What’s the best way to market your music? It's a great question because you truly have to market yourself to stand out in today's competitive musical landscape. But luckily, marketing yourself doesn’t have to be that hard.

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Follow these seven ways to market your music, and you have a solid foundation of getting new fans, listeners, and delighted followers that will listen and share your music with their friends, mom — and everyone in between.

Let’s dive in.

1. Get Your Music Out There

The first and perhaps most obvious way to market your music is getting your music out there to listeners and new, potential fans. Naturally, there are a thousand different ways to get your music out there.

But apart from standing on the street and handing out demo USB sticks, one of the best ways is engaging with communities, fans, and artists.

Be where your fans hang out. Check out dubstep groups on Facebook and share your music if you make dubstep music. Check out Reddit communities. Interact with other people, make new friends, and share your music when appropriate.

2. Engage With Your Fans

Engaging with your fans is huge. If you ever got a reply from your favorite artist on Instagram or got a like on one of your post comments, you know the impact it can have. It makes you happy, and it makes you connect to the artist even more.

So, wherever you are, answer direct messages, reply to comments, reach out and thank them for their engagement. Engaging with your fans is huge when it comes to marketing your music. And, it’s a lot more effective building a relationship with your current fans than finding new ones.

3. Play Live

Playing live opens the door to many new possibilities. First off, it exposes your music to new people in the best possible setting. People will be dancing, perhaps getting their drink on, and listening to your latest banger in huge club speakers. What more can you ask for?

And don't forget the pre and post-gig opportunities to connect with people and your new fans. Talking to people and telling them you will play later in the evening gets them interested in you and gives them a face to your music they will later hear.

4. Collaborate With Creators

A really effective way to market your music is by collaborating with other creators, such as artists, vocalists, and instrumentalists.

Let’s say you connect with a singer about featuring their vocals in your new track. If they have a large following and your track comes out great, they will share it with their network – which can have amazing effects.

Collaborating is indeed a great way to market your music. Word spreads around, links to your Spotify or SoundCloud get shared. Plus, getting out there and talking to people makes you more known.

Remixing other artist's music is another great way to build relationships and get more fans.

5. Create A Social Media Strategy

Social media is huge these days. Heck, you’re probably checking Instagram while reading this article. Social media is a key aspect of marketing yourself and your music for artists. But for that to work, you need a social media strategy.

Posting pictures of your dog and random stuff unrelated to music is fine, but if you truly want to make an impact with your brand, you want your artist profile to focus on your music and your image.

There’s no one way to do social media, but treating yourself like a brand is a great tip. Set up your logo, color schemes, and decide on the overall feel of your pictures and content.

If your music is gloomy, perhaps you want to post only black and white images to keep a sense of darkness and mystery. Or, if you produce tropical house music, you can give viewers images of you strolling around on beaches – or maybe a picture of yourself producing your next hit by the pool?

Also, make sure your artist biography is up to date.

6. Document Your Journey

Documenting your journey is a fantastic way to market your music. Other artists and people looking to learn music production love seeing how other producers think and do things.

When you document your music production journey, you get content for your social media channels that you can use to post interesting things consistently.

You can also start a YouTube channel and share music production tips with beginners or intermediate producers. Or do live streams of yourself producing a track from the beginning.

7. Build a community

Building a community is an awesome way to market your music. By providing a place for like-minded people and fans to discuss, share tips (or music), or hang out, you create a network of people who can potentially become your new fans. The key is building a community of people with people that might actually like your music.

Then, you can start hosting competitions, doing free releases, and marketing your new releases to your community. But make sure you don’t shove your music down their throats. Make them naturally curious about you and your music, and you have a solid chance of getting new fans of your music.

Summary

After reading these seven ways to market your music, you have a new sense of how to market your music to get new followers, listeners, and fans. An important thing to remember is consistency.

If you desire real results, you have to create a strategy and stick to it. And more importantly, when you find out what marketing strategy works best, double down on your efforts and follow that strategy.

Let’s get marketing!

Thanks for reading, and see you in the next article.

About the author Pelle Sundin is a Swedish music producer and writer, active with his chillout project PLMTRZ. He also produces psytrance. When he's not producing, he surfs, skates, and chugs coffee.

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