Amplifying Your Music Career: Marketing Tips for Musicians

Apr 05, 2024 11:22am

Marketing for musicians is a must if you want to make money, promote your music, and get noticed. It's all about connecting with fans, reaching a wider audience, and rocking your music career.

The Art of Marketing for Musicians

If you’re a musician and wondering “how can I make money as a musician?”, “how do I market and promote my music?” and “how do I get my music out there?” then you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve spent almost twenty years fine-tuning my marketing skills, learning new ones, and turning them in to big results, like topping sales charts, 5-figure licensing deals, and even a GRAMMY® nomination. If you’re looking for a music business coach, I’m your gal, starting with this article!

Let’s break down the term “marketing” into smaller bite-sized pieces. We will start with my favorite one (yes, I am a big dork about this stuff!)

Email Marketing For Musicians

Email is the #1 way to connect with your fans. Not just selling to them, but truly connecting with them. Giving them inside scoops. Telling your stories. Letting them be a part of your process, like helping you choose your album art.

My favorite email marketing fact: when you’re doing email correctly, you’ll be making one dollar per subscriber per month, minimum. That means that if you have a list of 1000 subscribers, you’ll be seeing a minimum of $1000 per month (or $12,000 over the year) when you’ve got your email systems set up. I suggest following my S.T.A.G.E.S. map to get going on the email path: Strategy, Technology, Awareness, Growth, Engagement, Selling.

There’s a lot to do to set up a working email machine machine that runs in the background of your music business, but it is SO worth it. If you want to learn more about email - take a look at the different email-related resources here.

Affiliate Marketing for Musicians

Oh yes, this is a thing! I also like to call this Partner Marketing because you are essentially partnering with someone else or a company to create a win-win-win: a win for you, for them, and for the future customer.

There are several ways to create a slice of your music business where other people are making you money. I’ll share my two favorites here.

The first is when you talk about products or services you love, you can find out if there’s an affiliate program where you get a unique link that you can share with other people, and when other people purchase The Thing, you get a percentage of that sale.

Amazon Associates is a great program to sign up with because it’s easy. You just create an account then when you go share a product you liked from Amazon, you select your Associate short link.

The next way to create affiliate marketing success as a musician is to cross-promote with other musicians. Tell your fans about a great new artists, and have them do the same to you, sending people to your music to buy, or your email list to sign up.

Influencer Marketing For Musicians

You don’t need to BE an influencer to get influencer-like attention. (Though if you're subscribed to The Content Drop, you may become one quickly!) You may even know a few that you can make a request to share your music. Additionally, there are several different sites (my favorite being Submit Hub) where you can put in a few bucks to submit your music to be used by influencers, bringing their crowd to you.

Benefits of trying this out include: 

    • Visibility: Reach a wider audience through influencers.
    • Credibility: Gain trust and authenticity with influencer endorsements.
    • Targeted Promotion: Focus on specific demographics and ideal fans.
    • Content Creation: Engaging and creative influencer content.
    • Social Proof: Influencer endorsements boost credibility.
    • Multi-Platform Reach: Utilize influencers on various platforms.
    • Cost-Effective: Budget-friendly marketing.
    • Engagement: Interact with fans through influencers.
    • Data Insights: Access campaign performance data.
    • Long-term Partnerships: Build enduring relationships with influencers. 

Choose influencers carefully and maintain transparency in paid partnerships for the best results.

Instagram Marketing For Musicians

Instagram is a powerful platform for musicians beyond showcasing your cute pup and your last baking triumph. It offers visual storytelling through photos and videos, fostering engagement with features like Stories and live streaming. Again, it's easy to get good at Instagram with The Content Drop (check it out!)

And like influencer marketing for musicians, you can target specific audiences with ads and boosts, which the platform makes really easy to do once you’ve connected your account to a payment system like Paypal.

Collaborations and analytics enhance reach and refine strategies. Which means I get to dork out here on the DATA! We love data - it tells us what’s working and what’s not, and then we can choose our next actions accordingly. Make sure to look at who is following you, and encourage your fans to follow you, comment, and share your posts!

TikTok Marketing For Musicians

TikTok isn’t just for the young kids anymore. There’s a good chance your next superfan is on the platform.

Here are the five best ways musicians can use TikTok to market their music and find those next superfans:

    • Create Catchy Content: Make short, authentic videos showcasing your music and personality, using trends and challenges.
    • Join TikTok Challenges: Participate in or create music-related challenges to go viral and boost song visibility.
    • Use Almost Trending Audio: the BIGGEST factor in going viral is using audio that’s just about to be trending. Look for audio that has been used between 2,000 and 10k times max and use that within three days!
    • Tease New Music: Share sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes content to create anticipation for upcoming releases.
    • Engage Your Audience: Interact with comments, host live sessions, and engage with followers to build a loyal community.
    • Utilize hashtags and appealing captions: Find hashtags that have 3-10 million uses and use the same ones to train the algorithm! Don’t have more than five to ten hashtags.

Once again, The Content Drop will provide you with current trending audio links, algorithm patterns, music promotion prompts and more. If you're serious about engaging with your fans while reducing social media overwhelm, take a peek.

Other Marketing Ideas For Musicians

Now what if we do some cross-over between the different ways to market listed above? Using Instagram to work with influencers. Inviting your email list to watch your newest TikTok (within a half hour of posting it) to help boost the algorithm. Get on IG or TikTok live with an affiliate partner to double your exposure to each other’s audiences.

The list goes on. The important thing is that you start with a clear goal around why you want to market your music AND what would a big win look like? This will help focus your attention and productivity.

Dig into my free framework, The Musician’s Success Cycle to really get clear on your next big marketing move. It’s a free mini course available here.




References

  1. The Rock Your Email List Course | Learn more
  2. The Content Drop subscription | Subscribe here
  3. Amazon’s affiliate marketing program | Learn More 
  4. Share your music on Submit Hub | Request to join