3 ways to hype your music
by Vickens Moscova and Tamara Halbritter
Online marketing and social media have become a huge part of everyday life. For musicians, the World Wide Web provides the opportunity for simple, instant access to almost anything you need to promote your music. To become successful in the music industry, you must have a strong, consistent social networking presence. And to have a significant presence, you must have solid knowledge of your choices.
If you choose the right combinations of sites to share your music and information, you can have a very powerful online presence and gain popularity solely on your Web reputation.
Here are three ways to market your music online and use social media to your advantage.
1. Sell your music online.
Numerous options are out there for selling your music online. Sites like Tunecore allow you to distribute your music or album to many stores such as iTunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify and Zune. Having your music for sale online means that any time someone browses for music at any of these sites, your band’s name — your brand —may be in front of potential fans. Other good sites that allow you to sell music online are Nimbit, Apricado and BandCamp.
2. Post videos of your music.
Submitting videos of you or your band is also essential to create an online presence. Simply hearing your music will not capture the attention of typical Web browsers who need faces and images to associate with your sound.
Social media popularity can skyrocket if you can manage to be unique, humorous or outrageous. You can submit your music videos or informational videos manually through sites like Vimeo, MySpaceVideo and Daily Motion, and there are many other sites that feature music videos. If you have your own website and want to embed videos without using a service, you can use these free Flash video players: VideoJS, JW Player and Flowplayer.
3. Engage your fans through social media.
Plenty of social media sites at your disposal can help you engage fans and increase the number of people who follow your band in many different ways. You’re probably familiar with Soundcloud, Pandora and Maestro. Check out these other sites:
- Namechk can tell you if your band name (username) is available on social networks. Fans need to easily find you on the Web (and you don’t want to get into trouble for using another band’s legal name).
- Hootsuit and Tweetdeck assist in managing multiple social networks at a time.
- Social Mention keeps track of who is talking about your band or your album.
- Disrupt allows you to share your music with all of your Facebook friends.
Another way to keep fans in the loop is to email newsletters to your social media followers that talk about what your band is doing.
Want to become a household name? Start to use these marketing and social media tools to grow your online presence, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can build the hype.
