Category: How-To

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A Step-By-Step Plan To Market Your Music And Grow Your Fan-Base

 

The objectives of this music marketing plan are:

  1. Reach 1000s of non-fans
  2. Convert a percentage of those people into fans
  3. Grow your email list

 

***PRE-RELEASE PREPARATION***

Being fully prepared to drop a new project is essential to its success. It’s better to take the time making every possible detail of your project as perfect as it can be than it is to take the time wondering what you could have done better. Remember, proper preparation prevents poor performance.

 

If you can say yes to all of these questions, then you are ready to go. If just one answer is “no”, you should highly consider delaying your release until your team is fully prepared.

  • Have ALL songs been mixed and mastered?
  • Has track-list been completed?
  • Is album cover finalized?
  • Has 1 single been chosen?
  • Is single cover done?
  • Has two outlets (blogs, Radio Stations, etc.) been chosen and confirmed?
  • Has 1 music video been completed or close to completion?
  • Has music distribution platform(s) been chosen? (NoiseTrade, Itunes, BandCamp, VibeDeck)
  • Has all promotional material been designed and approved??

***PRE-RELEASE TASKS***

 

TASK 1: RECRUIT AT LEAST TEN DEDICATED PEOPLE TO JOIN YOUR DIGITAL PROMO TEAM.

  • You can use Facebook groups as the medium to communicate with everyone.
  • Only add people to your promo team who are willing to be dedicated to your cause for at least 30 days.
  • When asking potential recruits, emphasize the fact that their tasks will be as simple as posting and sharing content on social media once every other day.

 

TASK 2. DESIGN MARKETING COLLATERAL FOR WEB AND PRINT.

  • Create 1000x1000px album and single covers
    • This will be distributed to your digital street team to add as their profile picture on Twitter and Facebook.
  • Create a 800x600px digital flyer depicting you, your album cover, and your website
    • This will be used for creating a Facebook ad.
  • 100 8.5×11” (cheapest) or 11×17” flyers depicting you, your website and announcing your album release.
    • This will be used to post around your city at high traffic establishments

 

TASK 3. BUY YOUR DOMAIN NAME!

  • Use Google domains or GoDaddy to buy your domain name.
  • If you don’t have the time or budget to invest in a full blown website, that’s fine, but make sure you at least own a domain name.
  • If you don’t have a dedicated website, forward your domain to the platform you plan on using to release your album. 

 

TASK 4. CHOOSE TWO(2) OUTLETS TO PREMIERE YOUR SINGLE AND MUSIC VIDEO ON

  • The idea behind premiering your single and music video via third party is to gain access to a new audience.
  • The outlets you choose to premiere your music on will also benefit, because you’ll be sending your existing fan-base to their website. Be sure to emphasize that when you’re reaching out.

 

TASK 5. CHOOSE THE BEST PLATFORM TO DISTRIBUTE YOUR ALBUM

  • We recommend that you use NoiseTrade.com. It’ll allow you to build an email list while also giving your fans the option to tip you. Trust us, it works!
  • The best strategy is to use SoundCloud in order to let people listen to your tracks, but add your NoiseTrade link to the download section. This way when someone goes to download your song/album they’ll be forwarded to your NoiseTrade account where they will have to input their email address in order to get the song.

 

TASK 6. CHOOSE YOUR RELEASE DATE (WISELY)

  • Every task contained in this music marketing plan is centered around the date you plan on releasing your album or mixtape.
  • We highly suggest you wait until you have EVERYTHING finalized before you choose a release date. We’ve seen countless artists announce their release date and then push it back, because they were still waiting on tracks to get mixed, the cover design to be revised and whatever else.
  • Trust us, in the long run, it’ll be worth the wait knowing you have a complete project ready to be delivered.

 

TASK 7. CHOOSE A SINGLE AND SHOOT A MUSIC VIDEO

  • You can release two singles if you want, but we recommend just releasing one in order to reduce the amount of time your fans have to wait for the full project.
  • It’s very important that you pick a song that is going to appeal to the masses.
  • This song is what you’re going to be sending to complete strangers (blogs, radio stations, etc.) so make sure it’s one of the best songs you’ve ever made, because it’ll be a determining factor of whether or not these music blogs and radio stations decide to feature you.

