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Be More Than a Musician…and more: Musician Marketing Strategies Worth Considering

Musician Marketing Strategies Worth Considering

All thanks to the internet, there are now endless ways to promote your music in this day and age. The variety in channels allows you to experiment and run a creativity test on yourself by trying new things, which is key to successfully promoting your music in today’s music industry. Marketing your music is essential if you want to get your name out there and actually start making money from your musical talent. Here are some channels to exploit in marketing your music:

Focus a large part of your time on Gigging

Gigging is one of the very important activities every musician should be doing, it is not only good for creating awareness for your brand but can also be monetized in different ways to help build a strong relationship with your audience. Some of the best gigs you can do are events that have other acts in your genres are also playing at. Gigging is good for gaining new fans and making money in the music industry.

Be more than a Musician

By being more than a musician, it means doing everything you can to get yourself out there and be in front of a targeted audience because this will give you more exposure for your music as possible, also do things that are not directly related to promoting yourself as a musician but will still get new targeted eyes to your music.

Reach out to Music Blogs

Promoting your music isn’t just about sharing it with your fans. If you also want to reach out to a new audience and convert them to fans, music blogs are a great way to do that. Bloggers are always looking for fresh, clean content so reaching out to them is a good way to help market yourself and your music.

Collaborate with other Musicians

Collaboration is often overlooked as an aspect of music promotion, it is a great way to get your music in front of a new group of people who follow your fan base exponentially.

Your music marketing strategy is should be something you redefine over time, so don’t get frustrated trying to get these things together as some of them may take time to come, but they will surely help.

DON’T HIND BEHIND THE MASK

A lot of people already know what you are as a musician, you should also be able to let people know what it feels like relating with you when you are not on stage performing. People should be able to tell the difference between you as a musician and living your normal daily life outside music.

How To Earn Money From Youtube

One of the major factors in the business of selling music today is the ability to generate income from your product or content via several channels. Our focus here is on ‘How you can monetize your Content on YouTube’.

Recent stats show that the number of people generating a 5-figure revenue from YouTube has gone up about 5% while those earning 6-figures have increased to over 40%. This gives YouTube bragging rights as a worthy business platform, where content creators can effectively generate and monetize their content. Here are a few ways to monetize your content on YouTube:

Independent Monetization

This is an independent channel of monetizing some aspect of your content through the ‘Partner Program’, without the inputs of a middleman. The revenue generated from your content will however be split between you and YouTube according to the stipulated rev. share. The criteria for Independent Monetization include;

Your channel must reach 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers
Google AdSense: You must have signed up to Google AdSense. This allows YouTube to pay your royalties
YouTube Monetization Settings: You must adjust your YouTube monetization settings to enable the ads you want running on your content and the type of content it should run on
Follow and Obey all YouTube Partners’ Policies patiently, while waiting to be approved

Content ID Policies

This is a digital “fingerprinting” system that YouTube content creators can use to identify and manage their COPYRIGHTED content across the YouTube platform. This ensures that your COPYRIGHTED content isn’t illegally used and monetized. If identified, the Content ID ensures that you get a royalty from such uploads. The simplest way to identify and manage your content is by working with YouTube Certified Content Aggregators (such as FREEME MUSIC of course).

YouTube Premium

This is a paid YouTube Streaming Subscription Service that provides advert-free video streaming to its customers. It offers access to music, series, and movies, all without adverts. Once again, working with a distributor allows you quickly and easily get your content on YouTube Premium as well as collect the appropriate royalties when it is available.

How To Get Playlisted On Spotify

How To Get Playlisted On Spotify

For as many that are interested in featuring on Spotify Playlist, the process just got easier and candid. The platform now allows for a public process of getting on or suggesting an unreleased song to the curators and editorial team on Spotify. Gone are the days where artists and labels have to go out of their way to pitch new releases, hunt for hidden web forms or source for email contacts to submit for opportunities..

A little while back, Spotify announced the launch of a more formal and transparent process for submission. All you need is; a ‘Spotify for Artist’ account, and you need to deliver your song (scheduled for release) to Spotify within a specific timeframe.

Hints on Song Submission for a Higher Chance:

You are eligible to submit only unreleased songs.
You are eligible to submit one unreleased song at a time; once the song is released, you can then submit another unreleased track.
It also guarantees that your Spotify followers will have the unreleased track added to their customized Release Radar playlists on Friday, should in a case where they haven’t listened to the song earlier in the week.
Songs can only be submitted on Desktop. It is NOT supported on the mobile version of Spotify for Artist.
You can only submit songs at least, seven (7) days before the song is released. It would also serve you better to submit your songs way before the seven days’ mark.
The process is free!! You need not pay for placement.

