Unsigned Musicians - Six Ways to Market Your Music

Unsigned Musicians - Six Ways to Market Your Music
By Tracey Roper


In an ideal world, the music is all that would matter. You would play and the legions of fans would come. This is not, unfortunately, an ideal world, which means that you need to market yourself if you want to be successful. Fortunately, we are living in a time when marketing your music and yourself has never been easier. The Internet has brought the whole world closer together, and this has made it easier and cheaper to both contact your fans and potential fans as well as made it easy to give them a wide variety of stuff to sell. But marketing can seem overwhelming, so here are six ways to market yourself and your music:

Have an Online Presence

You do not necessarily need your own website but you do need to make yourself easy to find and keep up with on the web. This means that at the very least you need to have Facebook and Twitter page and you need to keep them updated.

Get Your Music on a Service like Amie Street

There are several different services that allow people to listen to songs on the Internet, some of which are free and some of which are paid. You need to get your music on them. Not because of the royalties, but because it provides great promotion for your music.

Play Free Gigs

You need to play for as many people as you can, as often as you can. One of the best ways to do this is by playing at free events. Fairs, community picnics, parades, anywhere you can get yourself in front of people that have not heard your music before.

Create, Maintain and Use a Mailing List

You should be collecting the email addresses of your fans and making an email list. This allows you promote your gigs, CDs and whatever else you have to people who already like you. You need to make sure that you use it, maintain it, and keep at it.

Use Custom Merchandise

Band merchandise is a valuable source of extra money for any musician, but it is also a great way to market yourself. The trick here is to make sure that all your merchandise is cool and worth talk about and, crucially, has your band name or at least logo on it. The more creative you can be, the better.

Do not Be Afraid to Guerilla Market

Guerilla marketing is using non traditional, fan oriented ways to drum up publicity for your music. Put together a street team to distribute flyers, write articles, talk you up and just generally get the word out. This both gets you more promotion and strengthens the bond between you and your fans.

These six tips are just the tip of the iceberg, but they are a good way to get started.

Tracey Roper is a freelance writer and webmaster based in the UK. Visit her sites to find out more about DVD duplication and custom band merchandise.