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12 Ways Musicians Can Promote Live Shows and Tours

By Live Performance, Music Business No Comments

Live performance is often the most important revenue source for an independent artist. It is in your best interest to promote your shows and draw a crowd, no matter what stage of your career you are in or how established you are.

When working with agents, promoters, talent buyers and venues, you always want to make sure to make a good impression to build those business relationships. Not only by being professional but by doing everything you can to sell out the show. Read More

How to Window Your Next Music Release to Maximize Revenue

By Music Business, Music Distribution, Strategy No Comments

One of the biggest issues artists face is music streaming. While it’s great for fans to access almost every song imaginable, the payouts for artists from these platforms are too low for most to depend on.
 
Creating music professionally and marketing releases can be quite expensive. Typically, artists recoup those expenses by doing a tour and selling merch. However, to help generate money upfront, a trend we’re seeing more recently is this concept of windowing a release.
 
In this blog, I will talk about what windowing is, how you can use to maximize revenue and my top 3 platforms you should consider to window your next music release. Read More

Going Viral On Social Media: Campaign Breakdown For Musicians

By Discovery, Going Viral, Music Marketing, Social Media, Video No Comments

Many independent artists struggle with social media marketing. It’s not easy to know what exactly to post to break through the noise, get your music heard and reach new potential fans.

I put together a case study based on a recent album campaign I did to show you that it’s not as complicated as it seems to gain traction on social media.

This album rollout campaign resulted in 3 videos I created to promote singles for an artist going viral. This led to Snoop Dogg reposting one of these videos to his 80 million Instagram followers and Erykah Badu sharing another video to her Instagram Stories. Read More

7 Reasons Why Every Independent Artist Should Promote Older Songs

By Music Marketing, Music Promotion One Comment

The generally accepted norm in the music industry is that you never promote your older songs once new music has been released. I understand that artists don’t want to live in the past and revisit older music. As an artist grows and evolves, it’s more exciting to promote what’s new and current.

Many artists, especially more established ones who have been in the industry before social media and algorithms were even a thing, are hesitant to promote older songs. Not only do they feel it’s a bad look, but they think fans only want to hear new material.

If you’re in the middle of a campaign to promote a new release, your focus should be solely on that. However, you may have down periods that present a perfect opportunity to try something like this.

In this blog, I’ll will share my 8 reasons why we should challenge this old way of thinking and suggestions on how to go about promoting older music to reach new fans. Read More

How Many Fans Do Musicians Need to Be Successful on Patreon?

By Patreon No Comments

This blog was originally published on Hypebot.

This is a question musicians may be wondering about when considering launching a Patreon campaign as an additional income source.

What is the minimum number of fans or social media followers I need to have a chance of earning success on Patreon?

Since there are no discovery features on Patreon, it’s entirely up to you to funnel your fans to become paying patrons for your membership business.

As someone who has been working with artists and managing their Patreon accounts for 6 years now, this was a question I wondered about myself but never found an answer.

So in 2020, I did some research to come up with my own theory. I revisited these numbers in late 2023 while I was updating my Patreon For Musicians eBook to see if anything has changed since. Read More

13 Best Jobs For Emerging Independent Artists To Fund Music Career

By Music Business No Comments

Many developing artists dream of turning their music hobby into a full-time professional career. The problem is that this transition is challenging. Not only do you have to make generate enough income to take the leap, you need to be able to keep it going for the long haul in an ever-changing, competitive industry. Until you get to that point, you’ll need to fund your music aspirations with other sources of income.

This doesn’t only apply to new artists. It’s not uncommon for professional musicians to bounce back and forth between doing music full-time and taking up another job to supplement income. Or, even returning to a full-time day job and doing music on the side. It shows how volatile music can be for independents and why you can’t always depend on income directly from music itself, unfortunately.

As an emerging independent artist, you might be wondering what are your best job options to earn money to fund your music career. In this blog, I will cover 13 jobs you may want to consider while you develop as an artist. Read More

How to Create Short-Form Videos to Gain New Fans As A Musician

By Music Marketing, Music Promotion, Video 2 Comments

Over the years, I’ve noticed that emerging artists’ number one problem is marketing their music to gain new fans and grow a loyal fanbase. It’s the most common question that I see in my inbox.

In our current climate, the key to getting yourself in front of potential fans cost-effectively is through short-form video content. Typically, musicians associate this type of short-form content with the dance, lip-sync and crazy challenge videos found on TikTok. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be any of that. This trend of short-form videos can actually be quite simple and more in line with what’s natural for musicians, which is “live” performance.

Short-form live performance videos have grown in popularity in the past couple of years and have shown to be effective for marketing new music and even helping some artists go viral.

In this blog, I cover all the basics you need to know about how to go about creating short-form videos as a musician to promote your music on social media. Read More

Living Legends. Photo by D4 Nguyen.

9 Lessons Today’s Musicians Can Learn from the DIY Independent Music Ethos of the 1990s

By Music Business, Music Promotion No Comments

We all know it’s hard to get your music noticed and grow a fanbase in today’s content-saturated world. Have you ever thought about how much harder it would have been to make a living with your music as an independent artist WITHOUT the internet and social media? Or how about without powerful computers (desktops, laptops, smartphones) to conveniently record and produce music from home?

In this blog, I want to share some key lessons we can learn from DIY independent music artists from the 1990s, specifically in the underground hip hop scene in the United States. Even if you don’t listen to or make hip hop / rap music, you should be able to learn something and gain perspective that applies to you today. Read More

How Musicians Can Maximize Merch Sales At In Person Shows

By Merch, Music Business No Comments

You’ve put a lot of thought into creating the right designs for merch based on your brand and music. With those designs, you decided on the best way to get those items made. Now, it’s time to sell!

For many independent artists, live shows don’t come as frequently so you want to make sure you’re maximizing these opportunities to sell when you’re performing live.

In this blog, we’ll go over all of the basics that you should keep in mind for selling merch in person and some tips to maximize your efforts. Read More

20+ Tactics for Musicians to Beat Social Media Algorithms in 2023

By Facebook, Instagram, Social Media, Twitter No Comments

The one thing that never fails to piss off creators and artists are social media algorithms!

The days of free organic reach have been well behind us. Basically, ancient history at this point. Although the perception of how TikTok serves content to users seems to be more favorable, the complaints have more so been with Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta of course). To be fair, the YouTube algorithm doesn’t share your new video uploads to all of your subscribers either.

What can musicians do to overcome this challenge with algorithms? Or is it even the source of the problem in the first place? In this blog, we’ll explore that and cover a list of tactics for you to try and “beat” the algorithm. Read More