I’ve been a drummer in bands since 1995 and I’ve also made music videos since the late 90’s (and I released my own music video compilations on VHS tape in those days). I’ve built websites for all these music projects, marketed all these projects myself, and also started my own public access music TV show in the early 2000’s here in San Diego that later got syndicated nationwide (120 million households). In recent times, I’ve gotten my band’s music onto all the streaming platforms and experimented a lot with digital music marketing of today. So I’d say I know a thing or two about marketing strategies for musicians.
1. Television
MTV
Obviously, television is more of a music marketing strategy of the past. Young people don’t even watch cable TV anymore but back in the 90’s, MTV was probably the best promotion you could get. However, it was incredibly gatekeeping! You pretty much could only get your music video on MTV if you were signed to a major label. So you had to build a following and get discovered by them first (or you were created by a major label like boy bands or Linkin Park).
Independent Music Network
I was lucky enough to experience the power of having a music video on national television. Somewhere around the millennium (1999-2001) there was a cable TV channel starting out called Independent Music Network (IMNTV). They were looking for independent artists to submit music videos (so they’d have content to air). Well I was in a punk band called Camerica in those days and we jumped at the chance! I sent IMNTV our music video and so did only a few other artists. In those days, only some bands had the ability to make music videos on their own (we were one of them as we had camcorders and I had a PC that could handle video editing). And I also knew how to convert our PC-edited video to a broadcast-quality tape stock called BetacamSP. Since most other bands had no clue on how to do all that, we got a lot of rotation on IMNTV (like, many times per day and night).
The free promotion we got from that video on IMNTV was so good that it even attracted a startup record label at the time called Galactic Pop (out of Los Angeles). They recorded our next CD EP and released it for us! It was great.
In Your Face TV
After seeing the success of that music marketing strategy, the same band and I decided to start our own music TV show called In Your Face TV. We reached out to record labels, band managers, and publicists and they started sending us music videos like crazy. We came to find that there were even music video promotion companies like Rive Video who eventually became our main source for content. So yes, we played a lot of music videos on the show but we also interviewed bands and did our own little skits in between the videos.
Later on, I decided to quit the band and focus on the TV show as my career. Then it got picked up by America One syndication network who broadcasted it out to local TV affiliates all over the country. I finally stopped producing episodes of In Your Face TV in 2008.
Blank TV
While Camerica was a band, we actually made a second music video. We got it on IMNTV again but we also got in on Blank TV (which was a punk-rock music TV show out of L.A.). They also had a YouTube channel since just about the beginning of YouTube (and it still exists today!) So thanks to Blank TV, that music video can still be found online.
However, our music video on their YouTube channel did not get us many views. It was television broadcasts that really got us attention. And of course, you can upload your own music video to YouTube and promote it more anyway. Not to mention, you get the royalties from the views on your own channel. Blank TV wants you to give them up to them. Not that that’s a bad thing. If you’re a small punk or alternative rock band who is just starting out, submitting music videos to Blank TV is an okay way to get some exposure since their YouTube channel has grown a lot since those days.
2. Radio
Radio is another music marketing strategy of the past but it can still be utilized today (in a way). Just like television, radio is highly gatekeeping. You’ve probably noticed how any rock station in the country just plays the same five bands over and over all day. That’s because major radio is “pay-to-play”. And pay-to-play is technically illegal but it seems to happen anyway (just very hush-hush). Many say that most of music-based radio is mob owned. And they, of course, don’t care about the law. If you try to implement a campaign where you send your demo CD out to radio stations all over the country, or email mp3s to them all, you’ll find that none will respond. Maybe your local rock station has a local band show, but that’s probably the furthest you’ll get with mainstream radio.
So with mainstream radio being out, you can still hit the college radio circuit! They are often more than happy to accept your music submissions.
3. Your Website
Having your own website as a musician marketing strategy was a great idea in the 90’s and still is a great idea today. A website helps you to get found whenever your fans or anyone who had recently discovered your music wants to seek you out and find more. Of course, they can just find you directly on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. but they may want to learn more about you or sign up for your email list. And email lists are a fantastic way to keep fans engaged and let them know about any news, upcoming releases, new merch, etc. You can also sell merch with your site!
Promoting Your Website
But using your website as a method of getting discovered by new listeners can be tricky. What I’ve done is try advertising. Now, since the money you make from streaming is so incredibly low, you have no choice but to use the cheapest advertising platforms you can find. I started this studio project called Feral Humans. I tried advertising the band with YouTube video ads, Facebook and Instagram ads but they were all way too expensive. Then I found alternative ad networks where you run native (ads that look like articles- “Sponsored” articles on news sites) and push ads. Push ads look like push notifications on your phone and they looked like this…
The ad accomplished two things:
- It branded us. People were discovering our name so that they could go look us up on whatever music streaming service they prefer (if they were curious).
- It brought traffic directly to our website to learn more about us, listen to some songs, and join our email list (as the ad was clickable).
And with push ads, I was only paying an average of $0.002 cents a click! But that’s still too expensive when considering the pay you get per music stream is even less than that. Plus, not everyone who clicks will listen to your songs. In fact, most won’t! Only a small fraction will. And to really kick push ads out of the picture, way too much of the traffic was bots.