 

TASK 8. CREATE A MAILCHIMP ACCOUNT AND DOWNLOAD THE APP

  • If you don’t already have an email list, you need to start one!
  • Emails are a big deal, because they allow you to have constant and immediate contact with your fans.
  • Create a subscription form on MailChimp that asks for an email and zip code.
  • mailchimp.com
  • Mail Chimp App: https://goo.gl/JyPI13 or https://goo.gl/d2rBFt
  • If you don’t have a website to embed the form, you can just send fans a link to your subscribe form.

 

***PROMOTIONAL TIMELINE***

 

 

WEEK 1: DROP ALBUM COVER AND ANNOUNCE RELEASE DATE

 

Date: __________

Wk1 Goal: 50 EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS

 

Task 1: Ask promo team members to change their profile pics to album cover for exactly 7 days (Longer if they’re really committed to helping you).

Task 2: Start promoting appropriate marketing collateral across all channels.  Include the link to your Mailchimp form. You can use Google URL Shortener to create a shortlink.

Task 3: Pay $10 to promote marketing collateral on Facebook. Make sure you target people in your locale and include the link to your MailChimp form.
Notes: Your campaign copy can read something like, “My album drops on December 5th, if you want to be the first to hear the first single when it drops, Subscribe to my newsletter!”

 

WEEK 2: PREMIERE SINGLE VIA 3rd PARTY


Date: ____________
Outlet: ____________________

Wk2 Goal: 50 EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS
Wk2 Goal: GET SINGLE FEATURED ON 10 DIFFERENT MUSIC BLOGS
Task 1: upload song to noisetrade.

Task 2: upload song to soundcloud and change download link to the noisetrade link.

Task 3: send outlet embed code for soundcloud.

Task 5: send the outlet link to email subscribers
Task 6: Post the link to the outlet on social media every day for 3 days. Your promo digital promo team should be doing this every other day.
Task 8: After 3 days start sending the soundcloud link with a short press release to 5 music blogs a day
Task 7: Pay $5 to $10 to promote/boost your post with the outlet on Facebook

 

Notes: The idea here is to reach a new audience via a 3rd party. In addition to that, by requiring people to download your song via noisetrade, theyre forced to give up an email. No free music! The effort you put into promoting your single will have a huge impact on the success (as far as downloads/purchases) of your album.

 

WEEK 3: PREMIERE MUSIC VIDEO VIA 3rd PARTY

 

Date: ______________

Outlet: __________________

Wk3 Goal: 500 VIDEO VIEWS

 

Task 1: Upload your music video to YOUR OWN Youtube or Vimeo Account.

Task 2: Include the link to either noisedtrade or soundcloud in the video description.

Task 3: Send embed code to your outlet.

Task 4: Send the link to the outlet to your email subscribers.

Task 5: Post the link to the outlet on social media for 3 days straight. Your promo team should be doing this every other day.

Task 6: After 3 days upload the music video to facebook and pay $10 to $20 boost the post. Be sure to target your ideal age groups and locations as well as include a link to download the song.

Task 7: Send your youtube or vimeo link to any blogs that posted your single

Task 8: Start sending your music video to 5 music blog sites a day.

 

Notes: If people like your music you should be seeing multiple downloads every day.

 

 

WEEK 4: RELEASE YOUR ALBUM

Date: ______________
Outlet: YourDomain.com

Wk3 Goal: 100 DOWNLOADS OR PURCHASES

 

Task 1: Upload your album to NoiseTrade or whatever your platform you decide to sell it on

Task 2: Upload album to soundcloud

Task 3: Insert the link to your website in the download section for each song.

Task 4: Embed the album widget on your website or point your domain to the album download/purchase page

Task 5: Send the soundcloud link to the blogs who previously featured your music

Task 6: Send the soundcloud link to your email subscribers.

Task 7: Post the soundcloud link along with the album cover on social media every day. Your promo team should be doing this every other day.

