3 Music Marketing Strategies Most People Ignore

Why isn’t your music getting any traction?

You’ve spent a bunch of time perfecting your art, but people aren’t paying much attention to it.

If you’ve ever tried to get others to hear your music, you know how difficult it can be. 

Most people will either ignore your pleas or humor you for a time, only to forget you ever existed the moment you’re not annoying them.

Harsh, but true.

Getting past that barrier and gaining listeners takes effective marketing. 

But what does that even mean? How can you use music marketing strategies while not wasting your music-making time?

That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today:

• What Is Music Marketing, Honestly?
• A Note About Spamming People
• Some Of My Favorite Music Marketing Strategies
• In Conclusion…

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What Is Music Marketing, Honestly?

So what is music marketing at its core?

There’s a common misconception that music marketing is complicated, boring, or will distract you from making music.

But in its most basic form, marketing your music is simply getting people to hear about it.

Here’s how it works:

1. You make great music
2. There are fans of your genre who don’t know you make good music
3. You inform them you have music that they’ll most likely enjoy

That’s it. Pretty simple right?

But most people complicate things and think it’s a lot more complicated than this. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, just because the concept is simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are many ways to market your music — some more effective than others. 

However, most forms are based on this simple concept.

A Note About Spamming People

So now you know what music marketing is.

Now let’s quickly look at something you need to avoid: spam!

Just because you want to market your music doesn’t mean you need to market it to every person under the sun. 

No matter how good your music is, it won’t be for everyone.

And when you reach out to people who clearly aren’t interested in what you’re offering, you’re essentially spamming them.

Spamming is a waste of time, both for you and the other person. It’s also a highly effective way to annoy people and get your social media and email marketing accounts blocked.

As an example, here are two obvious groups of people you shouldn’t attempt to market your music to:

1. People who aren’t interested in your genre
2. People or platforms that can’t help you in the way you want to be helped

Let’s elaborate on these.

Firstly, just because someone likes music doesn’t mean they’ll like your genre of music. 

When you’re using music marketing strategies, you want to target people who have already shown an interest in the type of music you make.

For example, a gospel singer wouldn’t want to appear on a platform that caters to fans of death metal music.

The number of fan conversions will be slim to none, and the gospel singer will simply be wasting valuable time. 

Secondly, avoid reaching out to people who won’t be able to help build your music career. I see this all the time. 

Musicians often ask me to promote their music, share it, fund them, or help them some other way. This would be fine if these were services I provided, but they’re not. 

When people reach out to me with these requests, it shows that not only do they not fully understand what I do, but they’re also likely doing the same thing to other people. Again, this is a waste of time for both of us.

If you’re not sure if a marketing tactic is spammy, ask yourself these two questions:

1. “Would I be happy to be on the other side of this message if I were interested in this genre of music?”
2. “Is what I’m offering genuinely going to benefit people’s lives?”

If you can honestly say yes to the above — and not just because you think your music is good — then give it a try.

Otherwise, you’re probably spamming people. 

Some Of My Favorite Music Marketing Strategies

Now onto the fun part — here are 3 of my favorite music marketing strategies that still work better than ever! 

You won’t find any of the normal tips like “get your music on Spotify playlists” and “use social platforms and post regularly.”

These are marketing strategies that may take more time to work, but they’ll give you bigger wins.

1. Focus On High-Level Music Marketing

This has been a core strategy I’ve recommended for many years and it hasn’t changed. Mostly because, when done right, it works very well.

In short, the strategy behind “high-level music marketing” is all about sharing your music via established platforms instead of trying to reach new fans one-by-one.

This works really well because people trust the recommendations of these platforms. 

When you’re reaching out to people individually, you’re just one out of many people marketing to them. They haven’t heard of you before, so most likely they won’t even bother listening to your music. 

After all, if someone randomly messaged you on Instagram and told you to look at their Youtube video, would you go and check it out? 

Or would you ignore it? Maybe even mark it as spam? 

You don’t know this person and you probably don’t trust unsolicited recommendations.

On the other hand, if your favorite clothing brand told you about their new T-shirt collection, you’d be more likely to check it out, right?

That’s because it’s coming from a brand you know, like, and trust — not just some random person on the internet.

That’s the same idea with this marketing strategy. 

There’s just too much music out there for most people to take random recommendations like this seriously.

Because of this, you’ll have much better success rates when you get established platforms to recommend you instead.

Another reason this works is that once you partner with a platform, you’re instantly going to get in front of a larger number of your target audience at once. 