Using Search Traffic
Otherwise, the organic and free way to get traffic to your website is to simply let it get found in Google and other search engines. But getting found for your band name doesn’t help when you want to get discovered by new potential fans. So another thing I did was write blog posts that targeted specific keyword phrases like:
- ”bands like Evanescence”
- “bands like Nirvana”
- ”bands like Tool”
That way, our website got found by people actively searching for new music to discover.
I used keyword research software called KeySearch to find these keyword phrases and others like them. The software suggested these keywords because they are searched at least 1,000 times a month (or near it) and they’re not overly competitive to rank for yet.
I have to say… this music marketing strategy worked pretty well! Although it’s not a way to blast your music out to the masses (the traffic comes in slowly), it is great traffic that actually converts into listeners and email list signups.
I only stopped the Feral Humans project because, once again, the pay-per-stream is way too low to make it feasible. It was only a studio project after all. We were all scattered around the globe so we could never play live (which is a key marketing strategy that I’ll cover later)…
But if you don’t have a website up and running already, I would seriously consider buying a domain and hosting package. Here’s my blog post on two popular companies to use.
4. Social Media
In today’s era the most obvious, common, and popular marketing strategy for musicians is of course social media. It’s free to do, easy to do, and can garner a lot of results (if you’re lucky). Yes, luck has a lot to do with it unfortunately.
Vertical Video
The latest and greatest in social media is obviously the vertical video platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat Public). Many musicians have built huge followings by simply uploading short videos of themselves playing their songs in front of their phone’s camera. You’ve probably seen them already. However, those musicians were lucky enough to jump on TikTok when it was still new. If you upload these types of videos today, you’ll hardly get any views. The algorithm already has so much of that, it’s not going to push out more of the same. So, unfortunately, that doesn’t really help you out with marketing your music.
To rectify this, I know some musicians who make videos where they talk about news concerning larger artists, or cover larger artist’s songs, or review their albums. When they post things like that, those videos go wild! But when they post anything that promotes their music, the video flops. That is because, once again, these platform’s algorithm are not trying to help you sell your stuff. They are trying to help themselves.
So if anything, you can try that strategy (upload videos on larger artists). However, I personally believe that’s kind of a wonky strategy. I know from doing a YouTube channel, Instagram account, and TikTok account on drum covers that people who followed me for my covers were following because of the artists I covered. They were’t at all not interested in my original stuff from my bands. However, I was doing covers in a wide range of genres. I bet if you stick to your genre (or better yet, your sub-genre), they’d be more inclined to like your original stuff too.
Horizontal Video (YouTube)
Now, what about your music video on YouTube? Is that a good strategy? Well, yes, but you have a problem: YouTube doesn’t push your music video out either (unless you’re already a large artist beforehand or you started when YouTube was relatively young, like Justin Bieber). So as an independent artist today, you have to bring the traffic to it on your own.
What I did was try running ads on YouTube. I figured out a clever way to run my music video as an ad that plays in front similar band’s music videos that are already big. I Googled “new rock music” and then when I set up the YouTube ad in Google Ads, I selected those mainstream music videos one by one. So my ads only ran in front of those music videos. People who were checking out those mainstream music videos could either skip my ad (then I didn’t pay for it) or they would click my ad and go straight to my band’s music video.
That music video ad strategy worked really well as targeting method. The proof was in all the positive comments on our music video. People absolutely loved the song because they were really well targeted. The downside though was the price. I was paying $0.05 cents a click. And I got paid royalties when people did watch my music video (so that offset the cost a little) but nowhere near profiting when considering the 0.00012345 payout.
5. Playing Live
Now we’re getting down to the nitty gritty. Congratulations if you made it this far because this is the most useful part of the blog post. Playing live worked best as one of the marketing strategies for musicians back in the 90’s and it’s even more so today! Because of all the problems that I discussed above, it leaves the live performance as your best bet.
When you play shows, you want to always try to open for larger bands or artists (unless you grow to the point where you are the largest artist on the bill). But until then, opening for larger acts are a great way to get discovered by new listeners/fans who already have an interest in your style of music (you are likely opening for bands in your genre).
My Real-World Experience With This
Back when I was in high school in the 90’s, I played in a punk band called Gimp here in San Diego. We played just about once a month at this legendary, all-ages, punk venue called Soma. We, of course, brought some of our own crowd to the shows but the best thing was the fact that we got discovered by fans of larger punk bands like Pulley, Millencolin, No Use for a Name, and Strung Out…
At shows, both your fans and fans of the larger bands have the opportunity to buy your merch and sign up for your email list. So your email list keeps growing the more you play (which then leads to more shows, more sales, and so on).
Don’t Sleep on the Flyer
If you’re wondering how we brought kids to the shows on our own, well first of all, we were in high school so we had the opportunity to let everyone at our school know about the shows each month. But we took that a bit further as well… We also took our flyers around to all of the:
- records stores
- skate/surf shops
- smoke shops
- tattoo shops
- Hot Topic type of stores
- music instruments stores (Guitar Centers)
- even other high schools (haha!)
in San Diego County.
This strategy is something that still works today except record stores are much less a thing.
