I was just curious about how others here are promoting their music online. Us grassroots independent guys.
Im in the process of making social media accounts on the usuals, FB, IG, Snap, Twitter, YouTube, Soundcloud to cross-promote my music.
Do any of you use an aggregator to blast all your feeds at the same time? I was thinking I could create many posts beforehand for the feeds and then time them to post in order, one or two a day to the social feeds. Some automation to help make it easier. I dont want to spam peoples feeds, just some humor or memes to get a laugh once or twice a day between the track releases.
Im new to this and have no idea how to really do this, besides a couple youtube vids I watched.
Whats up with the genre specific channels and blogs on youtube? After doing some investigating and reading up, It seems a majority of them promise artists a part of the haul they get from ads but never like to pay up.
Im not too worried about selling on Spotify or other services just yet. Just want to get out there first and build up a fanbase. In fact Ill give all my music away if I can land some paying gigs.
I was just wondering who else here does this and if they would be nice enough to share their marketing methods to help me from making beginner mistakes and wasting time.
Im lost.

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2017

https://www.jamendo.com/user/6048116/neelps-sevals-fo-noitareneg-wen-a-dnuos-eht-edih

 

In my experience, if you really want to own your social media it's all about authenticity. Soundcloud and YouTube are my main mediums to interact with my audience, and where I get the most resonance from. The resonance on SoundCloud decreased A LOT since they got rid of the groups. It really is a fraction now from what it was before. I maybe got some hundred new followers per month before the change, now it's ten or so. Youtube is great because there is just the biggest audience, plus I do some tutorials or deconstruct my own songs and show people how I do it from time to time, which is a great way for me to start a dialogue and gain true, die-hard fans. Facebook has lost a lot of traction and since we as artists are treated the same way by facebook as if we were a corporation, it's lost a lot of attractiveness to me. The thing with facebook is that you have to pay to promote your posts so they make their way into your fans' timelines, which is a lousy stinking rip-off imho. I'm an independant artist with under 10k fans on facebook (which is NOTHING) and am treated the same way as Nike or Samsung. So, to talk in numbers, my (non-promoted) posts end up in the timeline of 3-10% of my fans. With facebook video, it's a whole different story. Facebook wants to become the #1 social medium in every area, and since they introduced video, they feature it very prominently. So if I post a video to facebook (and that means hosting it there, not linking to a youtube video), the reach is up to 90% of my fans.
Twitter, Instagram, snapchat are irrelevant to me. Yes, I keep on reading IG and snap are where the fans go nowadays but it has zero meaning to me and my daily life so skipping it alltogether is the better option than trying to be cool and hop on the hype train while in reality you only appear desperate and artifical. As an artist, authenticity is what your real fans value and there is no way faking that.

While it is true that it's best to have some kind of constant flow of content, it's also true that if you don't have to say something remotely meaningful, you best don't say anything at all. It apears that it's best practice to post random crap every other hour to snapchat or instagram, from your breakfast to your number two, but if that's not you, don't try to pick that up - remember: authenticity. There are periods where a lot is happening and you have a lot to talk about, and there are slow periods where you only post once a week or every other week to show you're still alive.
I don't use social dashboards. I tried them but the truth is that I really don't need to blast concerted social media campaigns. If I have a release upcoming I make a pre-dated posting on facebook, and that's about it.

You mean for premiering your release or stuff like that? Sure, that's a great way to get some publicity but tbh it's mostly a quid pro quo. Most blogs hope for your release to bring traffic from your fans to their site/channel/blog, and yes, some if not most require you to at least whitelist them via content-id (youtube) so they can monetize your music (show ads for which they get paid). Working with blogs had almost no impact for me in terms of plays or hits or exposure but it's great to have a review from e.g. the rolling stone you can quote from.

Post your music to spotify from day one. Ideally, you have your complete catalog at spotify. The more the better.
From my experience, you don't build a fanbase virtually. As I said earlier, I have sub 10k "fans", but at least the number is in the thousands. That sounds much but truth to be told, that doesn't mean my gigs sell out because I have thousands of fans. They are spread around the world and have in fact very little impact on my commercial success or failure.
Start to build your loyal following in your local area and then spread your wings from there.

Free resources that offer incredible value to me are:
DIY Musician Podcast
Ari's Take and his book (ok the book is not free)
Those resources aim generally for the independant rock etc. artist but most tips can be extrapolated to electronic music. Not all of them, but most.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 20, 2017