracket, level of education and so on. I imagine that you can answer some of those questions off the top of your head. Here is a suggestion… At your next several gigs look around at your audience. Try to notice any of the above demographic characteristics that you didn’t immediately have an answer for. Then start to look at what they are wearing. Look for anything that they have used their sense of taste to purchase. If you can find any common threads amongst your audience that will help you imensely to market your music online. While this is a good idea for any marketing plan, this is especially crucial in marketing music online.

Let me explain why… If you were a designer of handbags and were looking to capture some of the existing handbag market, you would try to find people who are already shopping for handbags and attempt to get them to notice yours. Not to say that is easy, many designers fail in accomplishing just that. But the point is, that there are people looking for handbags online. These people are looking in a general sense (meaning just searching for any handbag) and in specific sense (searching for a particular brand or style handbag). So if you have designed a clutch, you might want to find a stream of people who are looking for a clutch style handbag and try to position your product in front of their eyes.   You are selling music. People aren’t usually on the Internet just typing into google the word music by itself. Nor are they searching for music according to style (i.e. typing “country music” or “emo” into google). People have to discover music while doing something else. The question that I am suggesting you answer here is… discovering what? Well if you notice that your audience is all wearing the same brand of jeans, or a certain baseball team’s hat, or a certain style of shoes, then you are closer to answering that question. Knowing what material things your audience spends money on is only one thing to pay attention to. The next thing to try and figure out is, in short, everything that they spend their money on. Lifestyle choices. What do they do for fun? Where do they buy their groceries? What kind of car do they drive? Do they take the bus? Do they live in houses or apartments? in the city or the country? A great method to answer as many of these questions as possible, is wise use of all of the Social Networking sites available. I will give you an overview of which social networking sites to use and a basic approach to using them in a future post. For in-depth knowledge of how to use these tools effectively visit these websites – Music Success in Nine Weeks or Road Map to Social Media Success.

So, in short, the first step in marketing your music online is to figure out who you are marketing to. Before you go through the trouble of making your music available online, crafting a marketing message, and developing a system to deliver that message you need to determine who wants to receive your message and be exposed to your music or you will just be spinning your wheels.

Keep a look out for Step Two of Marketing your Music Online in a future post.

Tom Siegel

P.S. – For more information about how to put together an online music marketing strategy sign up for my newsletter at www.indieleap.com.

Online music marketing is the name of the game these days. If you handle your music marketing yourself it is an obvious must do. Even record labels big and small have to focus intently on marketing music online. The wild and crazy thing is… you can be almost as affective marketing for your music online as the record labels can. Sure there are some things out there that just take the kind resources that a lot of independent artist just don’t have. But if you learn to leverage your social networking for marketing, blog marketing, press releases, use a good auto responder for your email list and so on, you can really turn the exposure that you have already into actual sales of your music and merchandise. You can really make an impact with your music marketing efforts online. If you don’t have a good idea of how to manage your social networking, don’t worry. You don’t have to have a gigantic budget to figure it out. Visit the following websites for great information about how to manage your Social Networking as a musician: Music Success In Nine Weeks or Road Map to Social Media Success.

Let me give an example: Friends of mine have a group called Ma Muse. They are a fantastic duet of kinda enhanced acapella. People love them. They sell a bunch of CDs at their shows. Finally they put together a website and started selling their music online. Without doing a thing to market that website, they sell CDs to people all over the U.S. I purchased their CD online myself. One day while talking to my friend on the phone I was amazed to find out that Ma Muse had released a new album. I asked her why I didn’t get an email letting me know about the new CD. Having made a purchase online, I had to give my email address. She said “hmmm… we are just starting to put together an email list.” I asked if the people who had already bought their first CD were on that list and she told me “No, that’s funny isn’t it? We have just been collecting names and emails at our concerts.” To this I said “ludicrous!! I have already parted with my money because I like your music. I am a prime candidate to receive any marketing message that you send out.” The point here is that my friend could possibly double her sales if she takes a couple of small steps to set up an online music marketing strategy.

Online music marketing is a learned skill and one needs to put together a system. There are a bunch of different tactics out there, but the most important thing is to devise an online music marketing strategy comprised of several tactics that make sense given the demographics of your audience. For more information about how to put together an online music marketing strategy sign up for my newsletter at www.indieleap.com.