While this will help you build some good awareness right away, this really starts making an impact when a few of these platforms pick you up within several months. 

This is when things start to snowball. That’s when your name has a much better chance of becoming a familiar one.

Now, I know what you might be thinking…

If this works so well, why aren’t more people doing this?

Two main reasons…

First, most people don’t even think to do this. When you search online, you often find people recommending you reach out to people directly on social media.

Second, there’s a much higher rejection rate with direct contact. 

When you’re messaging people one-on-one, rejection isn’t that big of a deal because you’ll just message more people. 

And if you message enough people, you’ll get some replies. So it feels like you’re making progress, even if it doesn’t move your music career forward in any meaningful way.

On the other hand, when you’re approaching companies, you’re generally reaching out to fewer people.

But you’re relying more on each company, so when you don’t hear back from them, it’s easy to start feeling demotivated about the lack of replies. 

This kind of rejection can feel hard-hitting. And when faced with it, many musicians simply decide it doesn’t work and they go back to reaching out to people one-on-one.

But I encourage you to persist through this outreach stage. 

Just because a platform or company doesn’t get back to you on the first try, that doesn’t mean you won’t work with them in the future. 

So adjust based on any feedback you get (feedback, to be honest though, is quite rare). Try different tactics and keep going until you’re good enough to get on these platforms.

The great thing is that once you appear on one or two of these platforms, things start to become much easier (I’ll talk about this later).

So what platforms can you contact? Here are a few:

• Bandcamp Daily (their editorial publication)
• Don’t Flop (battle rap)
• Shows on BBC 1xtra
• KEXP (audience from all over)
• Red Bull Music (large YouTube following)

2. Become A Project Manager

One of the best things I ever did for my music career (when I was nearly full-time) was to become a project manager. 

And it’s one of the most overlooked music marketing strategies.

Even though I made good music that people liked, there were thousands and thousands of other people making music similar to me that were also talented.

In order to stand out, I decided to become more than just another musician. I became a project manager.

Here’s what I did…

I created projects and platforms that helped promote other musicians on a wider scale.

Then, as these creations started building up momentum, I used them to also promote my own music. 

One example of this is a mixtape I created called 2000 And West. This was a mixtape that featured some of the biggest musicians in my genre who lived in West London.

It was an easy concept to sell: contribute one of your best songs, I’ll put it on my mixtape, and I’ll release it to the world.

By doing this, I had a number of musicians chasing me down to be featured on my mixtape — musicians who probably wouldn’t have given me the time of day before. 

Of course, I also included my own songs on the mixtape. And it went on to sell pretty well.

After this, things changed. Instead of being the person who was asking other musicians to collaborate, people were now contacting me. And I got a lot more exposure.

Another way I applied this “project manager” strategy was to create the music advice website Music Industry How To, which includes how-tos and product reviews. 

Doing these things gave me a platform that I could use to further my music career, allowing me to make better connections in the music industry.

You can do this, but with today’s version of a mixtape: creating your own platform. 

For example, you can create a podcast or Youtube channel that features other artists in your genre. From there, you can incorporate your music on the platform.

The artists you feature will share your platform (which includes your music too) with their fans — and that’s what we call cross-promotion.

3. Leverage Your Wins

The final strategy I want to share is to leverage your wins. (This works great with getting on bigger platforms).

It can be difficult to get on your first big platform, but it gets easier once you do. You can approach other platforms and let them know you’ve been on platform XYZ already.

This makes them take you much more seriously. You’ll still get a good amount of rejection at this stage, but you’ll find it easier to get on the second platform than the first. 

Once you’ve partnered with a couple of good-sized platforms, you can leverage these to get others going forward.

And even if a platform rejects you, you can reach out to them after you’ve gotten on one or two other platforms. At that point, it’s much more likely they’ll want to work with you. 

So keep a list of platforms to contact, even if they’ve already rejected you. Because you can always revisit them. 

You can use this strategy with people too. 

If you’ve collaborated with well-known songwriters, producers, or other music industry folks, mention that collaborator’s name when reaching out to other potential collaborators.  

To be clear, don’t use people for your own success. But if you happen to have worked with notable people, why not mention it?

In Conclusion…

So to recap, here are the 3 music marketing strategies I suggest:

1. Focus on high-level music marketing
2. Become a project manager
3. Leverage your wins

Commit to these tactics and, given time, more people will notice you. And your music career will start to grow.

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Shaun Letang has been knee-deep in music marketing strategies for a number of years. Initially, it was with his own music, then with the music of the thousands of musicians who visit his site, Music Industry How To, each day.