Promote your music with no budget
Promote your music with no budget
Do you create music and sell online? Maybe you sell on Spotify, Last.fm or some other online service. Maybe you have a band who tours small towns and mostly play on bars and don’t sell any CD:s. Well – either way, this article is for you.
I take examples from the Swedish electronic artist Pingo® who recently released an album directly on Spotify, through the online label SouthPole Radio. With no budget at all, the name is out there and sales and streams are made. This is how you can copy that promotion plan and do the same thing yourself with your band, your artist, your music.
If you want to release your music on Spotify, please read my article ”How to get your music on Spotify – and earn money
on it!”. Then head back to this text and find out how to start promoting!
Last.fm is a great place for an artist to write more about himself, push the music to friends and start a fan-base. MySpace is today also a very good artist platform. However, both of them lack a lot, specifically in technology, since both of the websites are a bit old fashioned and – especially MySpace – is a slow and heavy site with too much scripts and bad design. However, since the sites are used by so much people, they are still two sites that an artist should sign up on.
After adding your artist page to MySpace and Last.fm it’s time to create your own website. If you don’t already have one (you should!), then find a good webhost (I suggest HostGator, since it’s cheap and have very good service in different languages) where you easily can install a WordPress blog. Hostgator (and
many other hosts) have the cPanel. cPanel is an add-on many hosts have where you easily can install several different scripts and functions for your website. WordPress – the blogging script – is one of these.
Before you buy hosting, however, you need a domain name. You can buy that online on any domain registrating company (I usually use GoDaddy). Choose a name that is as close to your artist’s or label’s name as possible. Try to go for the .com domain, but if that is not accessable, you can go for anything – if you have your band residing in any other country than USA, you should of course go for that country’s localized top domain.
Hosting and domain name is the only costs in this. The hosting is around per month, and the domain name is approximalty for a whole year.
When you have linked your domain with your hosting, head into the cPanel
and do the easy installment of the WordPress blog. After that, head into the WordPress admin panel and choose a theme that fits your artist or label design. Now you have your own place on the ‘net and now the real business starts.
Use Twitter. Create an account if you don’t have one, and see to it that the WordPress theme you are using also can handle a Twitter ”widget”. Installing such a widget in WordPress makes your latest twitter end up directly on your website.
In Last.fm link your feed (the rss-link from your WordPress site) to the site. You can add this in the Music Manager on Last.fm.
Now sign up for a YouTube account. Make a video. You can make any video you like to one of your tunes using a regular video- or digital camera. Either just film yourself singing, have a friend film you live or do a stop-motion animation (as –~~~~~~~~~~~~–
onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’, ‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’]);” href=”http://www.southpoleradio.com/”>Pingo® did) or anything else you can think of! There are lots free software out there that can help you with the editing and creation of your video.
Upload the video to your YouTube account and use the embedd link on your WordPress blog. Write a news post about it, and see the news post end up on Last.fm too!
Now use your own network to promote your website. The nice thing with all this is that you now can sell your music as downloadable mp3’s via Last.fm, get payed for it, get payed for streams via Spotify – but only have to take care of two things: your news posts on your website and your small twitters via Twitter. Everything else is updating itself!
So next time you are on tour – create a banner that has your website’s
domain name on it. Spread the word of your domain name to your friend. Make stickers and put on your car. Spread that domain name any way you can!
The beauty in this is that you don’t have to spread your Twitter (since that feed is visible on your website, people may sign up to your Twitter account when they have found your website), you don’t have to spread your MySpace, Last.fm or Spotify links (which all can be a bit weird to send out to people anyway).
So with a little time, only a few bucks and some tweaking – you can end up selling your tunes for your unknown band in no time, with just a single domain name to spread and a lot of sites promoting your music.
Good luck!
Anders Dent writes articles for online music label SouthPole Radio and is mainly interested in dub, techno and other electronic music.
ANTARCTICA by Pingo® can be listened to for free on Spotify and Last.fm. Watch the video and read more on music releases and promotion on the record label SouthPole Radio official website: http://www.SouthPoleRadio.com/
Article from articlesbase.com
