Learning how to sell your music and create music marketing plans and strategies is not nearly as daunting as it might seem to many musicians. In this article, I’ll not only give you a simple music marketing plan and strategy, I’m also going to give you some free marketing tips and ideas you can start using today!

Marketing music—as it’s done by record labels—is typically too expensive for Independent artists. While major labels will often try regional marketing, and if it works, deploy the same techniques nationally, Indie artists don’t have the budgets to go national, and often rely on the Internet for online music marketing to give them national and international reach.

The Best Music Marketing Tip of All!

Marketing Indie music really isn’t much more than using some common sense and a little elbow grease. It’s all about audience engagement and building relationships one fan at a time. So let me start off with what might be the greatest single music-marketing tip of them all; you’ve got to give to get!

There’s a marketing law; The Rule of Reciprocity – “I’ll give you something for free, if you give me something of equal value in return.” The potential buyer feels a moral obligation to give something in return if you offer something first, and you’re not asking for too much in return.

What do you have that your buyer will value enough to give you his or her email address in return? If you give them a free song download in return for their email address, you can build a relationship and market more of your music to her over time. And to a person who has already shown an interest in your music. Does it get any better than that?

How to Create a Music Marketing Plan and Strategy

Music Marketing Tip #1: Identify your target market and go to where they are. Who is your target market? Thirty-something females? Great! I identify where they frequent or congregate online and off. That’s where you need to be to meet them and market your music to them.

Do they come to your shows? Great! Have an assistant or volunteer walk around the room giving out a CD Single in exchange for email addresses from your. Have that same person selling full albums for $10 to $15. And what about T-shirts or other swag? You can do this! You just need to find someone with a personality and the desire to help you.

And don’t forget; once you have those email addresses, don’t forget to use them! Keep your fans in the loop, but don’t bombard them with spam. Send them short, informative emails that they will find interesting.

Music Marketing Tip #2: Learn some basic sales tracking and record keeping. Not to sound cynical, but make sure you create and routinely use a simple accounting system to make sure all inventory and money balances out at the end of the night. You’ll need to keep an accurate track of those things for tax purposes as well. Use Quickbooks. There are plenty of FAQs and helpful online forums to help you become good at it in no time flat. Suck it up… you’ll need to do some basic business tasks if you want to earn an income marketing your music.

Music Marketing Tip #3: Marketing your music online. People will not buy your music if they can’t find your music. Make it easy for them to find you by learning where your buyers go online and see if you can market your music in those places. Example: If your typical buyers, or at least a significant percentage of them are mid-thirties females who tend to read a lot of romance novels, see if there are any best-selling authors who have their own site. Cut a deal to put a graphic link on their site, and for every download sold, they get a reasonable cut. To summarize: Market your music to your most likely buyers at places where they already go!

Music Marketing Tip #4: Building a website for yourself on the cheap is easier than you think. Google the terms; WordPress Music Retail Themes. Many of them are free, and none are very expensive. WordPress is easy to learn, but if it’s out of your technological reach, there are plenty of small developers that will do it for you for a few hundred bucks. Money well spent.

Use Facebook and Twitter to market your music as well, but don’t over do it! Nobody wants to hear about your trips to the grocery store or what you’re having for dinner. Engaging your fans with information that’s about the making of your music is what they want to hear about.

Tell them about a new song you’re working on. Post video clips of you in the studio. Post lyric sheets. Tell them the story behind the song. Let them meet the other musicians who played on the track. Those musicians will show their friends, who in turn will show theirs!

Let your fans know about every show you’re doing. Comment before and after your shows. Mention the names of fans that you saw in the audience or greeted at the venue. Make it personal to them and they’ll show their appreciation and loyalty by telling their friends about you.

A Music Marketing Strategy is Important But…

If you don’t have a great product—in this case, your music—no matter how many people find you because of great marketing, they are not likely to buy what you’re selling. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. In this case, if the water tastes foul, the horse will never take another sip.

And while I’m using horse metaphors, let’s talk about putting the cart before the horse! There is a common belief that record companies manufacture sales with marketing. I’m sure there may be some cases of that, but it’s my observation that the reason we sometimes believe a hit was “manufactured” is that we personally don’t like what we hear and believe that the only way it could have become a hit is through marketing or some sort of play to play.

The reality is that somebody does like the music—a lot of somebodies! Just because it doesn’t appeal to you or I doesn’t mean the song is only a hit because of great marketing. Radio stations couldn’t keep an audience if they only played bad music they were cramming down the throats of their listeners.

