Distributing Your Music - Understanding Where and How To Find Your Airwaves
So you don’t have much of a budget but you're definitely keen to grow your fan base? It's possible, of course, but you have to get two things right... you must have high quality content and then good distribution networks to get that out there. These two things are the key to online growth.
Lets cover the first one, quickly. High quality content means putting yourself in the shoes of your followers, first and foremost. What can you do within your style that adds VALUE to their day? You need to be thinking in that way. Next, what value are you adding? It could be humour, it could be your music, it could be something topical that’s trending, it could be beauty, or it could be a high quality photo supported by a strong caption. Captions are so important these days, especially in videos. And remember, there should be plenty of your music vids in there!
Once you have that high quality product, content or piece of music, here's where you should be thinking:
- getting it shared through "meme" accounts. A meme account is an account with many followers who do not post about a particular product or brand but, rather, share other content on a particular topic or genre. Sometimes they do this for a fee (which is ALWAYS negotiable), but be wary of accounts with fake followers.. how to estimate that? Check their number of followers and then see how many comments they are getting on their posts.. does it add up?
- SubmitHub: if you don't know about SubmitHub then it is an absolute must and now you do. You can submit your song or press release through this site to be put in front of blogs, radio stations, spotify playlists, record labels and more. However, you'll need a PRESS RELEASE. This is really really important and for that you need a copywriter. Need help? Drop me a line. https://www.submithub.com/
- Muso Soup: for the European market mostly, but similar to SubmitHub. For submission to blogs, playlists and radio stations mostly in Europe, and the good news is you only pay a small fee if you get submitted. https://www.musosoup.com/
- Soundplate: lists of playlists for you to submit to. Remember, if you submit, BE PERSONAL in your approach (more on that below)... no cut and paste jobs when contacting people unless your goal is to get ignored! You NEED to spend the time being personal or you might as well not spend the time at all. https://soundplate.com/
- Spotify for Artists: if you are dropping your music on spotify then it is absolutely crucial that you get your distributor putting your song in front of spotify around one month in advance of release and getting you a spotify for artists account. This gives the people at Spotify enough time to listen to your track and decide whether to put it on one of their playlists. Other factors go into this process, one important one being your pre-save link... allowing people to sign up to download your song the day it is released. The more downloads you get on the day of release the more the algorithms pick it up and push your song to more people.
- Influencers: finding the right influencer whose audience is somewhat consistent with yours could be an amazing way to get you noticed. Offering your music for one of their videos, or for them to promote your music generally in a way they want, is even better than a meme account... these influencers have much more "influence" (go figure) over their audience and are much more trusted by their followers. You should be looking for influencers in the 10,000-30,000 follower range, and that shouldn't cost you too much money. Maybe also you have a song about travelling... find a travel blog!
Check out https://www.brandwatch.com/p/peerindex-and-brandwatch/ or https://buzzsumo.com/ if you want to explore some tools that can help you with finding influencers and data.
There is so much more to all of these of course, but this should get your thoughts facing in the right direction. At the end of the day you need to do your RESEARCH, you need to find these pages, you need to understand your target audience (analysing your current audience, and testing through a facebook ads campaign, are nice ways to do this, more on that another time), and you need to write PERSONAL messages to these people. No more cut and paste jobs, you will not get noticed. The way to get the attention of a radio DJ, a blogger, vlogger, influencer whatever, is to write to them, understand them first and how you can capture their attention in your first sentence or two. Then write something personally to them.
Be prepared to take the time to connect with people on their level and you’ll find more doors opening for you.