Thoughts on online music promotion?

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

Hey guys! Looking for some good old crowd wisdom on a very broad and subjective topic: online music promotion.

I’m about to self-release an online album using CDbaby for the distribution on all digital platforms (I’m not going to do a physical edition, at least for now). Question is, with hundreds (if not thousands) of releases around the world everyday, how do you let people know your music is out there? A quick search on google will return hundreds of music promotion service, I have no idea how to choose one or even on what platforms to invest in.

What have other users of the forum used to promote self-released albums?

Producer with a large backlog of electronic/ambient music on hand. Good way to start shopping it around?
#2

My experiences with Bandcamp are very good because your release will be shown to people who already purchased or listened to music that has a similar style. If your release sells well in the first days it will pop up in the music feed on the start page of the sub genre that you release.
Digital Distro channels like cdbaby are very crowded, it´s hard to get any attention without a campain or strategy behind the release.

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#3

But it’s OK to do both, right? As far as I can tell they seem like complementary services, since bandcamp doesn’t do distribution on other platforms like spotify, Apple music, etc and cdbaby doesn’t do distribution on bandcamp.

#4

Very interesting topic!

Have you released something before? Do you have an audience already (online / offline)? Do you have an active social media presence (Instagram)?

What’s your aim for this release?

#5
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#6

I’ve found that spamming emails with a link to my Bandcamp page along with a message to at reads “Share this with 10 people and your deepest wish will come true otherwise you’ll have 88 years bad luck” to be fairly successful.

Perhaps you’ve heard of my music, I perform under the name “Aphex Twin”

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#7

Simple questions with not so simple (and potentially crazy-sounding) answers… I have made quite some releases before, both solo and with bands, and have created a small audience over the years. But for reasons that are too long to explain here I have decide to release this new album anonymously (under this “the artist is irrelevant” pseudonym), so my audience won’t know it’s mine. Truthfully, the style is so different from what I’ve done before that I’m not sure my previous audience would be interested in it anyway.

My aim for this release is very simple: I would like that people with similar tastes in music to at least know that the album is out there and hopefully click on it once to see if they like it. I’m not interested in making money from it (I have a full time job that pays the bills) and I also won’t be playing it live, so it’s basically just sharing something that I’m proud of with the rest of the world and hoping that someone will like it.

In normal circumstances I would just put the songs online and not do much else other than showing it to friends, but for this particular album I received a grant from a local copyrights management association so I have some money too spend on promotion and I’m trying to figure out how to best use it.

#8

I hadn’t seen that before, thanks for sharing!

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#9

ahahah

Never heard of your project, sorry. But I’m a firm believer in the power of chain emails, so if everything else fails I’m all for that! :wink:

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#10

That’s unfortunate.

On an unrelated note, what’s your email?

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#11

Ok, so assuming you don’t want to build that “the artist is irrelevant” persona beyond this release, and given that your primary objective is for the music to be heard (rather than building an audience you can “manage/tap into”), probably a good platform to upload your music to would be YouTube and from there spend some of that cash on boosting the vids. Depending on what you sound like, you should be able to define targeting that’s still fairly broad which means you’d get a whole lot of value (in the form of reach and views) for your money.

Youtube is significantly cheaper than eg Instagram or even Facebook, plus FB has become so trashy, I feel it’s almost a negative thing to be seen on that platform…just my 2 cents :wink:

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#12

I wasn´t aware that this is possible on youtube! Would you mind elaborating this a bit more? I am working with youtube as a main source to build my audience but never saw an option to boost or advertise videos.

#13

It’s basically using Google Ads for Videos. If you google for YouTube Promoted Videos and scroll past all the agency offers, you should find Google’s own pages on how to go about it.

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#14

Thanks for the tip! I’ll have a look into that, I’ve never tried paid promotion on youtube before.

#15

Here are my thoughts. Make music, put it online somewhere, walk away.
Make more music.

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#16

That’s pretty solid advice and it’s basically what I’ve been doing most of my life. But like I explained on a previous reply, for this album I received a grant for recording and promotion, so I’m just trying to figure out where to best use the money in terms of promotion.

… I could of course just spend it all on new gear, though! :grinning:

#17

hey curious question. i haven’t tried to promote music, or send demos. since back in CDr days…
with so much stuff being digitial now. and with most label having (and reasonably) a no demo policy. how do people try to get their music to people who might be interested? its easy to say social media. but that depends on followers… is it all and only about generating followers? or is it just who you know know. say how fact will promote some random artist as some huge deal.

Share your tunes
#18

Have a read above :slight_smile:
There might be some other advices on this forum, have a look.