Task 8: Pay to promote/boost the post with the link and album cover on your Facebook fan-page

Task 9: Start sending a press release to with the soundcloud link as well as an MP3 of your single attached to 10 music blogs a day.

Task 10: Start sending a press release to with the soundcloud link as well as an MP3 of your single attached to 5 radio stations a day.

Task 11: Start hanging your promotional flyers around your city

 

Notes: If you went the extra mile promoting your single and music video you should hit your download or purchase goal with ease.

 

WEEK 5: ONE WEEK AFTER ALBUM RELEASE

Wk5 Goal: 500 DOWNLOADS OR PURCHASES

 

This stage in your album release is crucial. Most artist’s promotion efforts will tend to fizzle out and thus downloads will start to decline. This is not the end of the road, it’s only the beginning!

Think about the majority of popular artists you listen to or know about, in most cases it was someone who already had a large following that shared their music and thus acted as a catalyst. If your music is good enough, just one influential person sharing your song can be a major factoring in your career finally reaching new heights. Use this knowledge to your advantage!

 

Task: 1: Reach out to influential people on social media and ask for their email unless they provide it in their profiles. This includes writers for big music blogs and any other random person on Twitter, IG, Youtube, Facebook, etc that have a significant audience.

Task 2: Email these people and tell them you admire their work/what they do (whatever that may be). Tell them it would be a honor for them to listen to your song and let you know what they think. Be sure to include an MP3 of the single and a link to the album on soundcloud.

Task 3: Continue sending your music to music blogs and radio stations.

Task 4: Have your promo team start sending the link to your album to the people in their network, whether that be on social media or through text message.

 

Notes: As an independent artist nothing is going to be handed to you.  There’s no multimillion dollar marketing budget that will get your music in front of millions of people, but that’s not to say you can’t do it on your own.

 

 

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Make Affordable Music Videos With Rotor’s Online Music Video Creator (2020)

Rotor music video creation website

11/23/2020 – When we discovered Rotor Videos in 2015 they definitely were not “Trusted by the world’s biggest record labels” lol. They’ve come a long way businesswise. Congrats to them. We look forward to telling you about their new features.

Stay Tuned!

rotorvideos.com is an awesome new web-based application that lets artists make creative music videos for no more than $30 bucks.

If you’re getting ready to release a single, but don’t want to have to deal with the inflated costs or time associated with getting a full-production music video produced, RotorVideos.com is just for you.

All you need to get started is a handful of video clips and photos that you can shoot on your phone.

Simply login and upload your song. Once your song is uploaded you can choose a theme for your video to be produced in. You can get a better idea of what that means by checking out the music videos made with Rotor at the bottom of this article. Once you’ve picked your theme you can start uploading your videos clips and photos or you can also choose from the stock video provided by Rotor. The stock footage has old and abstract shots, but from looking at the videos, you’ll see that quite a few artists got creative with incorporating them in their videos.

Once you have selected the video and photos you want in your completed projected, you can render your video. Depending on the length of the entire project, it could take a while to render a preview, but once that is complete, you can pay about $30 and then download your music video in HD 1080p format. Standard definition is cheaper, but why bother.

So far RotorVideos.com seems to be a diamond in the rough that will likely take off once more artists (especially in the United States) catch wind of it.

If you’re spending $30 on fast food, you might as well put it towards your career and see what rotor can do for you.

Have questions? Shoot them a tweet: @RotorVideos

Check out these music videos made with RotorVideos.com

EDM

Rock

Hiphop

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5 Proven Ways To Boost Your Music Career

Being successful in the music industry in this day and age can no longer be left to chance. You can either take initiative and implement some new techniques for growing your fan-base or you can continue doing the same’ol stuff that has only gotten you as far as you are now. To help you out, we’ve put together a list of 5 things we are certain will garner you the results you’ve been vying for.