Back to the cart before the horse; is your music ready to be marketed? Do you know what genre it’s in? Is it a niche genre or a more commercial one? Are your songs so catchy and memorable that your listeners will want to hear them over and over again, and then tell their friends? Are your songs as good as the best on the market?

I know it’s hard to take an objective look at your own music, but it seems to be wasted time, energy and expense to market your music before it’s ready enough to capture the fans that you’re after.

What’s Your Strategy to Market Your Music?

Do you have one? Do you have a marketing plan written down? When are you going to start, and what will be your first action steps?

Before you start, make sure your music is top notch, get objective opinions, figure out what genre your music is in, who your fans are, and identify the best marketing tactics to get your music heard by those fans. Whether you’re using an online music marketing plan, or selling CDs from the trunk of your car after shows, making a plan and sticking with it will result in much better sales!

Bonus material:

Music marketing and promotion articles and FAQs:

http://www.taxi.com/music-business-faq/music-promotion/

Great video interview with Youtube sensation Tiffany Alvord:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH8mZX5FX80

“How do I get my music heard?” asked the caller. If I had a nickel for every time a songwriter, artist, band or composer has asked me that question, I could retire! Truthfully, it’s not a great question because it’s so ambiguous. The people who ask the question would get a much better answer if they asked a more specific question.

Here are some examples:

• “How do I get my music heard by an A&R person at a record label?

• “How do I get my music heard by a publisher?”

• “How do I get my music heard by a Film or TV music supervisor?”

• “How do I get my music heard by somebody who books bands?”

• “How do I get my music heard by people who would be interested in buying it?”

Even those questions aren’t really specific enough. Don’t you want to know what kind of music they’re talking about? After all, a music supervisor working on a soap opera is probably not looking for Death Metal so much as singer/songwriter tracks, right? A little common sense goes a long way!

Marketing Your Music Starts with Common Sense

If you’re looking to market your music to the public, the question might be, “Where is a good place to market music from singer/songwriters?”

The more specific you are in your question, the more narrowly focused the answer is going to be.

Let’s take the example of a band that wants to get their music heard by an A&R person at a major record label. The question would be, “How do I get my music heard by an A&R person at a major record label?”

If you’re really on top of your game, you’d be even smarter to be more specific and ask, “How do I get my music heard by somebody who works in the Pop genre at a major record label?”

Getting Film and TV placements has become all the rage, yet most musicians don’t take the time to actually watch the shows and take notes as to what kind of music the shows generally use. The road map is staring them in the face!

Don’t submit Country songs to a show that primarily uses twenty-something hipster, Singer/Songwriter music. And the question that works as the corollary to this is, “How do I get my music to music supervisors who are looking for Singer/Songwriter tracks?”

The next time you’re ready to ask, “How do I get my music heard?” give it some thought and frame your question to be more specific. You’ll be much happier with the answers you get and much more successful in getting your music to the right people!

How to Choose the Right Music Licensing Companies

It seems like so many songwriters and artists have given up on the dream of getting a record deal with major record label. Flying around on private jets and trashing hotel rooms is a dream now long forgotten. Film and TV placements are the new “record deal.”

Most musicians don’t know how to choose the right music licensing company or companies, because they haven’t done their homework yet. They haven’t learned how to know which company has the best chance of getting them a film or TV placement period, and they often have no idea which company has the best track record for making the most money for the songwriters ad artists they work with.

Truth be told, it’s not all that hard to set up a web page that looks great, add a database that hosts music, post up a couple of success stories (true or not), and bammo, you’re in business as a music licensing company! Doesn’t matter if you’re in the cow pastures of Wisconsin, the heart of Hollywood, or the plains of Africa. Nobody does due diligence any more. “If they’ve got a cool web page, they must be real!” Uh-huh!

Things to watch out for:

Open submissions — Not ALL companies that allow any old Tom, Dick or Harry to submit to them are schlock shops, but many are. Accepting music from any and everybody seems appealing at first, but it also means that the music supervisors and music editors are going to hear a lot of mediocre music (at best), and quickly leave the site with nothing in hand.

Rating and filtering by fans and competing musicians — Music supervisors want filtered music. They want only the very best music. In many cases (but not necessarily all), music that has been selected or filtered by competing songwriters or artists doesn’t stand up to the quality of music that has been pre-screened by real music industry professionals. Why? Two reasons: The musicians doing the filtering have never worked at a music supervision company, a film company, a TV production company, a record company, or a Film or TV publishing company. They simply don’t know how high the bar is set. They also may not know that just because they personally like a particular song or instrumental track, it doesn’t mean that it will work well for TV or film music companies.

