Most of my articles have addressed songwriting from the business to business perspective—you are creating songs or instrumentals that you want to place in film or television, or get some artist with a track record to release. For those of you who also make CDs, or at least recordings, there is also the issue of promoting your music, and yourself as an artist.

Music marketing is big time, especially online marketing, and it’s almost easier to talk about what you can’t do (for the moment) than what you can.  But we will give it a shot.

Social networking is a big step forward, as is selling (or giving away) downloads, and putting together electronic press kits to help the world know about your music. There are even online public relations services to get the word out.

If you are looking for airplay for your music, sites like www.AirPlayDirect.com are there to provide that connection.

Sometimes it is all far too much.

So let us divide these up a bit and see if any hold promise. In this article, I want to look at social networking and electronic press kits. Next time we will focus on online PR (how it works and how to use it).

SOCIAL NETWORKING

As Kavit point out in a recent article, there are some good strategies for using the various social networks to get attention. Better yet, many of them are interconnected. I put songs up on reverbnation. Whenever I post a new one, there is an announcement on my status update on twitter, myspace, facebook and, of course, reverbnation. In fact, any status update I make at revernation goes to all those places. This probably produces a certain amount of yawn inducing overlap, but it is efficient. A variation is that myspace and twitter are also now linked. All of this incestuous sounding linking is free, and fairly easy and quick to do on days when the wind is from the West and the Powers That Be are smiling. As a result, this falls into the “why not?” category of promotional activity.

Similarly, Fanbridge helps you collects fans from several social sites and provides a way to send out blanket emails to them, announcing gigs, your upcoming CD, or news from the band. (Does anyone e-mail anymore?) If your fans read emails, this is another brainless way to stay in touch. Actually the content should NOT be brainless–just the distribution method. Send out things the fans will find interesting or save the electrons. We don’t need more garbage out there. Your fans (and I) will appreciate you all the more. But inside information, or thought provoking ideas could score some points.

I should point out that Reverbnation also provides widgets you can use to collect fans, and others to  put your songs on Facebook and so on. It’s all very powerful in terms of efficient promotion.

ELECTRONIC PRESS KITS (EPK)

These started with a bang. Who could resist sending stuff out electronically? Everything you needed to know about a band, including songs and videos. But SPAM filters and the vast amount of stuff cluttering in boxes put paid to the idea.  It is just as effective to send links to songs on broadjam.com or Reverbnation. They let you send links to specific songs you have posted. It is a bit classier than sending an mp3 and doesn’t foul up the inbox.

But an EPK is an online presence, and lets you provide an information rich link in your signature line. And so, such an account, say with www.sonicbids.com or Airplay Direct, can do you some good.

All of these are useful, but not enough in and of themselves. Also, there are about a bazillion of these now; and don’t take my naming these as a recommendation as to what will work for you.

Ultimately If you want to be noticed, your music heard, you will need the market muscle of public relations. Public relations can be proactive, where these sites are reactive, and it can be targeted to a niche, genre, or just a good story.

I hear this (or something along the lines of this) quite a lot: “I launched my CD about two months ago and sales have only trickled in, it’s been nothing spectacular. What went wrong, and what can I do to promote it and get more sales?” I respond with this: “What did you do in the six months running up to your CD launch?”

The answers vary, but usually along these lines… “I set up my Myspace page and just put up a few clips”… “I haven’t really done much, we’ve been busy recording”… “I did a few gigs but haven’t really performed any of this new material”… 

I rarely hear of independent musicians who devote hours upon hours to promote and market their new music months ahead of launch and frankly, you’re losing out and leaving a lot of money on the table if you’re not. 

In order to build up a successful launch during launch day and the following week, you’ve got to build up enough buzz to get people talking about it, getting juiced and marking their calendars for your launch ready to download or buy your CD. The ultimate record launch (or re-launch) is one that generates buzz, puts you in the papers, gets your music heard on radios and takes you up the charts. This kind of ultimate record launch can only happen when you plan and then act on that plan.

Nearly every musician is so juiced about releasing a music record that for the majority of the time, they forget about how important the release is and don’t plan it. I agree that I’d love it to be this way and hope that someone else can take care of it, but as independent musicians it’s important to remind ourselves that we’re music business owners and have to also take care of the planning as well.

The question is what should you do to build your buzz. Here are four quick ideas.

1. Start a blog. A blog is a great tool to use in cultivating relationships with your fans – starting new ones on the web and continuing relationships from your gigs. See this post for more: Do I need to blog as a musician?

2. Build your mailing list. Musicians Mastermind members, my audiences and readers know what a mailing list means to me: it’s probably the best way to tell how many fans you have and how many potential sales you’ll make with your launch. For example, if you have 1,000 subscribers, you have the potential to sell 1,000 downloads. I understand that other mediums such as the radio, TV, newspapers, websites and magazines can get you to hundreds of thousands of people – but the real fans are those who’ve subscribed. 

So make the mailing list a core feature of your promotional activities. Capture their details. Ideally their name, email and if possible, their contact number. The reason you’re doing this is so that when it comes to launch time and pre-launch offers, you already have a base of people you can offer this too!

3. Play regular gigs. Book a period of lots of gigs. Grow some momentum and grow your crowds. If you also play covers, use the gigs to also throw in some originals with some promotion of upcoming gigs, free downloads and launch information. That way you can also see what people think of your new stuff too. Get a friend to come along with a camera and video your entire show. Don’t worry too much about the quality, just get it all on video.

4. Upload all your recorded gig videos to YouTube and share them. Upload songs individually. Share them at your blog, share them with people who sign up. Offer them new videos on a regular basis to keep them coming back and checking out your music. The more they hear it, the more they’ll want to hear it and then download/buy it.

These are just four ways. There are lots more, of course. What have you done in the run up to any of your launches – what worked and what didn’t work? I’m interested in hearing how this has worked for you. 

I love guerilla marketing. It’s so simple, effective, outrageous and exciting. Guerilla marketing is all about using unique low cost promotion tactics to create maximum revenue for yourself. In this article, I outline 5 different guerilla tactics for making more music sales:-

1) Make fans a musical birthday card! – Nowadays, it’s so easy to keep on track of people’s birthdays and this can even be done automatically using e-calendars and programs that act as reminders. When you ask your fan to sign up at your site, make sure you take their birthday. That way, when it comes next, you can send them an e-card. It costs nothing and it means everything. Perhaps even offer them a coupon of their next purchase.

You don’t have to do it to all your fans if you don’t want to. Maybe just to your best 50 fans who’ve purchased multiple times from your site. You will obviously have to have your database setup to include a place for your fans to give you their birth dates, but after that, at the beginning of every month simply sort out who has a birthday coming up and mail them off. Be sure to do this at least a week before the beginning of each month.

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One question I am asked quite a lot is “how is a musician supposed to do their own marketing when they haven’t got enough hours in the day and want to make music?” Although I give a selection of answers to this question when asked, in planning this article, I wanted to put them all out here because it leads nicely into what I want to write about today.

(1) If you haven’t got the big bucks to spend on a marketing firm, you can’t change that. You’ve got to do your own marketing. If you don’t market, no-one will hear of you.

(2) There’s not enough hours in the day? Ha! The truth is, you have as much time as you need. You just need to make it. Most don’t. They just spend most that time complaining.

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