 

1. Send your music to music-blogs instead of just posting links on social media.

Time and time again we see artists drop a song or an entire project with the sole intention of relying on social media to spread it. This works only to an extent. However, the problem with this prosaic strategy is that they’re only sharing their music with the SAME people over and over. If you’re objective is to grow your fan-base, how do you expect to do that by marketing to the same group of people and through the same exact channel over and over? Artists need to submit their music to the gate keepers – the media. Which in the most simplest form are the countless music blogs and music publications across the web. These publications have an obligation to expose their audience to new and exceptional music. So take some time out of your day and compile a list of potential matches that you can submit your music to. Some will like it, some will not, but at least you made the effort. And at the end of the day you’ll have either lost time or gained a new fan.

 

2. Use social media to your advantage.

Social media is a means to connect and interact not a means to spam or act “stuck up”. We constantly see rappers spamming random people they don’t even know with the classic and oh-so annoying, “Check out my music [insert link here]” line. And when it comes to other artists, whoever is in control of the social media accounts seem to be the most introverted or arrogant people on the web. They only reply and interact with people they know and hardly ever make an attempt to interact with their fans or just random people who follow/like their accounts. Both of these examples are beyond logic or at least beyond the conventions of pragmatism. You can literally make a new fan and even a new friend by reaching out to people on social media in a practical fashion. Interact! Don’t just spam strangers with links to your music. That’s the most annoying thing you can do, in fact our social media manager is instructed to ignore those uninvited music links. And for everyone else, if you’re not famous and receiving more tweets and comments than you can handle, how do you justify not leveraging social media to your advantage? How do you justify treating fans or strangers as if they’re not worthy of a reply? Why does your band even have a social media account if you’re not going to use it to connect with potential fans? Interact with people, show some interest in what they’re interested in at the moment and maybe later on, when you need a few RTs or are selling a CD those same people will remember how you’re not just a stranger, but rather someone they know and support.

 

3. YouTube!

Justin Bieber, Karmin, August Alsina, Iggy Alzaela, Tyler Ward – those are just a few names of people whose career took off thanks to YouTube. It’s no surprise that YouTube can take an artist’s career as viral as a video of a kid drugged up after leaving the dentist. We constantly tell people to record themselves singing or rapping a cover of a popular song and upload it to YouTube. Because of the way the internet works the video is likely to get thousands of views as it pops up in search results for people looking for that particular song. Regular people who’ve put in less work than up and coming artists/musicians have literally become rich and famous all because of a simple low-quality cover song and yet here you are wondering when you’re big break will come. Take initiative! You can’t knock this strategy until you’ve actually tried it and weighed the results.

 

4. Facebook advertising.

We see tons of sponsored ads on Facebook ranging from apparel companies to upcoming events. Yet, we hardly ever see sponsored ads from musicians promoting their new songs, videos or albums. Why is that? Five dollars spent on Facebook ads can get your song or video in the eyes of 100s of people, which of those, a small percentage will actually click play. Just imagine if you spend one-hundred dollars or more. Facebook ads actually work, so why haven’t you utilized it? If your goal is to grow your fan-base, advertising on Facebook will expose your music to potentially thousands of people who some of which will like it so much that they’ll actually take the time to like your fan-page, browse your website, and maybe even sign up for your newsletter. The money you spend on Facebook advertising will pay off later down the road when those same people either buy a ticket to your next show or buy your next album.

 

5. Music publishing.

Music publishers act as a liaison between musicians/record labels and corporate America. They’re the ones who can get your song into a blockbuster film, Ford commercial or a TV show, and in effect make you thousands of dollars. When a Hollywood film is being made they set aside a budget for the music that will go along with the film. The music directors in charge of this budget will usually reach out to the music publishers they have a relationship with and let them know what kind of song(s) they’re looking for. So, finding a well connected music publisher willing to sign you to a 50/50 deal could potentially mean not only being able to pay the bills, but also reaching an audience well outside your realm of influence. If you want to find out more about music publishing read THIS.

 

 

If you have any objections or ideas please comment below, and we’ll be happy to address them.

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How To EQ Vocals Correctly

One big difference we notice between home studio recordings and professional recordings is the quality and clarity of the vocals. Not only does the quality of the microphone you’re using matter, but what also matters is cutting out the sound that the human ear can’t hear as well as adding presence to your vocals. These two videos will show you how to do just that(given that you have the basic software). Enjoy!