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Promoting Music Online – Getting Started with Social Media

Posted on July 4th, 2009 in Music Promotion & Marketing, Online Marketing & Promotion, Social Media.
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First and foremost, one of the first things you should be doing in promoting your music online is making your music accessible and developing an online presence. That way people will start to know that you exist. Whether they hear your music or not is another matter. But as long as it’s available, should someone make a recommendation, they can easily find your work. Then you can focus your attention on promoting it.

A great way of doing this is by signing up for a profile page on another site, such as a social media site, where you can add samples of your music for people to listen to online. Even those social networking sites that don’t allow music uploads will prove to be useful.

Signing up with social networking sites such as MySpace or SoundClick is great for making a connection with new potential fans but large sites such as this often follow trends. They can end up becoming so huge and popular with spammers who want to take advantage of what can be gained from such exposure that people stop using it and it quickly becomes a thing of the past with only spammers remaining. I personally feel MySpace has headed this way already and wouldn’t place too much emphasis in this area unless you can see it is working for you. Having said that, MySpace should still be considered as a quick and easy way of getting your music online so you can refer people to your pages for them to hear your work.

Try to stay ahead of the game and sign up for accounts on numerous different social media sites so that should the site go down you haven’t lost all of your hard work. Not only that but this way you can also see which sites are working best for you and focus your time and attention on these.

Network with as many related people as possible. By ‘related’ I mean people that are within the same or similar industry to you. Labels, A&R, musicians, bands, local fans of that genre and so on. Make yourself known to the people that matter. Don’t just add anyone as a friend. It’s unlikely they’ll be of much help and if you’re pushing your music to them they most likely won’t be interested. Concentrate on the contacts and fans that have some kind of interest in what you do as they are most likely to actually ‘listen’ to your music and messages. Blind marketing just won’t work well.

Although I haven’t tested this myself extensively, you could try cross-selling each profile. In other words, link from one profile to another so anyone that adds your on MySpace can also find you on Facebook, SoundClick, Unsigned and so on. This way when you post a message or upload a new song or have other news you are more likely to get a response or a listen. This would also test to see which of the sites get a better response to that type of ‘news’.

This could also ensure your message still gets across and can act as a reminder if your contacts didn’t get chance to hear the song or message the first time round if they were busy or distracted.

So those are some of the basics to promoting your music online using social media sites. They are the basic – but also fundamental – steps that you will need to take if you are to start promoting your work effectively. Now your music is online you can begin working on promoting it in other ways and get your music heard more by the online mass of ears and fight through the online mass of competition.

TIP: Don’t carry out all of your work on an external site. It’s best used as point of contact only as it‘s quite an impersonal and seemingly unprofessional way of contacting industry professionals. Once you have established contact make sure you can both keep in touch outside of the place you met. In other words, make sure you always have an alternative form of contact if the worst-case scenario happens.

Some sites you may want to look into signing up with are:

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com

MySpace – http://www.myspace.com

SoundClick – http://www.soundclick.com

MP3 Unsigned – http://www.mp3unsigned.com

Twitter – http://twitter.com

Buzznet – http://www.buzznet.com

Songkick – http://www.songkick.com

Blip.fm – http://blip.fm

Last.fm – http://www.last.fm

Reverb Nation – http://www.reverbnation.com

If you have anything to add to this post in relation to social media sites and the online promotion of music then please post your comments below.

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Published by Ashley

Please note: I don't claim to have all the answers and here on my blog I can only give you ideas and suggestions from my own knowledge and experience within my own niche. Since I know very little about what you do exactly and can only cover a number of angles in each post, if you you can add anything please do so for the benefit of our reader in a comment - I'd be most grateful.

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Music Marketing UK Blog Owner
Welcome to my Music Marketing blog. I have been actively involved with online promotion for many years now, both professionally and in my spare time, and being an active musician for the best part of 9 years I felt I needed to share my knowledge and experience with those that would be most appreciative and could put it to good use.

My aim here is to combine the two areas into manageable chunks and present tips, ideas and inspiration for anyone wanting to promote their music online and offline and generally get one foot above the rest, set themselves apart from the average and achieve what they want to achieve musically. I'm hoping the information I post here can help you do just that.

Read about how I can help you market your own music.