Premiering Your Music Online: What It Takes To Succeed In 2020

Premiering Your Music Online: What It Takes To Succeed In 2020

Before the quarantine or COVID-19 even hit, the landscape of premiering your music has been drastically changing. Within the last decade, the world of premiering and promoting your music has largely gone online. Artists aren’t out on the street corners hustling their mixtapes, and no one really has a CD player to listen to it with anymore. An artist’s online presence and listenership on streaming platforms is now a decidedly weighing factor in calculating their success. If you’re premiering your music online now in 2020, it’s especially important to understand how to dominate the digital sphere.

Premiering your music online isn’t necessarily an easy task, as there are so many different mediums, tools, and platforms that artists are able to utilize. More than anything, artists should be putting together digital campaigns to support their release from multiple angles. It’s all about diversifying your content and finding new avenues to present your music to fresh faces. Below are some key actions artists can take to successfully push their music online. 

Whether you hire a digital marketer or become one yourself, this role is key. No matter what level of artist you are, there is a digital marketer pushing their content. After conferring with our resident music industry marketer, Eitan Schorr, bringing a budget to the table is essential to success in his opinion. There needs to be a little bit of money that goes behind each release if you’re genuinely seeking a career in music. To quote him directly, “if you can’t find a good means to market digitally then you’re playing yourself.”

Active Social Media Accounts

It’s not even about having a solid EPK (Electronic Press Kit) anymore—it’s all about social media. Everything you would be saying in an EPK you can show with an Instagram page. Clips of your songs and videos, high-quality photos, past performances, and the ability to write out your life story in photo captions are all things you can post on Instagram. This is also where you can visibly show the engagement from your fanbase and how much effort you’re putting in daily to entertain them. 

Regularly utilizing other platforms such as Twitter, Triller, TikTok, and Snapchat to speak to your fans is also important. Even if your goal isn’t to impress the record labels and get signed, putting this amount of effort into maintaining active social media accounts will ultimately lead you to be able to monetize yourself. In this same vein, you should be creating visual content to go along with any music you release whether that’s music videos, short-form videos, motion graphics, or whatever.

Ask yourself what other interests you have that could be a visible component to your brand and invest in creating content surrounding that as well. Are you into fashion? Food? Weed? Travel? Gaming? These are all facets of your personal brand that you can create content for that will keep your fanbase diverse and paying attention when you’re premiering music online.

Running Ads

The first step of running successful ads is knowing your demographic. One of the easiest ways (I think) you can accomplish this is to head to Google Trends. Search for artists that sound similar to yourself and see where in the world people are searching for them. Ask yourself what age group you think your music speaks to the most. Find out where people are searching for artists that you align with. Then, you can then do research to find out what platforms they’re on the most. Younger audiences are going to be on platforms like TikTok, Triller, and Snapchat. Meanwhile, the older crowd is going to be on Facebook and straight-up Googling stuff. 

After knowing where to run your ads, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords, etc, you need to put money behind them. If you’re not willing to spend $500-$1000 on promoting your single or album, you’ll eventually end up spinning your wheels. Unless you truly have the next viral hit, that is. Even then, there is usually always a marketer behind pushing viral content. Consider that Drake put $30 million behind promoting his Scorpian album. 

Using digital marketing agencies such as Respect My Region offers 3rd party abilities to frame your content in front of geo-targeted audiences and ask questions that lead to engagement. I recently interviewed Respect My Region’s founder, Mitch Pfeifer, on how exactly RMR creates engaging music ads. Whether you’re doing it, or someone else with more experience, running ads is crucial to spreading your music around online.

Playlisting

Think of playlisting like a way to cut through the fat and stand out more, but not your defining path to success. There are individuals that curate playlists for Spotify that you can find on the platform if you’re crafty enough. If you’re making hip-hop music especially, playlisting can be a very useful tool to get that extra push to the forefront of peoples’ attention. Hunting down these playlist curators and sending them a DM, or finding an email address and pitching them repeatedly is a method of getting playlisting. The other method, obviously, is to pay agencies or people with connections to these playlists to gain placement. 

Connections

They always say that it’s all about who you know, and to a certain extent—it is. Building out your connections in the music industry is extremely important to find new opportunities. Whether you’re a band or a solo artist, it’s vital to seek out the members of the music industry that don’t make music. Publicists, marketers, influencers, A&Rs, and bloggers are all people that you want on your side. They have the ability to push your content through their channels and connect you to other important people. 

One of the easiest ways to seek out these people is through LinkedIn. You can search for all of the aforementioned groups of people and connect with them. Professionals in the music industry love using LinkedIn. Search for people that work at Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc, and strike up a conversation. See if they can refer you to the right person that might want to push your sound. Additionally, nobody ever wants to say this, but money talks. Building connections and fans of your music within the industry is only going to help you win in the end. Or, at the very least, find reliable outlets to further help promote your new tracks.

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