How to Promote Your Music Online: From Forum to Field

Posted on 31 Aug 2010 at 15:39

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Sales

Rambo says: "We sell our music on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and most online sellers. iTunes has been the best place for sales there but we also sell physical albums on Big Cartel, which is a really simple and effective way to sell your merchandise online. I think a lot of people these days prefer having a physical product, especially if it is made really well or it is a bit different."

Big Cartel is a shopping cart service that allows artists to easily set up a storefront and take online payments via Paypal or credit card. A basic page is free and allows you to sell up to five products. The site takes no percentage of sales, instead relying on subscriptions payments from sellers who wish to set up more advanced storefronts. It's focussed on physical sales, with the seller responsible for fulfilling once the order has been paid for, although a new sister site is currently in development to allow sales of digital products including videos, photos and e-books.

Services like Tunecore and DittoMusic make it easy for any artist to get their music onto iTunes; they charge a low one-off fee to put your content on to the site (Tunecore charges 99c US per track while DittoMusic charges 30p), after which all the profit goes to you. In that case of iTunes, that's around 49p per track. Reverbnation, which we've already mentioned, offers a similar service, but only if you subscribe to its premium package.

Both services can place your music on scores of different music sales sites, including iTunes, Amazon and Spotify, although it's worth noting that streaming sites like Spotify work primarily as a promotional tool, with low profits unless your track gets a lot of listens.

Booking Gigs

Unusually in a world increasingly dominated by online communications, booking gigs is one area where going back to the traditional method of posting or dropping off physical materials with a venue or promoter still gets you results.

Rambo feels that "local knowledge is the best; if the promoter books good bands and knows his market, people will know about it. Obviously we tell people about our gigs on all of our platforms and we get good results from all of them. Doing gigs is the best promotion a band can have, getting yourself a foot in the door using your online platforms should only be a starting place and to keep people involved with what is going on.

"Sending out press packs to places you know do good gigs and festivals after you have some dates under your belt is the best way to get yourself known. There are still A LOT of people who DON'T use social media - they don't have time, or just don't like it; it's something to bear in mind."

He's in a good position to comment - while many of the bands on Bloodstock's New Blood stage got there via the nation-wide Metal 2 the Masses battle of the bands, Stone Circle were booked after sending a press pack out to the festival organisers.

But just as many consumers will check out a local business or tradesman online before hiring them to do any work, music fans and promoters will do the same thing. "Credit to Dementia's business cards have the MySpace address and our Gmail address – people can grab a card, type in our name and there we are."

Merging technology with physical promotion

Although the physical element of live gigs and face-to-face promotion is vital to most bands, even there, technology plays its part. Zocalo design their own logos, flyers and media content using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Friends studying 3D design at university will be creating a rendered video for one of their tracks.

They still sell most of their tickets physically, though. "You can promote online, but face to face interaction puts a human being to a ticket price. Like when we were promoting for Metal 2 the Masses; you have to go out there, put up the money, give out flyers, go around the rock clubs."

Another advantage they've found to rock clubs is that, if you have a friendly DJ and a copy of your music on an MP3 player, you can get the DJ to hook up your iPod and immediately get your song on to the night's playlist.

If you want to hear more from the bands we've spoken to, Zocalo will be supporting Beholder at the Camden Underworld in London on the 20th of September. Stone Circle will be playing on the 18th of September at Mamothfest at Brighton's Hove Centre. Credit to Dementia will be supporting Beholder in Falmouth on the 19th September.

If you're a musician looking for more information on promotion, profit and music law, you can buy our sister publication How to Make it in Music 2 for just £7.99.

Author: Kat Orphanides