17 Best Marketing Strategies For Musicians
Looking for new ways to promote your music? Here are the best marketing strategies for musicians right now..
The music industry is saturated. There are thousands of artists and bands out there hoping to be the next big thing. With so much competition, how can anyone hope to cut through the noise and stand out?
It all comes down to having a music marketing plan.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the best music marketing strategies that musicians can use to build momentum and grow in the music business.
And don’t worry, we won’t just reiterate the same old tips you’ve read a thousand times already.
We’ll start with the basic stuff, but if you stick around, we’ll also be sharing a bunch of lesser-known music marketing strategies that the record labels don’t want you to know about.
1. Create your own artist website
First, you’re going to want to create your own band or artist website. Your website serves as the central hub for all your music marketing efforts. It’s the permanent home of your digital presence and the space through which you build your own musical identity.
Your website is also where you’ll be sending all the new fans you gain through your music marketing efforts. You can use it to host your community and monetize your audience by selling music and merch directly to fans.
Fortunately, it’s easy to create your own artist website these days. Thanks to website builders like Squarespace, anyone can knock up a website in minutes using templates and intuitive design tools—no coding required.
But for musicians, we’d recommend using Sellfy. It’s an ecommerce store builder made specifically for creators, and it’s super easy to use. You can use it to build your own site or online storefront, and use it to sell digital products like albums, songs, and subscription memberships directly to your fans.
Plus, Sellfy even has its own print-on-demand product catalog, so you can sell branded merch like band t-shirts to your audience without any external platforms.
You don’t need to purchase any stock—just upload your designs to Sellfy’s print-on-demand products and add them to your store. Sellfy will print and fulfill orders on-demand by shipping them straight to the customer once they’ve paid for the item(s).
This is especially helpful because you can start selling right away. You don’t need to invest any money up-front. No wasting money on stock you can’t sell, no hassles of storing stock or shipping it out.
2. Post engaging social media content
Social media is your bread and butter when it comes to marketing. It’s arguably the most effective digital marketing channel for musicians, and an indispensable tool when it comes to getting the word out about new releases and gigs.
Ideally, you should have social media accounts on all the major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, etc. But you might want to focus the bulk of your marketing efforts on a single social media platform to begin with.
The idea is to consistently post social media content that generates engagement, grows your organic following, and drives new fans back to your website or music. You might also want to invest in paid social media ads to reach more potential music lovers.
First, you’ll want to put together a social media marketing strategy. Figure out which social networks your fans are most likely to be active on, and how you can reach them.
Create a posting schedule and stick to it, and put together a content plan outlining what kind of content you’re going to post, e.g. behind-the-scenes videos, music snippets, viral content, themed posts, gig announcements, etc.
We’d recommend using a social media scheduling tool like Pallyy or SocialBee to plan your social strategy. You can use these tools to create a ‘content calendar’ and schedule social media posts months in advance to ensure your campaigns run like a well-oiled machine.
3. Run social contests & giveaways
Social contests and giveaways are one of the most powerful and underrated music marketing strategies. The cool thing about contests is that they have a ton of viral potential— you can use them to reach thousands of new listeners for very little effort or investment.
The idea is simple: You offer some sort of prize (e.g. concert tickets, free merchandise, a signed album, etc.) as part of a social media giveaway contest.
Then, you set it up so that users have to take some sort of action that helps promote you as an artist in order to enter.
For example, you might require users to sign up for your mailing list to enter (that way, you can email them whenever you release a new track). Or you might require entrants to follow you on social media or Spotify. You could even offer bonus entries to entrants who share the contest with their friends, which helps the contest to go viral.
At the end of the contest, you pick a winner at random. They get a prize, and you get tons of new email subscribers, followers, fans, etc. It’s a win-win.
You can use one of these social media giveaway tools to create, launch, and manage your contests. We’d recommend SweepWidget. It’s very beginner-friendly and supports a ton of entry methods – especially for Spotify and SoundCloud.
With Spotify, you can set the following entry methods:
- Follow Artist
- Follow Playlist
- Listen To A Song
With SoundCloud, you can set these entry methods:
- Follow Artist
- Like Song
- Repost Song
- Submit Song
- Listen To Song
A long with these entry methods, you’ve got the more typical entry methods for popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Related: How To Get More Spotify Followers (The Complete Guide)
4. Build an email list
Email marketing is another essential marketing channel for musicians. The idea is to use your website as a vehicle to build your email list, by creating an opt-in form and encouraging visitors to sign up for your newsletter.
Then, you can email the subscribers on your list to reinforce your relationship and turn them into lifelong fans. You can also send out email broadcasts whenever you drop a new track or album to build momentum.
You can use an email newsletter platform to create your email opt-in forms and landing pages, design and send out newsletters, and plan, automate, and manage your entire email marketing campaigns from start to finish.
We’d recommend Moosend or MailerLite. Both are affordable email marketing solutions that come with all the tools you need. MailerLite in particular has a free plan for up to 1,000 subscribers.
5. Use a music distribution service
If you want to reach more listeners, it makes sense to distribute your music as far and wide as possible. The more platforms your music is available on, the more opportunities listeners will have to discover it.
And the easiest way to make your music available across the web is to use a music distribution service. They’ll upload your music to popular online streaming services and marketplaces like Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, etc. for you to increase your discoverability and get you more exposure.
All you have to do to get started is sign up for a music distribution platform and upload your music. There are tons of these platforms out there.
Based on my research, I’d say Distrokid is the best option right now. That’s the platform I’ll be using when my next release is ready.
6. Start a YouTube channel
Starting a YouTube channel is one of the best things you can do as a musician to get your name out there. YouTube is second to none in terms of discoverability—it can help you to reach millions of listeners and start to build your own audience.
In fact, some of the biggest artists today started out on YouTube, including Justin Bieber. The superstar started out by posting home recordings to YouTube when he was just 12. A decade later, he’s one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
First, create your own YouTube channel, upload some channel art and a nice profile picture, and fill out your profile.
Then, start publishing music videos. We’d recommend uploading cover songs first to build your following (popular songs by existing artists will already get millions of searches per month, which makes it easier for listeners to discover your channel). Ideally, you should focus on trending songs that are hot right now.
Once you’ve built your following and you have plenty of subscribers, start releasing original recordings and try creating a music video or two.
7. Launch an outreach campaign
Outreach campaigns involve reaching out to influential figures in your space in order to promote your music. That might involve sending an email to a well-known music journalist or contacting bloggers that write about your genre and asking them to review your music.
You might even want to reach out to YouTube music channels and ask them to share your music with their audience. Anyone that can get more eyes on your tracks is worth hitting up.
Outreach tools can help you to find leads and reach out to them. They typically come with a bunch of features to help with prospecting, gathering contact details, sending emails, and automating your outreach efforts.
We’d recommend signing up for BuzzStream to get started. It’s a popular tool used by PR pros. Use it to find people to reach out to, send emails, schedule follow up emails, and stay organized with a CRM.
Alternatively, you can go about it the old-fashioned way and manually search the web for in