The second reason is that some less than ethical people will “vote down” the competition. It’s become somewhat common for musicians who want their music to rise will ask fans, friends and family members to visit the music web sites that have “contests,” to give them high scores and give the competition low scores.

Companies that are too quick to accept music into their catalogs – There are companies who will sign almost anything. even though the deals are often non-exclusive, it can be a sign that the company is just trying to fatten the catalog or music library for a later sale, and is more interested in quantity, not quality.

Companies that don’t have solid, long-term relationships with the industry — Music supervisors have go-to people that they’ve worked with for years. They trust their ears. They know they can rely on them for great music. If you can’t find solid evidence that those relationships exists at te company you’re about to sign with, you might want to keep looking and find a company that does!

If you’d like to lean more about how to get started licensing your music through production music libraries and how to pick the right film & TV licensing companies for your music, watch this series of short videos I did with Matt Hirt. Matt is a long-time TAXI member, and through diligent work, persistence and getting his music picked up by the best music licensing companies (mostly through TAXI, if I can be so immodest)  he’s created an income that any songwriter, artist or composer would be happy to have.

Watch the video. I promise you’ll learn just about everything you need to know about music licensing in a very short time.

Enjoy!

Michael

Dear Passengers,

Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Every year, our members who come to the Road Rally, stop me and tell me how stoked they are that they came. They can’t wait to get home and use all the new songwriting and production tips and techniques they learned at the convention.

Their heads seem as if they are about to explode! It’s incredible to feel their energy. But I often wonder how many of them can sustain that level of energy and commitment once they get home.

For some I would bet that it wears off a week or two after the Rally. For others, it must last for a few months. But the members who amaze me, are the small percentage that make the commitment, make a plan, and stick with it for an entire year.

Those are always the people who start getting deals and begin to build their careers in music. I see them year after year, and I wish I could bottle whatever it is that makes them go home and stick with it. What makes them succeed, where others fall short?

I think that lasting change is brought about by emotion, because we require emotion to stay motivated. A soldier charging into a hail of gunfire to save his buddies is pumped by emotion and adrenaline. But that’s momentary - a transient effect. How can you keep that up for a long period of time?

Practice, practice, practice…

If you keep practicing, there is no question that you will get better. As you get better, the incremental improvements will motivate you to keep practicing. You practice more and more, and you get better and better! It becomes a virtuous cycle. Seems obvious, right?

But there’s another thing that happens with practice. Just like a golfer can train his muscles to repeat great golf swings, a songwriter can actually train him or herself to write better songs! While you brain is not technically a muscle, it is built to adopt to repetitive behaviors. They sink in over time.

Ask any songwriter who has moved to Nashville and become part of the great community of songwriters there. They don’t become better just by living in Nashville. It’s not caused by osmosis.

No, it’s because the people who are surrounded by other great songwriters who live there are motivated on an emotional level and they repeatedly write more songs. Each of them typically better than the last.

You don’t have to move to Nashville. At least not until you start to get some nibbles. There are two very concrete ways to increase your level of excellence in songwriting.

First, join TAXI and come to the Road Rally this coming November 5th-8th. It’s free for TAXI members, so you’ll save HUNDREDS of dollars compared to other music conventions. Our host hotel will soon be offering a special TAXI Road Rally rate of just $109 per night for a limited time (July 6th-20th). That’s $50 per night cheaper than what is was supposed to be, so you’re saving $200 over four nights!

But you’ll need to join TAXI in the next five days to get in under the wire on that deal.

Really Cheap Airfare!

I just found airfare (as I’m writing this) of only $239, roundtrip from New York to LA!

With the room rates and airfare so inexpensive, you could probably do the entire weekend for $800-$1,000 total. A few hundred cheaper STILL, if you join TAXI and use your guest pass and bring a friend or your spouse and split the room cost.

If you’re within driving distance of LA, this will definitely be your year to get the killer deal on coming to the Rally!

The second thing you should do is read two sections of our online forum.

Read this 1st to get motivated!

Read this 2nd to get motivated about the life changing effect the Road Rally has on the people who join us:

Remember what Aristotle said, “Excellence is not an act, but a habit.” You can quite literally train your brain to become excellent at songwriting. Your chances of success in the music business will go up by a factor of ten if you do that. I’ve just given you the tools.

Are you motivated? How badly do you want your music to be your income-generating career? That’s a decision only you can make.

Talk to you soon,
Michael

P.S. Remember, the killer deal on room rates will be offered July 6th-20th, so you’ll need to belong to TAXI to get those rates.

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