Online Music Marketing and Artist Promotion

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.