How to Submit Song(s):

Log in to Spotify for Artists on desktop, and find any unreleased music at the top of the Home or Profile tabs.
Select GET STARTED next to the release you want to submit. Or, go to Profile, right-click any unreleased music, and select Submit a Song.
Choose a song from the release to submit.
Fill out as much info about the song as possible. The more info we get; the better chance it has!

As soon as your song gets placed in a playlist, Spotify will notify you via email. Also, it’s good to keep checking the Playlists tab in your Spotify for Artists account.

How To Make Your Song More Playlist–Friendly

HOW TO MAKE YOUR SONG MORE PLAYLIST–FRIENDLY

For your song to make the listeners’ playlist, it has to be play-worthy, in that, it must satisfy the need of your listeners as well as leave them wanting more. However, getting your song to be added to the playlist isn’t just about making good music or promoting the sound through all channels, there are certain technicalities that can aid your song and make it more playlist friendly. It is along this line that we shall briefly discuss certain fundamentals to achieving this.

As an artist, you must have it in mind that your music must have playlist features i.e short and straight to the point. For instance, to make a radio playlist, certain edits are done. The process of making those ‘edits’ could be burdensome, hence, the radio stations leave the song off their playlist. Having shorter versions of the song is good, especially for radio listeners, who are not as patient to listen to the whole song. It is therefore advisable to make a song for the playlist short and straight to the point.

Before we proceed, it is important to state clearly that this is not to dissuade the creativity of artists or restrict their musical expression, what we have discussed thus far is for the sake of musical playlists, especially on the radio. It is to this that we say it is advisable to make the original version of the song before making ‘playlist edits’. Have it in mind that the edited version of the song shouldn’t be so different from the original song, just a little extraction from different parts will do.

In editing your song, you can take note of the following:

Song Length: Make sure the length of your edited song does not exceed 4 minutes. It might begin to bore your listeners after the 4-minutes mark.
Song intro & outro: Ensure this does not exceed 15 seconds. Make it captivating and exciting.
Song Structure: Be sure to communicate what the song is about with a captivating hook or vocals. Keep your listeners in the groove of what you are singing.

Also, you must ensure to grab the attention of your audience such that, they won’t be eager to skip your song. In doing this, the song must have a fantastic intro and the body of the song must captivate them to want more. Failure to do so will reduce your chances of making money from your music on music streaming platforms. Before a song is considered streamed, the listener must have listened past the 30-second mark. Anything less than the 30-second mark will mean the song wasn’t streamed, hence, reducing your chances of making money off the song.

In a nutshell, musicians should make their songs playlist-friendly. To do this, musicians should, after making the original version of their songs have edited versions of their songs. The implication of this is that it relieves the radio stations the stress of editing your song for a radio playlist as well as it is designed to capture the attention of the listeners, within the 30-second mark, on a music streaming platform.

Music Distribution 101

One of the fundamentals for music artists to get discovered and thrive digitally is through Music Distribution. It is the entry point into the digital earning space for artists. It affords artists opportunities that can be instrumental to achieving success with their music. In this article, we will be discussing all there is to know about Music Distribution.

Music distribution is the act of making music content available for public consumption. Our emphasis here is on digital. Music distribution affords listeners buy/listen/download music online. Although some platforms allow direct uploads from artists, the most lucrative way yet is to upload/distribute through a content aggregator/distributor.

A distributor/aggregator is an industry term for companies that help artists put their music on digital stores like Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, etc. The ultimate goal for digital distribution is to earn money from your music. There are a ton of distribution companies around the world and Freeme Music is at the forefront of Music Distribution and Label Services in Africa.

Most Music Streaming platforms don’t interact with artists directly, hence the need for a distributor.

There are certain benefits artists can enjoy from their distributor, apart from just the distribution of their songs. The distributor can help with editorial pitching to get marketing support from the DSPs. Some distributors also partner with specific artists on specific projects. Some even offer marketing support and cash advances. All of these largely depend on the deal on the table.

For artists to earn money from distribution, the song(s) have to be streamed or bought. The more the streams, the more the money. With playlisting services, artists have higher levels of exposure. Playlisting is a digital curation of music based on mood and quality. It aids content discovery. The competition is high and playlisting is incredibly important to have a better chance of thriving.

To get playlisted, artists have to pitch for considerations. A safe period is 14 days before the song’s release. Playlist pitch can only be submitted by music distributors, except for services like Spotify and Audiomack that allows artists to pitch directly through platform apps.

It’s also important to know that most platforms provide data for every artiste. These data show fan interaction with their music (location, age groups, genders, and time, etc). The analytics are made available to either the distributor or through the platforms’ artiste app. These insights should inform the artist’s decision when making and marketing a new release. Analytics also help artists to track, measure their growth and the impact their music is making.

You can also learn more on Music Distribution on our Freeme Academy Series here: Content Distribution, Pitching, and Analytics – Freeme Academy